GARDENING ANTHOLOGIES and GIFT BOOKS

There are over 1000 entries of remarkable information about flowers, vegetables, fruits, trees, herbs, insects, birds, water, soil, tools, composts, climate, recipes, gardens and gardeners, myths, superstitions, biodynamics. This is a short collection as profuse and variegated as gardening itself. Woven into this wealth of knowledge are famous quotations, anecdotes, traditional says, lines of verse, and words of rural wisdom. The spirit and focus of the Almanac is British but the wider picture is international as so much of our gardens originated from overseas. Dry or dull information has no place in the almanac and presentation is as appealing as the content.

isbn: 1903919908

Designed for the inept armchair gardener, this title gently guides the reader month by month through the seasons, showing what are weeds and what are not (even if the weeds are pretty), how to dig holes, and how to squish unwanted insects. You too can create a tranquil haven in your own backyard that you'll be too exhausted to appreciate.

ISBN: 9781840244236

The rise in the popularity of allotments means that the old image of flat-capped men leaning on spades is no longer valid. This book aims to bring to life the unorthodox, the highly successful and the occasionally absurd, activities going on down the allotment plots. From a singer/songwriter travelling the length of the country to catalogue allotment life, to solar-powered chicken coops, pumpkin art and prize-winning plot owners - there's more than originally meets the eye. "Allotment Days" also offers an array of allotment tips and hints so you, too, can make the most of your allotment. COVER PRICE £9.99

ISBN: 9781845376840

Profiling the unique obsessions and preoccupations of over 40 British allotmenteers, young and old, this book dispels the myth that there's no more to allotments than home-grown vegetables, compost, weeding and an over-abundance of tomato seedlings. Featuring everything from oversized marrows and dye plants to pampered rabbits and bees to allotments as performance art, along with the amazing and usually eccentric people behind them, this book is a humourous celebration of the diversity, industry and comedy that pervades the modern allotment community. Each story is accompanied by revealing photographs of the allotmenteer and his or her "patch".

isbn: 184330497x

An exploration of the sex and science of flowers. This is a botanical journey that reveals the science behind intelligent plants. Bringing together the work of botanists around the globe, this book looks at how they evolved, how they survive and how they heal. It also shows us how flowers regulate their own temperature, attract pollinating bats and even smell like a rotting corpse. Russell also looks at flowers senses and their healing powers, and how they are being used as a main line of defence against childhood lukaemia.

isbn: 0434008486

Imagine the stifling existence of a worker bee caught in the mindless tedium of life: every day, he helps build the hive, forages, feeds the larvae, stores honey and pollen, and falls into an exhausted sleep. Then the next day...he does it all again. But what happens if that bee has a little curiosity and a lot of spiritual yearning? You get the basis for this clever, inspirational allegory about living life to its fullest. Illustrated by award-winning artist Laurie Barrows, "To Bee or Not to Bee" is the story of Buzz Bee's search for God. Peppered with aphorisms and laced with wit and humour, this charming tale reminds us that life is too important to be taken so seriously.

ISBN: 9781402747656

Beech trees reached Britain about 8,000 years ago, and they were workhorses, not ornaments - fuel for Rome's glassworks; firewood for London; oars for the ships of Venice; raw material for furniture, cut and turned by 'bodgers' who lived like nomads among the trees in huts made of beechwood shavings. Mabey covers Europe as well as Britain, and autobiography as well as history and natural history. His beeches are characterful - 'hectic, gale-sculpted, gnomic' - and he writes about the bluebells, orchids, fungi, deer and badgers associated with them, as well as the narratives we tell about trees and the images we make of them. Many other kinds of tree are featured, and the portraits and celebrations of the beech always point to the larger story. More than all this, "Beechcombings" is a personal investigation of the ambivalent, engimatic relationship that humans have with trees.

ISBN: 9781856197335

One of the great gardening writers of our time shares the hope and successes - and sometimes failures - of her work and reveals what is really involoved in maintaining a unique and flourishing garden.

