Book Review: Plants in Garden History

Posted by Katie Elzer-Peters
April 7th, 2009
Filed in Organic Book Reviews
Tags: books, English Garden, garden history

One of my favorite gardening books, ever, is Plants in Garden History, by Penelope Hobhouse.  Apparently, it is Oprah’s favorite gardening book, too.  (Or, at least a favorite of those who choose Oprah’s favorite gardening books.  I love to watch Oprah, but I just can’t see her doing any actual gardening.)  She selected a good list, all of which we will be reviewing here.  (I love an excuse to read a book.)  Because I already own Plants in Garden History, I thought we’d start with that one.

A Gardening Book for History Buffs

A lot of plant lovers enjoy knowing about every aspect of their plants.  Not just how to grow them, but where they came from, who they inspired and how they were used throughout the ages.  Plants in Garden History is the ultimate book for plant loving historians or history loving gardeners.  It starts with the beginning of gardening in recorded history of Western Civilization.  (In the introduction, Hobhouse rightly explains that the history of plants in Eastern Garden History is entirely separate, and entirely different.  It would make a great book, in and of itself!)  This book details gardening styles from ancient Egypt, through historic gardens of Persia, including the Alhambra, Europe in the Renaissance, French Formal Gardens, and Colonial America.  You learn, along with the principles of garden design, the history that influenced historic design.  For garden lovers, reading this book is like a baseball lover learning Western Civ. by reading an architectural retrospective of great baseball stadiums.  You get the important highlights of overall history, framed by a topic that actually interests you.

Plants + Design

These days, you find a lot of gardening books that are organized around design principles, rather than plant combinations.  Hobhouse’s book traces the interconnected relationship between bringing new plants to cultivation and garden design during a “new” plant’s introduction.  For each period and plant discussed, Hobhouse traces the evolution of a plant from curiosity to sought-after prize, to a widely available ornamental, concurrent with popular garden designs of the time period.  The history of ornamental bulbs in the garden is one interesting example.  When originally brought from gardens in the Middle East, bulbs were treated as specimen plants, grown a few at a time, literally on pedestals.  As they became slightly more available, they were inter-planted in the formal parterres and knot gardens popular at the time.  By the time bulbs were standard in gardens, the more naturalistic style of gardening was popular, at which point the “naturalizing” of bulbs became common practice.

A “Cultivated Wild”

Gardens started as a place to grow food.  They evolved into pleasure grounds.  Today, they are a hybrid of both.  As building and development have eaten up more and more natural spaces, and there is little “wild” land left in areas where the most dense populations live, gardening attitudes have shifted.  Wild plants, once fenced out, are cultivated and brought in.  The pendulum of interest in exotics swings wildly from left to right: one year, horticulture is all about tropical plants and the next few are all about natives.  A great quote from Plants in Garden History sums up the emotional and design tug-of-war that happens for all serious gardeners:

“The conflict between a delight in logical rhythms of planting and in more natural free effects-between considering the art of gardening as ‘nature perfected’ and using gardening to re-interpret the roles of plants in order to imitate the wild-remains as topical today, when whole landscapes are threatened, as it has through the ages. . . There is no right or wrong way to use plants. . . In the hands of an individual who appreciates plants and sees the garden as an entity, the form of the layout and the character of the plants become inseparable. . . ”

Perspective for the Modern Gardener

Just as reading history books helps world leaders frame their attempts to govern in today’s world, so does the information in Plants in Garden History help gardeners.  It is easy to get caught up in the latest fad, or feel guilty if one is completely uninterested in what is being heralded as “the next big thing.”  Going from tulip mania to tropical mania to native plant mania has happened not once, not twice, but many times in the history of gardening.  If you despair that your Victory Garden isn’t as lush as your neighbor’s, or you feel sub-par because you don’t even want to plant a vegetable garden this year, even though “everyone is doing it,” take a stroll through Plants in Garden History.  Within its pages, you might find the next “new” horticultural development.