Book Shelf: Truly stunning ‘Wonderlands’

I look at a lot of garden photos. Too many, honestly. Too many ideas pumped into my brain all the time while I’m also feeling my way into what I want this, my, garden to be. There is so much beauty to be found in the wide world of gardening, inherently, and it’s easy to lose track of one’s own goals. Meaning, not everything that’s great or even jaw-droppingly beautiful is relevant to what I’m trying to create, so I have to filter a lot out. Part of me almost didn’t want to look at Clare Coulson’s book Wonderlands: British Garden Designers at Home (despite having coveted it for months) because I’m not trying to make an English garden for myself and I knew it would be ... distracting, shall we say? But then I was in a pretty little shop up in the Catskills and it was sitting right there on the counter, too beautiful to resist. And I’m glad I gave in.

First off, it’s a whopper of a book: roughly 10.5 x 12 inches, and 272 thick pages deep. (A little more than an inch.) Clothbound, foil stamped, with a large photo tipped into a debossed frame for it on the cover, it declares its high production values right from the start. The paper is thick enough I kept stopping to double-check that I wasn’t turning two pages at once. The text is by Coulson with genuinely stunning photos by Éva Németh, which are allowed to be the star of the show. They even spot-varnished the full-page, grand-vista images, to give the plantscapes an extra depth and richness against the unvarnished skies.

Wonderlands is very straightforwardly a series of visits to the personal gardens of 18 of the UK’s most prominent garden designers (more than half of them female), and each one consists of 2 pages of text about the gardener(s) and their garden, followed by page after page of photos. Meaning, fewer than 40 pages of the book are text while the rest is just wall-to-wall photos, totaling about 200. An absolute treasure trove.

There are no captions, for better or worse — you’re expected to be able to suss out what there is to glean from any given photo for yourself. On one hand, I admired the simplicity of this; on the other, I often wanted to know what was what. But a decision was seemingly made that this book is about showing more than telling, and with it being such an incredible repository of (big!) photos, I think it’s worth the trade-off.

That said, Coulson does a nice job of telling the back story of each one. And her choices are admirably broad, stylistically, even if that’s not really apparent upon first flipping through. While all of the people included are accomplished in their field and thus have some level of means, as well as ability, the properties do range from small cottage gardens to vast estates, and from naturalistic at one end to fairly formal (just a few) at the other. Most are planted around ancient stone buildings in the countryside with sweeping vistas, and whether in the city or the country, they do have certain things in common. They are British, after all. There are lots of climbing roses and garden gates, plenty of topiary, and I don’t think any of the write-ups lacks a reference to a ‘cloud-pruned’ component. There are also a surprising number that have long, rectangular troughs (whether newly built or discovered on the property) as water features, which I’m quite fond of. But there is also more variety to them than initially meets the eye.

Several them of them include beautiful kitchen gardens, as well.

All in all, a great mix — and something to be inspired by on every spread. Distracting, yes, but a book to pore over for years to come.

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