Subtitled 'From Kokedama to Terrariums and Water Gardens to Edibles', this book opens up a world beyond the modest kitchen-window Spider Plant. A basics section includes "Prune your way to happiness" and "Conquer your watering fears". Potting, cutting, trimming are all covered in a no-nonsense style with diagrams. "Fertilizer is a gateway drug", warns the author, and you should not succumb to coercive marketing techniques designed, as with humans, to get your plants hooked. The planting guide is divided into desert, temperate, tropical and aquatic. Among desert plants, a palm is graceful to look at and a good air purifier, but you need to be careful about their light needs. The spiky snake plant just wants to be left alone and is a good choice for bedrooms as it gives off oxygen at night. Ferns also present no care difficulties, though "they do like a bit of attention". Among tropical plants the Citrus with its colourful fruit lends an "Italian Riviera kind of vibe", while aquatic plants include Marimo or moss balls which sink or float in water, with the oldest recorded specimens over 100 years old. A chapter of Plant Projects includes methods of display and culture, including terrariums, water gardens, hanging and vertical gardens and the kitchen garden. The author gives instructions for creating a tropical terrarium in a bell jar, easily ordered online, and accompanied by photos of every stage. A Hanging Air Plant Globe or Underwater Landscape are attractive projects, and the Kitchen Garden section shows how you can grow garlic or carrots indoors. Finally there is Plant Style, with a "mid-century" look taking the stage as a large cheese plant overhangs your Scandinavian chair. A beautifully produced book, clear, concise, with colour photos on every double spread. 196pp.

Written between 1838 and 1865 by the father of Charles Darwin, Doctor Robert Darwin, and after Robert's death in 1848 continued by Charles's sister Susan, this hitherto unknown garden diary was a chance discovery. Susan Campbell made the discovery in 1986 and spent the next 35 years researching its background before writing this book. It describes the horticultural and domestic activities at The Mount, a large house with extensive and beautiful gardens and pastures on the banks of the River Severn in Shrewsbury. It was the home of the Darwin family from 1800 until Susan's death in 1866 and, in 1809, it was Charles's birthplace. It was in the seven acres that Charles climbed trees and learned to observe animals and plants, watched his mother keep doves and where he and his older brother set up a chemistry laboratory in the tool shed. The garden was designed by his parents Susannah Darwin (born into the Wedgwood family) and her physician husband Robert and took shape soon after their marriage in 1796. The garden included many striking features including a 680 foot long terrace walk, a steep river cliff, a large circular flower garden, and facilities for supplying the house with seasonable fruit and vegetables, as well as specialities like winter cucumbers and hot house delicacies such as pineapples and bananas. The great virtue of this garden diary is that it brings the garden vividly to life and the book is written by an internationally acknowledged garden historian and illustrator known for her writings on walled kitchen gardens. The book evokes the constant routines of planning, planting, pruning, mowing and harvesting, of the traffic between kitchen and garden, servants, family and friends, and with cosmic events such as the sight of Donati's Comet across the sky in 1858 witnessed, but what really matters is the passing of the seasons. A really beautifully designed volume with border decoration line art, beautiful typography, lists reproduced as were pencilled on sheets of paper watermarked 1858, lists of plants grown in the hothouse, stove-houses and vinery, the hybrid perpetuals and a month-by-month calendar of jobs and planting such as a new brick melon frame which took almost the whole of February 1844 to complete and the planting of mint, angelica and thyme, potatoes and rhubarb being forced in the frame and capsicums, mustard and cress and tomatoes sown. Outside sowings include parsley, lettuces, radishes, cauliflowers, turnips and more peas, beans, carrots and celery and the asparagus and strawberry beds are manured and the ground prepared for carrots. Full page colour photos, colour scale drawings on endpapers, modern colour photos, this is a very special garden history from a Victorian plus a modern gardener's viewpoint. 320 glamorous pages, 19.7 x 24.1cm. Colour.

The English formal garden of the late 17th and early 18th centuries reinvented the Ornamental Wilderness with its ornamental grove. In its mature form, the wilderness constituted mostly of the garden, shady and private, a place for retreat as well as social activity, with a seeming naturalness achieved through artifice. James Bartos celebrates the layout at Wrest Park, Chiswick and Stowe and many more besides. He begins with groves and trees in the English imagination, the Druids and patriotic plantations, he looks at design, hedges and planting, cabinets and open spaces for entertainment and continental precedents in Italy, France and Holland. He looks at the wilderness in England with its maze of hedges, simple geometry, complex geometry, the English Bosco, block planting, curves, the Artinatural, forest gardens and the shrubbery. There is the domed building of Chiswick Pavilion, alleyways and precise architecture as an arbiter of taste with Burlington and his attempt to imitate the Classical Roman world, Palladio and Jones. We meander into dead ends and walk on to other wildernesses along a serpentine river, an elm grove, an amphitheatre or a woodland at Castle Howard in Yorkshire; Vanbrugh with his first country house commission, London garden makers to the nobility and gentry and even Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736), who designed the rockwork, caves, cascades and watercourses within Wray Wood. Then of course there is the splendour of Hampton Court Palace and the walkways and mazes. This heavyweight beautiful publication is packed with colour photographs and examples throughout focussing on design manuals and individual gardens and landscapes with a wealth in engraved prints, maps and present-day photographs. Bartos considers the making, planting and maintenance of wildernesses, their continental precedents and thematic resonances - Classical, Biblical, Druidic, Patriotic - and their inevitable demise. Engagingly written and visually very pleasing. 296 large pages, 19 x 24.8cm. Satin pagemarker.

Olympic Flame, Limelight, Mickey Mouse, Persian Pearl, Claudia, Havran, Christmas Dream, Paul Rubens, Red Princess, tulips have stolen the show since they were first introduced to cultivation in Europe. They have been crossed with each other to produce thousands of cultivars that have been registered today like the Parrot Rembrandt and Fringed Bruce and in all colours, shades and shapes. Their incredible colour range includes almost every imaginable hue from pure white through pastels, rich reds and purples to near black. Their shapes are equally varied - short-stemmed, lily-flowered, or even goblet-shaped or stars. Expert Richard Wilford recommends tulips for specific conditions and cultivation preferences, and offers a selection of the brightest, boldest and best in this gorgeous tome published in conjunction with Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. The book celebrates the beauty of each flower with a large colour photograph, description and stats like height, bloom time, cultivation, landscape and design uses and alternatives. Plus a section on cut flowers. 224pp, 17.8 x 22.9cm. Blazing with colour.