ISBN: 9780752816449

The entertaining and practical pieces which make up "Better Against a Wall" are selected from the best of Ursula Buchan's journalism from the past fifteen years and demonstrate her highly individual take on gardening and modern gardeners. Politics, practicalities and personalities of the gardening world all find a place in this collection, alongside flowers, garden design, ecological friends and foes. She shivers at the thought of grass snakes, warms to the soft perfection of Shirley Poppies, hunts for plants in Nepal, fails to master machinery, pulls a fast one with climbers and somehow manages to give seaweed a good press. COVER PRICE £16.99

ISBN: 9780719560392

A perpetual diary, with photographs of plants and gardens on every spread, in which gardeners can record personal notes on their garden, from reminders of jobs to be done, to seasonal observations. For each month, Rosemary Verey points out the pleasures that each month will bring, as well as the tasks to be done, and at the back of the book there are 30 pages that give additional space for gardeners to itemise plants bought and their position in the garden. Rosemary Verey is a gardening writer and plantswoman, the author of "Good Planting" and many other books, including "The Garden in Winter" and "A Countrywoman's Notes". COVER PRICE £11.99

In 1911, in the Scottish Border village of Sprouston, the young parish minister wrote to the Daily Mail for entry forms for its sweet pea competition. The top prize was a staggering GBP1000 and organisers predicted that as many as 15,000 would enter. He could not foretell that the paper's estimate of the number of competitors would be more than doubled, or that a fortnight before the deadline a nation-wide drought would threaten the very existence of the sweet peas he was so painstakingly cultivating. This touching - and beautifully illustrated - is based on a true story

isbn: 1841953873

Full of humour, passion and an overwhelming sense of fun, this tells how Bryony Hill developed her stunning Sussex garden. Beautifully illustrated by the author.

ISBN: 9781846241048

A beautiful paperback edition of this bestselling Radio 4 Book of the Week. The ancient link between the gardener and the cook is at the heart of this remarkably evocative cookbook in which Amanda Hesser relates the story of a year she spent as a cook in a seventeenth-century chateau in Burgundy and her relationship with Monsieur Milbert, the charmingly sly peasant caretaker of the chateau's kitchen gardens. A rare culinary and literary experience.

ISBN: 9781904573395

Digger's Diary provides the low-down on what really goes on among the ramshackle sheds and improvised cold-frames where the allotment-holding tribe practise their horticultural rituals.
It takes us through the allotment year, month by month, from January and February when dogged digging is the order of the day, right through to the pleasures of the festive season and the joy of a Christmas dinner table laden with the fruits of your own labours.
There are triumphs - the spectacularly successful sweet peas, disasters - the lamentable failure of the autumn-sown onions, and dramas aplenty, from vandalism by the local yobboes to the epic battle against the invading mice in the compostor. There are tensions between the chemical warfare enthusiasts with their herbicides and pesticides and the organic true believers, of whom the author is one, although his principles are sorely tested by mystery infestations and the depredations of slugs.
There is also the rich social life of the allotments, a vigorous democracy where status is determined, not by class or accent, but by the harsh measure of the success or failure of your crops. Victor Osborne describes a varied cast of characters with warmth and humour. This is a book which will strike an instant chord within anyone who has experienced the pleasures of growing and eating their own produce.


ISBN: 9781845132514

How did plants get to be the way they are? Why do they have pretty flowers? How different would things have been if the wrong kind of pollinators had got the upper hand? Why are Latin names so complicated, and why Latin anyway? Why is a weed-free lawn an ecological impossibility? This entertaining book gives the answers to these questions and many more. It shows how a little botanical knowledge can bring not just better results but peace of mind, and that losing sleep over such traditional gardening bogeys as weeds, pests and pruning is not necessarily the best course. In this new edition Ken Thompson grabs the opportunity to explain why any old plant will do, for companion planting - but also that it can do as much harm as good - and why planting by the moon is complete and utter nonsense.

