If you read gardener and landscape designer Dan Pearson’s column in The Observer, you’ll know that he recently bought a small holding in the West Country, so leaving behind his jewel-like garden in Peckham Rye. Being London gardeners ourselves, we miss the stories from the Peckham garden, with its bamboo hedge and hornbeam, its raised vegetable beds and white wisteria, and so we are thrilled with Pearson’s latest and most personal book: Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City.
Part memoir, part practical manual and part seasonal diary – a bit like a gardening version of Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries – it’s a good read full of inspirational ideas as well as Pearson’s brilliantly reliable garden knowledge and practical tips. It’s illustrated throughout by Howard Sooley’s gorgeous photographs, though we wish there were more, particularly of the many individual plants Pearson name-checks.
Read it from cover to cover for full pleasure and to find lots of ideas (no one combines plants and colours quite like Pearson), or else pick specific subjects that you want to know more about – late-flowering bulbs, say, or potting-on – and dip in and out of the book, which is easy to do as each seasonal chapter is divided into useful short sub-sections with clear headings.
