I thrive on the visuals so rather than a book, my contribution is a TV series, Rosemary & Thyme. It is a British "cozy" mystery. Two single women with a strong horticultural and gardening background travel all over the UK and parts of Europe solving mysteries in gorgeous gardens. Hired to undertake some sort of landscape project, someone inevitably turns up dead and they solve the puzzle.

The cozy aspect is real. These are comfortable, entertaining stories and feature some beautiful gardens in a lot of detail.

GG, Ill rewatch it from that perspective . i didnt care for it years ago. Ive got a really bad summer cold and this sounds like a good antidote.

Oh this is a fun topic. I have a couple titles I'm trying to remember, but off the top of my head I'd of course mention The Secret Garden, which surely influenced many generations of readers, and the Brother Cadfael series of books by Ellis Peters. Cadfael was a gardener, and has been immortalized by David Austin roses so probably old news to most people here, but I did enjoy reading the book series (more cozy English mysteries) when I was in high school.

I love this topic! My personal library of garden-related books is fairly extensive, so here are a few favorites of mine:

Henry Mitchell - his books are a hoot, so much fun as well as being informative.

George Ordish - The Living Garden: the 400-year history of an English Garden

Susan Hill - The Magic Apple Tree: a Country Year

Wilfred Blunt - Of Flowers & a Village

Janet Gillespie - The Joy of a Small Garden

Cassandra Danz - Mrs Greenthumbs Plows Ahead (and any others of hers you might find. She can be very funny, but practical. She died too young...)

Claudia i didnt know there was a connection

can you say more?

Roxanna-I have a love for ”little English gardening books but havent read any of yours except Henry Mitchell. I am so looking forward to it.

@Marie Tulin Boston burbs z 6a Brother Cadfael is a fictional medieval Benedictine monk who also did a lot of gardening at his monastery, particularly herb and medicinal gardening, and used that knowledge to his advantage in solving mysteries and righting wrongs. David Austin named a lot of his roses after fictional British characters. There's a series of several books, not the greatest novels ever written but I enjoyed them, and a PBS series adaptation from the mid 1990s which I loved.

Edited to add: I still didn't quite connect all the dots there, sorry! Brother Cadfael is a very pretty pink rose DA released in the 1990s. For a while I think it was retired and hard to find, but it looks like it's available again.

I well remember the series and if i ever knew I forgot there was a rose named after him. that was Derek Jacobi, wasnt it? What an actor!

Yes, it was Derek Jacobi! He is indeed fantastic. That series was great, and an example of the adaptation surpassing the source material in my opinion, in no small part because of his presence. I grow the rose, but I bought it a while back before it was widely available again and it was only a small cutting really. I have yet to see it bloom unfortunately.

As a child I loved the illustrations of gardens in the Beatrix Potter books. They were beautiful, almost impressionist, watercolours but the plants were all accurately portrayed and identifiable.

@Marie Tulin Boston burbs z 6a – Your post made me remember an adult education class I attended at the local botanical garden many, many years ago – there was a recommended reading book that was very interesting - Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe’s The Landscape of Man – a wide‑ranging history of landscape architecture. I looked for, and found the book last night tucked away with other gardening books. I don’t think I ever got completely through the book – I’m leaving it out and will look through it again.

Floral: I particularly remember Mr McGregors garden and the setting of Mrs. Tiggywinkle. plants aside, what a cunning creature she was. ( not in the sense of sly)

One non-fiction selection I really enjoyed was Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature Nature, and the Shaping if the American Nation by Andrea Wulf.