ISBN: 9781903919200

This is a series of beautifully written evocative essays by Hannah Willetts, an amateur gardener who has lovingly developed and tended her garden in Shropshire over many years. The subjects of her essays range from a detailed analysis of different varieties of hellebore to a set of comparisons between flowering plants and classical composers, as well as personal accounts of the joys of simple gardening tasks. In these charming vignettes, Hannah Willetts displays formidable descriptive powers, extensive knowledge and experience and a profound love of gardening. "The Essence of the Garden", while perfect bedside reading for any gardener, is so packed with useful information and inspirational description, it will make them itch to get outside.

ISBN: 9780711225879

In this remarkable journal of visits to Eden, Mabey transports his reader from Cornwall to the Mediterranean to the Tropics, from Old World to New, from present to personal memory, to new perspectives on our collective artistic and emotional past. Sensuous and evocative, exquisitely written, his new book challenges the reader to look differently at the world, and our place in the landscape. At the same time, Mabey is controversial in his views about what we mean by buzz words like 'renewable', or 'sustainable', and he is highly provocative in his final response to the Eden Project itself.

ISBN: 9781903919323

This anthology brings together over 250 poems about flowers, plants and trees from eight centuries of writing in English: 14th-century lyrics sit next to poems of the 21st century; celebrations of plants native to the English soil share the volume with more exotic plant poetry from further afield. There are 30 poems about roses, by poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Dorothy Parker and the South African, Seitlhamo Motsapi; but there are also sections devoted to more unusual plants such as the mandrake, the starapple and the tamarind. An ex-gardener, the poet Sarah Maguire brings her extensive botanical knowledge to bear on all the poems, arranging them into botanical families, identifying the plants being written about and writing an introduction about how the history of flowers goes hand in hand with the history of English poetry.

ISBN: 9780701169237

Flowers have been very lucky in the world of art. Those who have used them as inspiration for painting, drawing or decoration have clearly enjoyed their subject, thus creating a wealth of floral art which is relaxed, objective and joyous. This book brings together the best of floral art in the British Museum. Poems and extracts from authors of different cultures illuminate a range of flowers and themes. Included are quotes from the Bible, Japanese haiku, poetry from China and Egypt and even an Aztec poem about the much-loved sunflower. A wealth of artists are illustrated including Mrs Delany, Durer, Jacques le Moyne des Morgues and Hubert Robert. The result is a giftbook to enthuse, inspire and delight those with a love of flowers.

ISBN: 9780714150444

This beautiful pocket anthology contains nineteenth-century French poetry illustrated with impressionist paintings. The impressionist painters rallied around the exhortation of the poet Baudelaire to paint directly from nature. The works of Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley and Degas glimmer with light, capturing the very moment of their creation with unprecedented vigour and clarity. In this book, Baudelaire's poetry features alongside the work of such writers as Alphonse de Lamartine, Stephane Mallarme, Paul Verlaine and Victor Hugo.

ISBN: 9780711226401

This volume collects 50 stories of gardening invention, innovation and discovery. Among them is that of Thomas Hyl, who in 1577 devised the first water sprinkler; Nathaniel Ward who began a craze for indoor gardening in 1829 with his terrarium case; and Henry Telende, who in 1720 grew England's first pineapple. From the invention of the trellis, flower pots and the waterscrew in the ancient world; via secateurs, jute string and flame guns in the Victorian age; to the Gro-Bag and Flymo of modern times, the ingenious achievements make an inspiring international collection. COVER PRICE £14.99

ISBN: 9780750925433

This beautiful retro-style journal is somewhere to plan, develop and record your garden, and chart your growing successes. In My Garden, record and sketch your plot as it is now, and ponder what your ideal garden would contain. Next, in Planning & Inspiration, draw up designs for beds, features and planting schemes (on special graph-paper pages), make plant lists, and paste in pictures and photos that you love. A section called The Garden Year provides space for you to note down tasks for every season, while four themed chapters (The Kitchen Garden, The Flower Garden, Trees, Shrubs and Climbers and a chapter for other plant groups such as ferns and aquatic plants) help you note what you planted and when, record pruning and growth development, and what the year's crop or blooms were like. Finally, a useful Resources chapter gives you an address book, space to document gardens you have visited and somewhere to list useful books.

