Look at that pipe!

I have recently acquired a later edition of the Gardening Expert which I blogged about a while back and this new one is in REALLY good nick.

I have no idea of the date, other than it's still pre-decimal.

It seems odd they changed the cover simply by redrawing what they had before and the contents are identical (older one top RH).

I also got these two old versions of Hessayons dating from 1980 & 1978 respectively.

Definitely Mabey

Feeling a bit down, I headed off in search of books. I know I have plenty to be getting on with but that's not the point.

It may have been my jaded state, but nothing I found really grabbed me. Not even in my favourite second hand bookshop. I picked up a couple of things, but put them back down after a couple of minutes.

Just as I was about the leave I spotted this tucked away.

It's a book I have wanted for a long time and even though it is an enormous tome, I just couldn't bring myself to buy it new (bad I know).

Quickly, I snatched it up, paid the 12 quid asking price and scuttled off grinning.
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A Touch of the Oscar's

That's a phrase I sometimes use to denote a complete cave-in on the resolution front.

"I can resist anything, except temptation."

You may, if you have very, very good memories recall this post.

I lasted six whole months after that, until I buckled and bought the book.

Darwin's Dogs

Flange member Emma T, not only has a book coming out .

But she also, I hope, has her life back after being holed up for what seems to me absolute aeons, writing it.

Hopefully she will be back regularly blogging soon.

Moonlight shadow

It's nice to have a ... what's the phrase?... I guess a shadow blog.

A blog that is something different to one's main blog and about some small (perhaps obsessive) part of one's make-up.

I have this book blog - and although I would welcome all and every contribution from others - it is largely a window on my OGBCD (Obsessive Garden Book Collecting Book Disorder).

Likewise Sarah Salway has a blog about benches as well as her main one.

Her latest post is about a book.

One I sent her as it happens.

If you knew how much it pained me to part with it, you would realise her refusal to send me another Mirabel Osler book in return is just plain ungrateful, even if it is was worth £100 and then one I sent her just a few quid.

(sobs theathrically in the manner of Heather Mills)

Around and about

Just a couple of bits

Cut-price shed book via Alex The Shed. The RRP is actually £25 not £20 - so even more of a bargain, for a book with a title made up of two words that don't immediately appear to go together.

And a review of one of my heroes Ken Thompson's latest from Emma "Muppet" Cooper. Em has quite a lot of booky stuff if you put book into her site's search bar.

Why she's not a Flange member I really don't know

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Strange habits

I know that I have previously mentioned my terrible habit of having several part-read books on the go at once.

I’m not sure what that says about me. A butterfly mind? An inability to commit? Someone who takes on more than they should? Who knows.

Sometimes this worries me a little and I make a concrete effort to get the number of “ongoing” books down. However this then makes me think that I’m not doing so bad and so I start adding to the “ongoing” pile all over again.

It is, I admit, a bad habit.

But I know someone who has a much odder bookish foible. He can’t go to bed if he has just finished reading a book, unless. He has to start another one before he can go to sleep.

Now that’s just plain weird.

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Poo

I'm sorry.

I've been really crap at putting posts up here.

I will try harder.

Promise.

What a snip!

I'm a sucker for a secondhand gardening book, preferably at least as old as me.

No glossy images for me - give me a line drawing any day of week. Add in a vaguely chucklesome author name and some old-school horticultural advice and I'm happy as a sandboy. No surprise, then, that Pruning in the Fruit Garden by F Hilkenbaumer caught my attention in the £1 rack outside my favourite bookshop.

Fruit tree pruning's one of those skills that, try as I might, I can't get the hang of from a written guide. This is where Mr Hilkenbaumer's book comes in. There's very little in the way of words, because it's the line drawings that communicate the art and science of the job of pruning. The lines of the tree's branches are rendered in black, with red lines showing what should be cut back: it couldn't be clearer.

The book was published in 1976, but as the back cover says, "fashions in pruning come and go, but the basic techniques remain the same". The only mystery is a pruning timetable on the last page that's got me completely puzzled, but no matter, the rest of it is pure gold. Thankyou, Mr Hilkenbaumer.

With any luck, my plum and pear tree will thank you, too.

Jane Perrone

Horticultural - The organic gardening blog

Thanks for the Guest Blog Jane - GMx

Child's Play

Last year an anthology of writing from Hortus came out. It wasn‘t the first - there were two previous anthologies “By Pen & By Spade“ (1990) and “The Generous Garden (1991). Both are no doubt no longer in print, but still available from secondhand bookshops, Amazon, Ebay etc..

Whilst looking through the first of them recently (for something unrelated), I found the following opening line to the essay “Gardening for and by Children” by Will Ingwerssen.

