Wednesday 18 June 2008

This is your life

James has suggested a topic for the Flange - Biography.

His top three (in reverse order) are:

Sally Festing - Gertrude Jekyll
John Dixon Hunt - William Kent
Kate Colquhoun - A Thing In Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton

.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ooh, surely Jennifer Potter's wonderful book on the Tradescants; Strange Blooms; the curious lives and adventures of the John Tradescants. Wonderfully written, thick with anecdotes, historically engaging and ultimately rather poignant. As you can probably tell I loved it.

I also want to know when James is writing his auto. It would surely be a bestseller and probably one of the most entertaining (but I bet also heartbreaking) books of recent times. Come on Hat, get to it!

The Garden Monkey said...

I would add, without hesitation, Nicola Shulman's excellent "A Rage For Rock Gardening"

I think I raved about it in a blog post once.

It is the informative and entertaining story of Reginald Farrer, who seems almost like an horticultural version of Kenneth Williams.

Simply a great read.

emmat said...

I could go on and on about The Brother Gardeners by Andrea Wulf which is a group biography of Linnaeus, Philip Miller, Thomas Fairchild, Daniel Solander, etc. But I think I already have, a bit too much. It's beautifully written. It depresses me all these people who write really well WHEN ENGLISH ISN"T EVEN THEIR FIRST LANGUAGE

VP said...

Having spent a few months trailing in the wake of Graham Stuart Thomas, I'm poised to order his 'Recollections of Great Gardeners'. 60 gardeners for the price of 1 including Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West.

What do you think?

Sadly garden biography's a branch (ha ha) of the genre I've yet to explore - looks like it's a rich seem though...