BOOK REVIEWS
GREAT DIXTER: THEN & NOW
by Fergus Garrett, photographs by Christopher Lloyd and Carol Casselden
Pimpernel Press, £12.99 ISBN 978-1910258897
A series of snapshots that build into a pointillist portrait of Dixter capturing its enduring ethos as much as its shifting physical reality.
Reviewer Jodie Jones is a garden writer.
Great Dixter is unquestionably one of the great gardens of the world. Unruffled by the winds of horticultural fashion, it epitomises a maximalist ‘more is more’ style that began with Christopher Lloyd, whose parents commissioned Sir Edwin Lutyens to lay out the garden in 1910, and continues today under the direction of Fergus Garrett, Christo’s head gardener and now chief executive of the Great Dixter Charitable Trust.
Both men shared a passion for the craft of gardening and an iconoclastic aversion to polite ‘good’ taste, and many books have been written – by them and others – on the fruits of their labours, but Dixter enthusiasts will happily make space on their shelves for this latest addition to the oeuvre.
Great Dixter: Then & Nowcombines a smattering of early black and white pictures – Nathaniel Lloyd standing in the bare bones of his new garden, the small yew trees that would grow into Dixter’s peacock topiaries, a tousle-haired young Christopher helping his mother plant native orchids in the Front Meadow – with a selection of Christopher’s own photographic records of his life’s work in progress, and pictures taken by photographer Carol Casselden starting in 2006, just before Christo died.