ISBN: 9781845975920

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This attractive, handy pocket book is a treasure trove of gardening facts and curiosities, notes and quotes. Packed with useful and fascinating information, "The Gardener's Pocket Companion" will let you into many secrets, including how Joseph Paxton, designer of Crystal Palace and landscape gardener extraordinaire, rose from poverty to become a multi-millionaire, where London's hidden gardens are located, which tree provided sixteenth-century Europeans with a cure for venereal disease, how to perform the soil fist test to determine soil type, and what Nelson Mandela grew in his prison garden.

ISBN: 9781862057951

"The Gardener's Wise Words and Country Ways" is a unique and fascinating collection of accumulated wisdom, old wives' tales and gardening proverbs. It contains generations of advice, both sound and questionable, from considering the seasons and wildlife in your garden, to growing better fruit, vegetables, herbs and trees. It is a tribute to the time-honoured traditional gardening techniques that continue to gain favour as gardeners become ever-more organically minded. A captivating content, charming design, attractive format and a great price make this the ideal gift book for every gardener.

ISBN: 9780715325834

Whether you care for a rambling country garden or a modest town plot, "Garden Secrets" offers a variety of seasonal hints and practical tips to help you make the most of your outside space. For those who are inspired by the year-round beauty of the Trust's gardens, here is a chance to learn from the experts and benefit from their years of experience. This illustrated book includes advice for urban gardeners working with small plots or container planting, larger country gardens that may include lawn space and those perhaps looking to grow vegetables.

ISBN: 9781905400355

A look at all aspects of gnome life, their origins and fashions, their pastimes, opinions and culinary tastes. It examines urban gnomes, suburban, bucolic and wild ones.COVER PRICE £12.99

ISBN: 9781862054257

When Barney Bardsley's husband was diagnosed with cancer he was thirty-six, and their daughter just one. The family was too young for sell-by dates - there was too much to live for. And so they did. But when he finally died, Barney felt alone and exhausted. Their savings had all gone and now she must support their child single-handedly. She would just have to take life one day at a time. She took to tending her small, scruffy allotment. Fresh air, wildlife, exercise, nature's cycles of growth and decay - she found solace in it all. This is the diary of her year in the garden. It begins with January's brisk walks, nourishing soups,and dreams of spring. In May comes a messy abundance of bluebells, tadpoles, and honeybees. In summer the sunflowers shout. And in autumn a harvest of blackberries, beans and squash. The garden's meditative atmosphere also provokes deeper musings. Barney recounts the myths and emotions associated with particular plants; she paints memories of childhood; she evokes the changes of mood as the seasons shift. Above all, she charts how her own life is slowly restored, under the garden's healing influence.

