Last Word Katherine Swift finds both

The World on Paper

Opportunities for travel have been hard to come by in this past year or so, but Katherine Swift finds both solace and escapism on her bookshelves

Iam an easy person to buy presents for: all I ever want is books. And since I never get rid of any, the house is awash with them. I long ago ran out of shelf space: there are books on the fl oor, books up the stairs, books in multiple piles beside the bed – though not (or not yet) books in the oven, a location reputedly used by the ecclesiastical historian Canon Jenkins.

I haven’t quite given up all sense of domestic propriety. It’s just that when I look at the books on my shelves I remember the people who gave them to me, or when and where I bought them: the facsimile of Parkinson’s folio bought from Mr Lloyd of Kew, or the bookshop in Carnforth where, one day of pouring rain, I found my treasured copy of Evelyn’s Acetaria. My whole life encapsulated in books.

These past two years especially, books as well as gardens have been our saviours. Gardening is a portal into many di erent worlds – history, art, geography, botany, biology – and gardening books can provide us with inspiration, information and encouragement for all those things we were going to do and will one day do or do again. It can also o er consolation or escape, helping us time-travel back into the history of gardens, armchair-travel to the great gardens of the world, or immersing us in imagined gardens via fi ction and poetry. A polyphony of voices, keeping us company. We may not have been able to get out much, or see those we love, but we have been able to read.

Here then are three of my favourite gardening books to give as presents, or to treat yourself. First is a beautiful big book, a feast for the eyes: A Natural History of English Gardening 1650-1800, by Mark Laird, sumptuously illustrated with contemporary botanical art (Yale University Press, £45).

Then there is psychiatrist and psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith’s inspiring book The Well-Gardened Mind: Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World (William Collins, £9.99). Gardeners have long suspected that gardening benefi ts mental as well as bodily health, and Stuart-Smith recounts a series of tales to prove it, starting with her grandfather’s traumatised return from a Turkish prisoner-of-war camp after the end of the First World War.

“When I look at the books on my shelves I remember the people who gave them to me”

And fi nally, a novel. Many of my favourite novels are set against the backdrop of a garden, but I particularly loved Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s Peculiar Ground (4th Estate, £8.99), a grand panoramic sweep of a novel about the life and death of a landscape garden and the people who inhabit it over the course of three centuries.

The book I have bought for myself this Christmas is Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape our Futures (Vintage, £10.99), which came out to rave reviews. The book I hope someone will give me is Janet Waymark’s Cedric Morris: A Life in Art and Plants (Whitefox, £25). Morris was a painter who loved irises, and taught (among others) Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling. In the past few years there have been two books, two London exhibitions and a stand at the Chelsea Flower Show dedicated to him – and I missed them all. One of the things I planned to do this summer (but wasn’t able to) was to split and move all my irises. They hadn’t fl owered for years. But never mind: there’s always next year. That’s the thing about gardening. Hope springs eternal. ■