Miss Willmott's Ghosts: the extraordinary life and gardens of a forgotten genius by Sandra Lawrence (Blink Publishing, May 2022)
Ellen Ann Willmott was a remarkable woman whose achievements in horticulture, botany, landscape architecture, photography and more, should have made her one of the most well-known trailblazers of her age. Yet, both posthumously and within her lifetime, she instead became known as a bitter, cantankerous and eccentric miser, and her reputation has been forever stained by the image of her maliciously seeding other people's gardens with thorns.
The beginnings of this prickly myth can be traced back to her conspicuous absence at what should have been the pinnacle of her career: the Royal Horticultural Society's inaugural Victoria Medal of Honour Award ceremony, at which she was due to be one of only two female recipients. Universally interpreted as the rudest of snubs, nobody has ever stopped to question why Ellen wasn't there, or if she was really as difficult and mean as she has been portrayed ever since.
Author, Sandra Lawrence, has been granted unparalleled access to her archives, and with it has uncovered the secrets behind this thorniness. This is a book with it all: gossip, sisters, rivalry, squandered inheritance, forbidden love, bad marriages and, at the heart of it all, trailblazing talent.
English Garden Eccentrics – Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, April 2022)
'In his new book, English Garden Eccentrics, renowned landscape architect and historian Todd Longstaffe-Gowan reveals a series of obscure and eccentric English garden-makers who, between the early seventeenth and the early twentieth centuries, created intensely personal and idiosyncratic gardens. They include such fascinating characters as the superstitious antiquary William Stukeley and the animal- and bird-loving Lady Read, as well as the celebrated master of Vauxhall Gardens, Jonathan Tyers, who created at his home at Denbies one of the gloomiest and most perverse anti-pleasure gardens in Georgian England. Others built miniature mountains, shaped topiaries, displayed exotic animals, excavated caves and assembled architectural fragments and fossils to realise their gardens in a way that was often thought to be excessive.
Napoleon A Life in Gardens and Shadows by Ruth Scurr (Random House, May 2021)
‘Napoleon's gardens range from his childhood olive groves in Corsica, to Josephine's gardens and menageries in Paris, to gardens in Cairo, Rome and on Elba, to the walled garden of Hougoumont at the battle of Waterloo, and ultimately to Napoleon's final garden…… In this innovative biography, as uniquely fitting its subject as Ruth Scurr's applauded portraits of Robespierre and John Aubrey, Napoleon emerges a giant figure made human, seen through the eyes of those who knew him best - close witnesses, rich and poor, famed and obscure - in the shade of his gardens. The result is vivid, multidimensional and haunting, throwing us back in time, so that we see him before us, both as the Emperor hunting for glory and the man in an old straw hat, leaning on his spade. on St Helena, where Chinese labourers built him a summerhouse where he could sit and scan the sea in his final months.’
Gardens in My Life: The Favourite Gardens of World-famous Landscape Designer Arabella Lennox-Boyd by Arabella Lennox-Boyd (Apollo, April 2021)
‘Arabella Lennox-Boyd is one of the foremost garden designers in the world. She has created some of the country's most stunning private gardens, in addition to commissions for the Serpentine Sackler Gallery and projects for Sting and Sir Terence Conran.
Looking back over her extraordinary career, Arabella takes us on a tour of the gardens that have had a particular interest or meaning to her. She describes the inspirations that led to the final design and plant combination. Famed for her herbaceous borders and a passionate collector of plants and shrubs, Arabella imparts her expert wisdom on planting and offers practical advice on landscaping.’
Mavis Batey: Bletchley Codebreaker, Garden Historian, Conservationist, Writer by Jean Stone (Matator, March 2020)
Mavis became an important figure in conservation, becoming President of the Garden History Society, which, under her watch, became an academic society and campaigning force for the protection of landscapes, parks, and gardens of historic interest. She also lobbied Parliament, fighting threats of encroachment and misuse of land. Acts of Parliament were passed, English Heritage was established, and grants were introduced. Historic gardens became officially recognised as essential components of European culture and her National Register of Historic Gardens came to fruition. Mavis’s passion was writing and she wrote many books.’
Shades of Green: My Life as the National Trust’s Head of Gardens by John Sales
Walled Gardens by Jules Hudson
Lives of Great Gardeners by Stephen Anderton (Thames & Hudson Ltd December 2016)
This new book explores the contribution of gardeners from four garden perspectives: Gardens of Ideas, Gardens of Straight Lines, Gardens of Curves, and Gardens of Plantsmanship. The work of a variety of gardeners is considered “Some have been aristocratic amateur gardeners, others professional designers with an international practice. Some have come to garden-making from sister arts such as sculpture or painting; some have been hands-on nurserymen or botanists. What they all have in common, no matter where or when they were born, is the ability to take an idea and develop it in a new manner relevant to their times.”
Great British Gardeners: From the Early Plantsmen to Chelsea Medal Winners by Vanessa Berridge (Amberley Publishing, 2018)