ISBN: 9780719596001

Angus McAllister, the iron-willed ruler of the gardens at Blanding's Castle who reduced his employer, Lord Emsworth, to abject pleading when he threatened to resign, and Sir Joseph Paxton, designer of the Crystal Palace, are just two examples, one fictional, one historical, of an extraordinary group of men who fluorished in the golden age of the British country house in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Toby Musgrave shows, the great head gardeners enjoyed a status and an importance that extended far beyond the walled frontiers of their fiefdoms. Only the very best of the uneducated country lads who were taken on as garden boys survived the apprenticeship of up to fifteen years, but those that did were men of strong character who had educated themselves in the sciences of botany, etymology, plant breeding, plant physiology, surveying, perspective drawing and much else. As well as ensuring that the great houses were supplied with flowers, fruit and vegetables the year round - pineapples by the dozens, peaches and apricots by the thousand were harvested from their greenhouses - they learned to cultivate the host of exotic plants that their employers imported from the ends of the earth. They invented the trade of floristry. They wrote bestselling books and published the first gardening magazines. The fame and reputation of great houses and their owners depended upon the skills of the head gardeners and competition for their services could be intense. Some tyrannised their employers to the extent that they durst not pick a flower or pluck a fruit for fear of the head gardener's displeasure. Others, like Paxton, became the friends and confidants of those who paid their wages. They ran what were, in effect, large horticultural businesses which might employ fifty or more staff and have annual expenditures that would run into the millions in today's currency.. In this scholarly and highly entertaining book, Toby Musgrave rescues the head gardeners from the backwaters of horticultural history and restores them to their rightful place as the founders of their profession. This is a fascinating study of the great Victorian and Edwardian head gardeners, a remarkable group of self-made men who transformed gardening from menial labour into a profession. It recreates the social world of the great country house gardens where staffs of up to fifty might be employed in growing produce of awe-inspiring variety in prodigious quantities. It reveals that it was the head gardeners of the past who were largely responsible for creating the science of horticulture as we know it today.

ISBN: 9781845132835

Where does botany start but with the naming and grouping of all flora? List-making is in the gardener's blood, and this collection of random facts, data, and wisdom is sure to excite the Latin-spouting garden geek.

ISBN: 9781570614859

A richly diverse selection from the original garden writings produced by the quarterly periodical Hortus over the last twenty-one years. 'Some of the best garden writing you could find anywhere.' Anna Pavord, The Independent 'Offering the finest garden writing in the English language.' The Daily Telegraph 'What a relief to read lean, sturdy sentences ...to see gardening as part of civilisation, bound up in commerce, science, art and literature.' The New York Times

ISBN: 9780711227385

Whether you're an active, hands-on gardener, or someone who simply enjoys looking at gardens, "The Joy of Gardening" is a book to savour at any time of year, whether on a glorious summer's day with a cool drink in your hand, or sitting in a cosy armchair warming yourself by a winter fireside. With its rich selection of inspirational quotations from gardeners past and present, as well as from poets, painters, novelists, diarists and spiritual teachers, it's a book for reflection and is designed to capture the joy of being alive that gardening evokes. Gardens can make us happy, heal us when sad or depressed, and help us understand profound truths about the relationship between ourselves and nature. As we journey through the seasons, the pattern of birth, bloom and decay sheds light on the mystery of being human.

ISBN: 9780340943663

This journal offers practical gardening advice on month by month basis with places for your own notes and plans, your brilliant successes and the occasional reminder not to try that again. Garden tasks and tools, tips and techniques, a little on ecology and wildlife, quite a lot on plants - all this will be found here in a handsome ringbound book with a waterproof cover, pockets for storage of extra notes and seed packets, and an elastic closer.

ISBN: 9780711227736

E. A. Bowles's trilogy reflects his understanding of the plants in his garden at Myddelton House. Each of the volumes contains a new preface by Charles Elliott.PUBLISHED PRICE £17.99

ISBN: 9780881924138

Terry Walton has kept an allotment for over 50 years - man and boy - in the Rhondda valley in South Wales. He started when he was 4, helping on his dad's plot on the side of the mountain, when he was sent to cut bracken and collect sheep manure by the bucketful to feed the rows of vegetables. By the time he was 11 he had his own plot - the youngest ever to do so - and while still in his teens established an allotment empire to grow the vegetables and flowers he sold to local customers. The proceeds paid for his first car, a canary yellow Ford Popular, when he was just 17. Set against the changing social scene in Wales - as the traditional culture of coal mining, heavy engineering and poverty gave way to a greener landscape and more affluent community - this is the story of a man with a great passion in life. His allotment has been the centre of his universe. From the first time he opened his eyes in a nursing home the other side of the allotment fence to his current role as media personality on radio, tv and in the press, Terry's tale unfolds in fascinating detail. He lovingly documents the changes over the years, the characters he meets and his own hearfelt conversion to organic gardening methods. This fascinating memoir also includes anecdotes, topical tips and family recipes plus delightful line drawings, which will make it the perfect gift for gardeners and allotmenteers.

