Recommended by jathton - Dec 1, 2019 8:56 PMHugh Johnson is a world respected author and expert on WINE. He is widely considered to be the world's best-selling wine writer. A wine he tasted in 1964, bottled in 1540, is still considered to be the oldest bottle of wine ever tasted.
Still reading?
OK, in 1973 he wrote The International Book of Trees. In 1975 he became the Editorial Director of The Garden; the journal of The Royal Horticultural Society. The column he writes for The Garden is called "Trad's Diary"... written under the nom de plume "Tradescant." Anthologies of Trad's Diary have often been called, in England, the "...best garden journal ever written."
In 1979 he wrote The Principles of Gardening. Penelope Hobhouse said of it, "It is the one gardening book I couldn't do without."
The opening paragraph to this book says............................................
"It would never occur to most gardeners to write a poem or paint a picture. Most gardens are the only artistic effort their owners ever make. Yet the one art that everyone chooses, or feels in some degree qualified to practice, is paradoxically the most complex art of all.
It is complex because it combines aesthetic judgements with science and craftsmanship in a kaleidoscope of variables. A poet is limited to the dictionary, a sculptor starts with a block of stone, but a gardener starts with a plot that is frozen one day and flooded the next, here in sun and there in shadow, teased by wind and tantalized by drought, plagued by insects, toyed with by birds, mined by moles. No two gardens are the same. No two days are the same in one garden. And yet on this flapping canvas an amateur without previous experience - holding the instruction book in one hand - tries to daub his vision of a better world - or if that is flying a bit high, to at least grow vegetables and feed his family."
I think it is fair to say no matter how much you know about gardening you will find something educational, and decidedly entertaining, in this book. Although out of print this book is available on-line... at ridiculously low prices.
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