Having a wide-ranging collection of gardening books amassed over the decades of my writing career often provides me with ideas for this column and always gives me a lift when gardening gets tough. In those moments, my library reminds me that whatever the problem/pleasure/trend is in the world of the garden, it has all been done before.
This lesson was the first thing I learned when I partnered with Rosemary Verey to produce The Scented Garden. The content depended heavily on her knowledge of garden history reflected in the design and planting of the garden around Barnsley House, her home in Gloucestershire. She was a generous mentor, letting me loose in her awe-inspiring library, lending me books to take home and read, and in what proved to be her most significant guidance, introduced me to Daniel Lloyd.
From Lloyd’s bookshop in Kew Gardens I acquired my facsimile edition, published in 1904 by Methuen & Co, London, of the 1629 edition of John Parkinson’s herbal Paradisi in Sole, Paradisus Terristris, and the rather worn leather-bound copy of Phillip Miller’s The Gardener’s Kalendar. Miller’s advice for what to do in the garden each month curiously applies to what we do now, especially when it comes to “work to be done in the greenhouse and hotbeds”. Sometimes, I imagine what the Kalendar’s previous owner, Ann Davis, was doing in her garden when she acquired the book on September 20th, 1781, compared to what I am doing in mine on the date.
Returning to the USA, my book collecting took a different direction, as it would for any gardener who moves from one extreme to another. In my case, to the robust Texas Hill Country from the gentle seasons of East Anglia. After 30 years, it was exhilarating to learn a new way to garden, one in which the demands of climate were considerably more strenuous. My library expanded with how-to books, as did my knowledge of plants from similar conditions and altitude that adapt comfortably to life on the Edwards Plateau where my new home in Austin was sited. I learned that many of the plants I especially wanted to grow, particularly agave, came from the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains where conditions are not dissimilar to west central Texas.
One trend that is catching on fast is rewilding in the garden, letting it all hang out in pursuit of blending an artificial environment (a garden) into the native/natural one, prioritizing plant and climate compatibility. Closely observe which plants are intrinsic to your surroundings and focus on planting these but expand the palette with ‘blow-ins’ if they are suited to our ground and well-behaved, i.e. won’t out-compete the natives. Arriving in Colorado ten years ago, I found this was well-established as the garden aesthetic of choice, and the local chapter of the Wild Ones well-subscribed. Not surprisingly, I reached for my library to see what had been done before…if wild gardens had been advocated for American gardens; William Robinson’s The Wild Garden, by this renowned Victorian “grandfather of English gardening” was on the shelf, but more relevant was a copy of My Wild Flower Garden; The Story of a New Departure in Horticulture, by Herbert Durand and published in 1927, by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.
Durand was from upstate New York, had a career as a reporter before turning his attention to the cultivation of wildflowers in his garden where, according to his obituary in the New York Times, he “carried out experiments in cooperation with the Federal Government.” I began to wonder, what sort of experiments? His inscription dedicates the book to “friends of our native flora who believe that intelligent cultivation is the surest way to protect and perpetuate vanishing species.” An admirable pursuit, attune today’s understanding of conservation. But his recommended methods would be frowned on today; the text provides detailed instruction on how to dig up specimens from the wild and bring them to their new home in the garden where similar growing conditions have been constructed. In the closing chapter, ‘Wildings for Tame Gardens’, he bemoans the fact that American nursery catalogues are “as barren of American wildflowers as are American gardens, because “there is no demand for such things” (I’m sure we’ve all heard that at one time or another); and that where such rare plants appear for sale, they’ve been imported from Europe, having been exported to growers there by nurserymen here, a trade that has been going on even before 1773 when John Bartram of Philadelphia sent boxes of wildflower seeds to Philip Collinson of London, who distributed the seed to growers throughout England.
Today, thankfully, there are nurseries and growers focusing their lists on propagating native plants, botanic gardens and garden societies that promote the exchange of native plant seed that we may in our own gardens “protect and perpetuate vanishing species”, without contributing to their loss. Interesting that today’s latest trend, and welcome one, I believe, is encouraging us to raise our gardens from seed. A practice that encourages greater harmony with natural processes, a tune so many of us want to hum.
©Ethne Clarke, 2026
One can still browse old gardening books at Daniel Lloyd’s by visiting their website at https://lloydsofkewbooks.co.uk, and Herbert Durand’s book and others by him are available on eBay and other retail sites.