Book Shelf: “The Essential Garden Book”

Two of my most-prized and most-thumbed books are Terence Conran’s iconic The House Book (1974) and its sequel, The Essential House Book (1994), so imagine my joy when I stumbled across a well-loved hardcopy of The Essential Garden Book (1998, with Dan Pearson) in a used-book store last Fall. I had coveted and pored over an older mentor-friend’s copy of The House Book as a teenager, and excitedly bought myself the paperback Essential as a young apartment dweller when it first appeared. Then hunted down my own vintage copy of The House Book years later. I have spent a lot of time with books in the “shelter” category — and have written/edited and photo edited more than a dozen of them — and I can’t name a more inspiring-meets-informative volume than either of the two. Decades after they first published, I’m still inspired every time I crack them open. Having spent a few hours with The Essential Garden Book over the weekend, I can without surprise or hesitation say the same about it.

The layout is identical to its predecessor: large-format pages packed with genuinely educational text and wide-ranging photos, each one demonstrating a key point. Over the course of the book, you get a complete survey of garden intel — from plant traits and types, to garden design and infrastructure, to the how-to’s of actual garden work. There are lots of ways to engage with it: A new gardener might read it cover to cover for all the big-picture guidance it provides; a seasoned one might study the copious photos and captions for whatever ideas they might spark. Anyone might turn to the pages on any given subject for a refresher or bit of insight on a particular situation from time to time, such as when seeking ideas for making an entrance or paving a pathway.

I don’t know what Dan Pearson’s stature was in the garden-design world of 1998, but he’s a big name here in the future, and he’s credited with the two meatiest chapters of the book, which together offer an extremely thorough introduction to garden design thinking and strategy. I signed up for Create Academy during a sale in December, and all I’ve watched so far are some of the introductory clips of Pearson’s class, which have left me impatient for a closer look at his own sprawling garden, called Home Farm. So I was pretty thrilled to find multiple spreads of beautiful images of the place — as it existed in the late 1990s — nestled into this book. [Correction: Home Farm was his previous garden. His current property — a different farmstead, and the one featured in the CA class — is called Hillside.]

While Pearson’s is the only other name on the cover (alongside Sir Terence’s), additional chapters are credited to Andrew Wilson, Jennifer Potter, Isabelle Van Groeningen and Richard Key. But I want to give a particular shout-out to ‘Picture Researcher’ Claire Taylor, aka photo editor. As with the two other Conran books above, the photos (and captions) do a ton of heavy lifting, encompassing a wide range of styles and specifics. And it’s mind-blowing how few of them seem even remotely dated, nearly 30 years later. They’re just that well-chosen.

(In the sense that a very small number of them are attributed to their designers, who happened to be huge at the time — Steve Martino, Oehme Van Sweden ...— it did date it for me, taking me back to a particular moment when I was a gardenless twentysomething studying the magazines. But that’s an edge case!)

The only complaint I have about the book is a mild one: It is really really big, which is what makes it so accommodating of the wealth of images, but also makes it challenging to engage with. You basically have to sit at a table with it open in front of you. But like I said, mild complaint. Your complaint for me might be that it is long out-of-print, but I absolutely encourage you to search the internet or just be on the lookout for it anytime you venture into a used shop. It’s a bonafide gem.