Gardens Illustrated Magazine

DOWNTOOLS

by Isabel Bannerman

Pimpernel Press, £14.99

ISBN 978-1914902949

A perceptive and engrossing view of making a new garden – with a little help from Mr B-by one of today's leading garden designers.

Reviewer Anna Pavord is a garden writer and GI contributing editor.

‘Making a garden together… is what Mr B and me like to do best,’ writes garden designer Isabel Bannerman. Husbandry tells the story of the garden she and her husband are currently making at Ashington Manor in Somerset, where they moved three years ago. But, as the title suggests, it is also a book about a quixotic marriage, and a working relationship that has lasted for four decades. And it is brilliantly done.

There's an exuberance and generosity about the Bannermans’ gardens that is very beguiling, impressive too, since here, at Ashington, as in their previous gardens at Trematon Castle and Hanham Court, they start with a fair amount of chaos. But finding a balance between ‘chaos and charm’ is the key to the Bannerman style. ‘We like a bit of wonk,’ says the author.

Since most of us are not professional garden designers, it's refreshing to be told at the outset that there is no such thing as taste, only ‘one's personal whims and fantasies’. But a great deal of excellent advice follows. Understand, for instance, that a garden ‘is always in the throes of becoming something else’. Take time to absorb its surroundings. Understand, too, the soil you have inherited. There is

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