The Bad Tempered Gardener
By Anne Wareham Photographs by Charles Hawes
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Seeing gardening as a serious and even outrageous art form has placed Anne Wareham well outside of what usually passes for discussion of gardens. Impatient with received ideas, eager to provoke, The Bad-Tempered Gardener is the story of her development as a thinking gardener and the creation with her husband, Charles Hawes, of their acclaimed garden in the Welsh borders, the Veddw.
From the strange (plant obsessives, a bizarre debut as a television presenter) to the everyday (deadheading, sharing a garden), with frequent paeans to favourite plants and thoughtful pieces on show gardens and status, this is an intelligent, pugnacious and engaging book. It also unflinchingly conveys the challenges, the hard work, triumphs and failures behind the creation and development of a substantial contemporary garden.
Contents
Introduction
The beginnings
Influences
The history of the site
Hellebores
Plant obsessives
The front garden
Autumn sunshine
Truth and the garden world
The meadow
Bulbs
The crescent border
Gardens and meaning
Appearing on telly
Persicaria campanulata
Buying plants
The wild garden
Experts
Hostas
The terrace the the pool
Tulips
I hate gardening
Objects
The veg plot
The tour
Snowdrops and ambivalence
The reflecting pool
Status
Are gardens for gardeners?
Roses and taste
Water maintenance
Erigeron karvinskianus 'Profusion'
Show gardens
The conservatory
Deadheading
Grasses
Planting style
Succulents
Scent
Hydrangeas
Sharing a garden
The woods
Visitors
New media
Exile and belonging
'At once entertaining, opinionated and deliciously annoying.'
'Challenging rather than bad-tempered, The Bad Tempered Gardener is certainly strongly voiced, argumentative and full of a sharp edged wisdom that those of us who want to make better, more beautiful gardens need to be attending to.’
'When, at Veddw in Monmouthshire, Wareham replants the lines of vanished hedgerows with box and fills the enclosed spaces with grasses and hardy perennials, she is linking the land-use of the past with the aesthetic of the lordly parterre. By giving expression to contemporary sensibility about conservation, she invites intellectual engagement.'
Anne Wareham gardens at Veddw House in Monmouthshire with her husband Charles Hawes. Their two-acre garden is quirky and so is she, but this book is full of original thought and it's honest. Two acres between two is tough going! The Lucky Jim anti-version of gardening books.
- Oxford TimesIf you love gardening but hate the pretensions surrounding it, this is the book for you.
- Yorkshire Evening PostWe're used to friendly faces and kind words in the gardening world, whether it's on TV or in print. People who give gentle encouragement, enthuse about reliable plants and impart wise advice. Then there's Anne Wareham. Gardener, author and sometime TV presenter, her latest book might well get her known as the Simon Cowell of the green-fingered scene.
- ScotsmanOutspoken, candid and occasionally controversial, Anne Wareham is a unique voice in the gardening world.
- TopiariusA different sort of gardening book.
- Western Mail SeriesAn intelligent, pugnacious and engaging book.
- Monmouthsire County LifeThis is also a compelling book - the story of the creation of the garden at the Veddw, interlaced with the author's somewhat bumpy education as a gardener. I read it from cover tocover in just a few sittings, agreeing with some parts, violently disagreeing with other parts but transfixed by the whole idea that someone who professes to hate gardening should spend their life creating a beautiful garden like the Veddw.
- Professional GardenerBe prepared to be both entertained and annoyed when you read Anne's book as she describes her 'outside housework' and takes a swipe at 'gushing garden stories'. If her penned thoughts and criticisms make you think a little more reflectively about gardens - and gardeners - then her book will have acheived its aim.
- Reckless GardenerLess bad tempered than a well considered plea to consider gardens more honestly and critically.
- Garden Design JournalThis book represents a gardener who is not so much bad-tempered as frustrated, at pains to challenge accepted garden wisdom in all its forms.
- House & GardenDefinitely thought-provoking.
- Irish GardenThis is certainly the first gardening book I've read in whch the author heartily recommends separate beds - for married couples, not vegetables.
- Daily MailA kind of grumpy, argumentative antidote to all other gardening books.
- Evening StandardGardening is talked-up housework that you have to do outside. It has everything in common with housework, even some of the tools. I have a vacuum cleaner that I use indoors and out since it sucks up wet as happily as dry. Gardening has a great deal of the same objective as housework and is mostly depressingly judged on the same criteria - is it neatandtidy and is it weed-free, alongside is it neatandtidy and is it dust-free?
Gardening is boring. It is repetitious, repetitive and mind-blowing boring, just like housework. All of it - sowing seeds, mowing, cutting hedges, potting up, propagating - is boring, and all of it requires doing over and over again. If there are enjoyable jobs they're mostly enjoyable for the result not the process.
There is no actual intellectual content to the task itself, even if there may be in the planning and designing. So, if there is something wrong in my world, if an editor has snubbed me or a call centre driven me round the bend, I find myself obsessing. I think we are supposed to be delighting in being out in the open air, communing with nature, but me, I'll be obsessing, writing rude letters in my head. Wishing I was sitting comfortably indoors writing rude letters.
Publication Details:
Binding: Hardback, 168 pages
ISBN: 9780711231504
Format: 210mm x 160mm
65 colour photographs
BIC Code: WMB
BISAC Code: GAR000000
Imprint: Frances Lincoln
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