“To my knowledge there is no gardening magazine or periodical that includes a page to encourage an interest in gardening directly to children.”

What a great idea, and surely a point more valid than ever.

Spooky

In a slightly alarming piece of synchronicity just a couple of days after posting that I had two of this series of books I came across another one for sale.

As it only cost a few pence I couldn't not buy it.

Now I have three and hence a collection.

Luckily they are very slim and won't take up much space.

The more eagle-eyed amongst you may have spotted the addition of a few new Flange members.
Firstly Graham Rice, who I trust needs no introduction, and in addition to writing the things clearly in the advanced stages of book addiction, as these posts testify. Graham also DJ's, so I imagine his place is also awash with CD's and vinyl.

Next up is Sue “Trillium” Beasley. Well known in the UK for winning the BBC’s Gardener of the Year, her RHS show gardens at Tatton Park and her nursery.
Sue says she was sagging off from doing RHS Diploma revision as she’s reading
but Maggie Campbell-Culver's 'The Origin of Plants'. I reckon the revision must be deadly dull, because I found that book a bit dry and am still only about halfway through it, having picked it up and put it down a few times. Mind you in my case that it true of far to many books.

Lastly, but by no means least, we have one of the stars of the UK garden blogging firmament the blogger formerly known as R Pete Free.

Welcome to the Flange, book lovers.
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Love is blind.

I say that because I have yet to come across a Penguin Handbook on horticulture who’s cover I didn’t adore - even this one which is ‘orrible.

It is PH 50 - The New Vegetable Grower’s Handbook [1962], was written by Arthur J Simmons who wrote the earlier Penguin Handbooks, The Vegetable Growers' Handbook Vol I & II and was published 4 years after his death.

Report report

Following New Shoot's comment on the last post, I feel I should explain that I bought the RHS Council Reports solely for the amusement of looking at the 20 to 30 pages of adverts at the back, featuring such things as boots for horses (so that they wouldn’t damage the turf as they pulled enormous lawnmowers), since the rest seemed to be a list of RHS members (all 170 pages of them).

But I've since had a closer look and the results are, I have to admit, mildly interesting. As I have said the last 30-odd pages are ads, and the first 8 pages are also ads, but imbedded within them are such things as Notices to Fellows, including offers of free poppy seeds from the RHS's then Secretary Rev Wilks (breeder of the Shirley poppies no less).

There is then the 10 page annual report, plus accounts. After that there is a list of the RHS council and officers, followed by a list of the Victoria Medal holders

Strange how some of the names like Gertrude Jekyll and Ellen Willmott, have remained well known, but others such as Rev Charles Wolley Dod, a hugely well known horticulturalist in his day, are not familiar to most gardeners today.

On closer inspection, even the list of members is vaguely interesting, including as it does the likes of Reg Farrer.

It does emphasise how, in many ways, the Edwardian period represents a high-water mark of British Gardening.

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What Have I Done?

I can usually justify a purchase - somehow.

But these I cannot.

They are RHS Council Reports and serve no useful purpose.

I bought them all the same.

What bothers me most is that I only have to come across another one to be able to invoke the Siadwell Principle, and then I shall have to collect the whole blessed lot.
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Pre-Spring Clean

I have been tidying my books. I would say organising, but in truth they were no more organised when I finished than when I started.

In the process I did discover that I have a pair of books from the Studies in Biology series.

As Flange members will know this is according to the Siadwell Principle dangerously close to the beginning of a collection.

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Anything except temptation

I love Timber Press books. If you have any sort of garden book collection you surely have at least one of their titles.

I don’t look at their website very often. Not for any other reason than that of temptation. It’s a bit like offering the late Ollie Reed the keys to a branch of Threshers off-licence.

Of course they have oodles of info about all their books, but they also have a daily horticultural question competition that enters you for their monthly book draw.

I do find the questions are generally very interesting, stroke, challenging in their own right, even if you don‘t enter.

I have entered this a number of times, because I do not have enough books, but have yet to win.
Which is probably God’s way of telling me I have plenty of books.

Book Clubbed

I should have mentioned this a while ago when I discovered it.

But if you pop over here, there is a Garden Book Club.

Undoubtedly of interest to all garden book lovers, but possibly more so to the Stateside bloggers as it would be easier for them to take part.

It seems to have gone to sleep, but will I guess spark back into life now winter is almost upon us.

If I had anything about me I would have started a UK oriented Garden Book Club.

That said, my experience of book clubs is that they involve a vociferous argument over what books to chose, a prolonged period of silence, followed by a round of mild-bulling dirceted at those members who have signed up and not actually read the book yet.

Or in some instances even remembered what it was, much less bought it.

I bet they do these things properly in the States.
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Free book!!

Win a free book!!

Oh Yes!!


Go here to find out how.

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