ISBN: 9780593057247

We may all know that dandelions make us wet the bed, and that stewed prunes are a cure for constipation, but how many of us were aware that a poultice of chicken manure is a remedy for baldness? Or that eel liver will aid a difficult labour? The woman healer is as old as history. For millennia she has been doctor, nurse and midwife, and even in the age of modern medicine her wisdom is handed down in the form of old wives' tales. Using extensive research into archives and original texts, and numerous conversations with women in city and countryside, Mary Chamberlain presents a stimulating challenge to orthodox medicine and an illuminating history of female wisdom which goes back to the earliest times. What are old wives' tales? Where do they come from? Do they really work? These questions, and many more, are answered in this fascinating compendium of remedies and cures handed down from mother to daughter from the beginning of time.

ISBN: 9780752439914

Describes how raspberries, peanuts, corn, and other foods are produced as various plants flower, create seeds, and finally bear fruit.

ISBN: 9780688178345

Make the most of your plot with this spiral bound structured record book. The Allotment Notebook provides space to create a survey of shape, aspect and soil so you can plant to maximise space and conditions. Other sections help with forward planning, crop rotation and dates and yields of harvests. In addition there are Expenses and Suppliers sections. Throughout, pockets allow easy storage of receipts, seed packets and bits and pieces and a wipe-clean 'To Do' list ensures you'll make the most of every visit to your plot.

ISBN: 9780711228184

"Seed to Seed" is part field notebook, part sketchbook and part diary. Built upon a narrative of the passing seasons of 2004, it relates that narrative to the life history of an 'iconic' plant. It gives a description of what is 'seen' and of the hidden molecular mechanisms that underlie the visible events in the plant's life, and tells the story of the last ten years of scientific discoveries in Nicholas Harberd's own laboratory as the team works on decoding the genome of a basic plant, thale cress - the fruit-fly of the plant world. This is a book for the general reader written by a scientist, passionate about his subject, who decided to get out into the open air and use the discoveries of the laboratory to explain the secret workings of the natural world. Set in the Norfolk country-side, with journeys to places as far away as New Zealand, Mallorca, Ireland and California, it is beautifully illustrated with more than forty sketches and diagrams, and gives a wonderfully open portrait of the scientific mind at work. COVER PRICE £16.99

isbn: 9780747570394

This is a very accessible history of the vices and virtues of British gardeners through the ages, particularly those who shaped the National Trust gardens. From the obsessive to the visionary, the eclectic to the eccentric, each chapter explores how a range of different individuals played out their excess in a variety of gardens, thus revealing the gardens' concealed secrets - just how and why they were created; the fortunes lavished and lost; clandestine and unorthodox uses; and hidden meanings for those who want to know how to 'read' a garden. Sir Francis Dashwood's lusty garden at West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, for example, has been described as "laid out by a curious arrangement of streams, bushes and plantation to represent the female form". This is very much a reading book for those passionate about gardens and in particular historical gardens. The chapters cover: Pride and Humility; Avarice and Generosity; Envy and Love; Wrath and Kindness; Lust and Self Control; Gluttony and Temperance; and finally, Sloth and Zeal.

isbn: 1905400462

The latest in "Frances Lincoln's" series of "RHS Treasuries", this charming anthology brings together a wealth of poetry and prose from a broad range of writers, from the Roman natural historian Pliny and the Chinese poet Po Chu-I, to Sir Walter Scott and Robert Fortune, to twentieth-century poets such as Seamus Heaney. The poems and extracts are illustrated with botanical prints from the remarkable collection of artworks at the Royal Horticultural Society's Lindley Library, acknowledged as the world's finest horticultural library. It is an ideal gift book, to appeal to lovers of literature, gardening and nature. It will showcase some of the most beautiful artwork from the enormous range of material in the RHS Lindley Library. It is a fourth volume in our successful series of "RHS Treasuries".

