Book review: A cracking read packed with common sense!
With lockdown leading to many people trying gardening for the first time, I Want To Like My Garden by Rachel McCartain is an excellent read.
It’s also an eye-opener for those with more experience but who want to make their time in the garden more pleasurable. It bursts with that rarest of things in gardening books – common sense.
So many gardening tomes preach to the converted and assume a depth of knowledge in the reader. This can frankly make many give up on the book, even on gardening itself.
Rachel doesn’t do that, far from it. The book helps new gardeners get the best out of whatever they have and take steps into design. It has some downright funny one-liners – Rachel is very much a gardener after my own heart with this one:
Rachel McCartain – ‘Gardening equivalent of cleaning the toilet’
‘Weeding is the most soul-destroying part of gardening; it is the gardening equivalent of cleaning the toilet.’
She talks about gardening and plants as your wardrobe. Think ever-useful jeans and jumpers (shrubs, trees and evergreens); tops and T-shirts (flowering perennials/plants with colourful foliage); accessories (bulbs and showy flowers). It’s a handy analogy to use.
There are really useful sections at the back on plant attributes. I liked ‘those that won’t flop over’ and ‘Plants that fight back’! A comprehensive list of plants based on their rough shape and size as boxes, is an innovative approach. It’s great if you want a plant to fill a certain area.
I stopped reviewing gardening books after doing virtually one a week for years because so few stood out from the crowd. However, Rachel’s book does, and I’d thoroughly recommend it to gardeners old and new.
Rachel McCartain runs the website www.plantplots.com, and you can order the book from there, price £9.99.
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