The Morville Hours

"It’s a popular garden plant which has been written about copiously since then. This is the most recent book of the list, it was published in 2008. It is quite the most ambitious book about gardening I’ve ever read. It’s in part a story of how Katherine Swift restored her National Trust property garden in Shropshire, which was the site of a medieval monastery. But it’s also a meditation about gardening and how the landscape of Shropshire became what it is over the last 2,000-3,000 years. And because she’s a medieval historian specialising in manuscripts it has the structure of the medieval services. It also runs through the seasons. It’s incredibly dense, full of the most treacly sentences and at times it feels a little bit like swimming in a vat of syrup. But it’s worth it. The book is quite melancholic – it’s the autobiography of a family running through three or four generations and she’s had quite a sad life, suffering from bouts of depression and estranged from her family. The book is clearly an act of catharsis and it pushes gardening literature in a direction I don’t remember it going before. A melange of history, meditation, self-exploration, philosophy, autobiography and geology. I can’t think of another gardening book so wide in its scope. And what’s also nice about it is that it has no photographs, only line drawings. It has an old world quality where you have to rely solely on her powers of description. There’s certainly a tendency to be picture-led. None of the books on this list are picture-led, although we did add pictures to the new edition of the Frank Kingdon Ward book. These days the pictures tend to make up for rather dreary and unoriginal text."