ISBN: 9780711227361

From the Royal Horticultural Society comes a fascinating compendium of poetry about gardens and garden plants, themes that have provided inspiration for poets since the dawn of time. The poems span many centuries and include the work of such great writers as William Wordsworth, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare as well as lesser-known hands. Each poem is illustrated with a botanical print from the Royal Horticultural Society's Lindley Library, one of the richest sources of plant illustrations in the world. - The only illustrated book of garden verse on the market - An ideal gift book, to appeal to lovers of literature and gardening - Will showcase some of the most beautiful artwork from the enormous range of material in the RHS Lindley Library

ISBN: 9780711220737

Can beer make plants grow? How about buttermilk? Or music classical or rock? Is it true about planting trees in deep holes? And how about chasing insects with hot sauce and stopping slugs with eggshells? Remedies for all garden woes are there for the taking: the challenge is to know what will work and what won't. Fearlessly conducting original experiments and harvesting wisdom from the scientific literature, horticulturist Jeff Gillman assesses new and historic advice and reveals the how and why and sometimes the why not for more than 100 common and uncommon gardening practices. The results will surprise even experienced gardeners.

ISBN: 9780881929126

Garden lovers everywhere will cherish this collection of beautiful poetry and prose inspired by all things green and flourishing. With quotations from down the ages and through the seasons, this beautifully-designed book contains words of wisdom on everything from allotments to arboretums, from pergolas to potting sheds, and will provide moments of laughter and reflection whether you are cooped up on a rainy day or admiring the fruits of your labour on a summer evening.

ISBN: 9781840246537

In "Working with the Curlew" Trevor Robinson shares his enthusiasm and joy for his work as a shepherd on the moor at Great Whernside in Yorkshire and later as a farmhand near Leominster in Hereford. He celebrates the intricate details of traditional farm life: selling rabbits at tuppence each, the village hop, sheep shearing, lambing, shire horses, haymaking, the warm welcome taste of tea on a snow-bound moor, muck spreading, cheese and bread making, trout-tickling, and killing the pig - "a quiet job well done". During one severe Yorkshire winter 600 sheep were lost, and he had to leave his job - 'the call of the curlew was still over two months away, when it came I was not there to hear it'. His new job in Herefordshire brought different skills: hedge laying, ploughing matches, haymaking, chain harrowing and crop rotation, and inevitably, the arrival of tractor and combine harvester. This book is an intimate and evocative account of an era before factory farming, when farmers worked closely with nature and the rhythm of the seasons, a smallholding could sustain a family, and there were enough small farms for a shepherd to climb the ladder to ownership. cover price £7.20

ISBN: 9781903998342

"A Year in Christine's Garden" is the utterly down-to-earth account of one woman's passion for plants. Recounting stories from her hectic life in horticulture, Christine Walkden's diary is a heartwarming account of octogenarian neighbours, living with a film crew and helping friends with their gardening needs. Reflecting all the charm of her BBC2 television series, Christine's narrative paints a picture of the day-to-day beauty that surrounds her. She likes being outside, she likes walking her dog Tara, she likes watching the light change and she enjoys those little moments when everything seems right in the world.With irrepressible enthusiasm, she interweaves tips and advice to prove that the best gardens are approachable and achievable. Forget fashion, forget trends - Christine's garden is about no-nonsense planting and growing what you enjoy. As the year progresses, this warm, but frank diary brings to life all the moments of pride, excitement, relaxation and laugh-out-loud fun that make Christine's garden a haven of contentment.

ISBN: 9781846074431