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.

I just started a novel…The Someday Garden by Ashley Poston.

@ Marie Tulin…I am in southeastern MA and am inundated with rabbits…to whom I talk. Two i call Peter and Benjamin…Potter references 😄

Fun topic! I have to think about my contribution, though. I read mostly non-fiction - history and biography - but I'm sure I must have read something with a great garden in it! I did read The Secret Garden, which is what first came to mind, and I too love the Beatrix Potter illustrations, although I haven't really read her fully.

On a side note, since his name came up, if anyone is a Derek Jacobi fan (and honestly, if you aren't, it's because you've never seen him in anything!) I encourage you to watch the old PBS series I, Claudius. Stellar cast, beautiful costumes (too bad it was shot on old-school video and not film, but when you get past the quality you can appreciate it) and it's just a big soap opera set in Ancient Rome. Fabulous!

And to tie it in to our topic, there are many scenes in a courtyard garden, and figs play a big part lol.

:)

Dee

I own many gardening books for reference that I've been too lazy to read cover to cover. One the only ones I have is Margery Fish's We Made a Garden. It's a quick read, and there's something about her style that is very unpretentious and engaging.

I dont think reference books are meant to be read cover to cover!

" I dont think reference books are meant to be read cover to cover! "

Haha, fair enough. I guess I should have said I turn weighty tomes INTO reference books, becuase I don't set aside the time to read them from cover to cover. Even though I would like to. Two that come to mind without turning around to see my bookshelves are "Plants In Garden History" by Penelope Hobhouse and "The English Garden Abroad" by Ch. Quest-Ritson.

Don't think I'm being a Richie Rich to point out how many books I own. I would confidently say I've never bought a gardening book at full price, except maybe a couple when I was a teenager, like 'Wymans Gardening Encyclopedia', surely at the old Crown Books in the DC burbs. A good investment in babysitting and grass cutting money if there ever was one! No I was an early customer of ABE books, so got many used for reasonable prices, but even better when I moved to MD in 2005, discovered the _amazing_ remainder seller Daedulus books. Sadly closed now. They would often sell titles from Timber Press, etc. for 15% to nmt 35% of list. So I was able to get a fine library for a cheap price. The majority of my gardening books surely came from them, 2005 to 2020 was 15 years of shopping for whatever hort. books were commercially available in those years.

Now I still buy some at the amazing used bookstores of PA...from Book Barn in West Chester to Cupboard Maker in Enola. Where I just bought this for $5 a few weeks ago: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0112411819 (I was up there to see the Big Boy steam locomotive! But knew about that place from prior trips to the Harrisburg area)

Upperbay

i think I paid full price for Dirrs Woody Plant reference.25 yesrs ago. it was well worth it. Abe is my first stop, too. Except i sometimes get sucked into a full price purchase of my favorite fiction calling from the display table at B & N. IS Enola between Philly and Lancaster?I seem to remember it as a train stop. Or maybe a community theater there?

Tx for interesting post.

Another Abe fan, and another former Daedulus user. Also Thriftbooks.

I've found that while I ooh and ahh and drool over gorgeous gardening books, I really seldom use them. I feel like if I have a gardening question, especially in the moment where I need to know the answer quickly, I just go on line. I always try to find a good sourc (i always put "-ai" in my search criteria) and I often check several sources before deciding on a course of action.

But - admittedly sadly - I just never really crack open my garden books and have given most away.

:)

Dee

I read Gertrude Jekyll for the cat references :-)

Agatha Christie's The Secret of Chimneysfits in here. Though maybe you need to be a rose person to get it.

Mad- gallica-

eould one have to be a successful rose person or might an aspirational person enjoy it?

perhaps the shortest memorable piece of garden dialogue from an Inspector Morse episode. The Lady of the Estate who is gardening in a skirt snd wellies takes the measure of the man when she asks Morse

”Do you dibble, Inspector?”

Lol that's too funny, Marie. (BTW I messaged you through GW/Houzz)

MG, Agatha Christie came to mindn for me as well, but I couldn't remember any specific garden scenes or refererences. I guess it was just the general "quaint English village" vibe.

Agatha Christie is one of those book series (like Nancy Drew lol) that I have to make sure I have time for. Quick reads, but once I read one, I have to get my hands on every single one and read them all! They're rather addictive!

:)

Dee

The Secret of Chimneys is one of Christie's early, silly works. It has jewel thieves, spies, eastern European royalty (both real and fake) and bumbling detectives. A rose happens to be a clue, and if you don't get it, you just have to wait for the big reveal at the end.

Now that I think about it, Halloween Party is about a garden. I don't tend to think about it that way because I get distracted by the Queen Elizabeth roses. It's a much more typical Poirot mystery.

I just gleaned a few more books from my bookshelves, which may be of interest:

Roy Strong ~ Garden Party

Helen Humphreys ~ The Lost Garden

Ellen Herrick ~ The Forbidden Garden and also The Sparrow Sisters

Alice Hoffman ~ The Red Garden

=)

Marie, Enola is just north of Harrisburg and once had the largest train yard in the US. The trains are right across from the bookstore.

Im not looking at a map so really have only a vague idea of PAs geography. ….Its about an hour from lancaster where my daughter lives. i was thinking of a side trip….it sounds like a cool place

Apart from reference books, I often enjoy books written by writers who are gardeners...and one who immediately comes to mind is the wonderful Patrick Gale. A truly lovely man who writes with deep humanity.

His love of plants (particularly old roses) is a gentle motif which runs through the quiet, yet penetrating ruminations of family and friendship. A relatively prolific author, I can think of no fails in his output, from his early works: 'The Aerodynamics of Pork', Tree Surgery for Beginners, through to his latest, 'Love Lane' (which is itself, a continuation of probably his most popular book, 'A Place Called Winter').

The Aerodynamics of Pork???

Lol how did I ever miss THAT title? Must have something to do with when pigs fly and all that. :)

Admittedly since transferring at work to the children's department a decade ago, I have no idea what goes on in the adult literary world any more. I will have to look into Patrick Gale.

:)

Dee

Suzy! i was hoping to hear from you. i know

you are an avid teader.

Marie, Baldwin's Book Barn in Chester is about the same distance from Lancaster, and if you have time for just one road trip when visiting with your daughter, make it that one. Cupboard Maker is great and I love the cats myself (and the lower Susquehanna valley is quite scenic in the way that it is), but with the formerly huge York Emporium radically reduced in size, I believe Book Barn is now the ne plus ultra used book destination in central or SE PA. Only avoid if stairs are a problem...it has at least 5 levels. And since the UK keeps coming up on this thread, entirely like something you'd encounter there. Making it perhaps appropriate I found a signed copy of 'The Rothschild Rhododendrons' that was clearly just waiting for me! I really need to go back and prepare to spend several hours. (I do love browsing for books on all topics, and, for example, on that trip, also found books on other equally arcane topics as 'the rhododendrons bred by Rothschild'!)

very interesting,UBG.I hope i can get there some day.

i am going to start to reading books you folks

recommended. Majorie Fish is on reserve for me