Andrew Lawson's Reading List

"I think a successful photograph incorporates a love of the subject. Edwin Smith loved everything English and gardens in particular. Using black-and-white photos of superb quality, he makes a garden transcend black and white. If you are missing out colour, of course your attention goes to the structures, forms and textures. Well, I am looking at some of his pictures of a garden called Great Dixter, and even though this book was published in the 1960s, the garden looks almost the same now. I was there a few weeks ago. What typifies it is the wonderful formal structure of topiary which is decorated with an extravaganza of flowers. I think they are wrong because even in a cottage garden you have a sort of structure. Usually there is a path coming up to the door and the whole thing is laid along the path. In the case of a sophisticated garden like Great Dixter, the original designer Edward Lutyens knew a lot about Italian architecture and Italian gardens. The formal structure of gardens over here owes a lot to Italian gardens which developed in the 16th century. They do."

"Tessa Traeger is a photographer I admire. She comes to gardening from another discipline, still life photography. She did a lot of work for Vogue and still does. She looked at gardens with a new eye – an eye for detail. She has an ability to see that and to record it. She is a good portrait photographer, which not many garden photographers are. Yes, there are. The book is full of them. For this book, she spent two years visiting a whole selection of gardens based on the people behind them. She photographed people like Miriam Rothschild, Lady Salisbury and Penelope Hobhouse . These were some of the best known gardeners of that time, around the beginning of 2000, which was a great time for gardening. Several people in this book have died since then, such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, so this was an historical moment."

"He succeeds in doing what an awful lot of plant photographers try to do now. Many of them are influenced by him. He looks at close-ups of plants through a macro lens in which he sees details of plants which you and I have never seen before, because they are seen so close up. This is another black-and-white book, so it is all to do with form and texture. He was German and lived from 1865-1932. In the book it describes how he photographed the flowers, buds and seed capsules all in extreme close-up. When he published his book, Art Forms in Nature, in 1928, he became famous overnight. He never considered himself a photographer but produced material to assist him in teaching at Berlin’s Arts and Crafts School. The book was meant to offer inspiration to future designers. He is very good at paring down extraneous detail and actually going to the core of the subject. He isolated things from their surroundings by photographing plants against a neutral background. One wouldn’t want to do that all the time, but there is a fine consistency in this work."

"Jerry is from my generation. Well, he is fifteen years older than me, so he has just been 80. He has been photographing gardens for even longer than I have; he was in advertising before. He took to garden photography just before I did and we have been gently competitive friends for years. He has travelled unstintingly round the world; he doesn’t hesitate to drop everything and go to California if there is a garden there he wants to see. I don’t know how he does it because the whole stamina of travel is the worst aspect of what we do. We all tend to get up early in the morning and photograph at dawn – and to get to a place for dawn, you have to fly there or drive there the night before, and he hasn’t hesitated to do that throughout his working life. Like Jerry, I have travelled round the world, but I did so earlier than he did. I have found it stressful and am now trying to do less of it. I have been to America, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and many other places. Do you know, the more I travel the world, the more I realise that my favourite gardens are in England! They are the best gardens in the world of their own kind, of course. If you want a desert garden then you have to go to somewhere like California or Australia. The trouble with a lot of Californian and Australian gardens is that they try to be like English ones. They will never be as good, because the climate isn’t right for that. So when they are like themselves I love them, but when they are trying to be like something else I prefer the real thing! Funnily enough, I was at Highgrove earlier this week, and every time I go, there is something new and wonderful. It’s an enthusiast’s garden in the sense that he loves the garden and he encouraged some of the best designers to contribute. Also he has got a very good team of gardeners. So it is both well designed and well maintained. I was brought up on those gardens in the late 80s. I photographed their gardens and contributed photographs to their books. They are gardens that I admire. Penelope Hobhouse was first at the National Trust Garden at Tintinhull and then at her own garden at Bettiscombe. Rosemary Verey created an iconic garden at Barnsley House. A lot of English garden-makers have found inspiration in the designs of these two formidable ladies."