Flowers – Wild and Garden! Paddy Tobin Book Review July 31, 2020 Lavish praise, a very generous book review, can be counter-productive for there is within us all that little streak of cynicism which says it may be too good to be true. This is my predicament with Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast, A Natural History by Carol Gracie for I […]
Society Blog
The Wild Food Plants of Ireland – A Review.
Dining on the Long Acre – The Wild Food Plants of Ireland Paddy Tobin Book Review July 14, 2020 Reading Tom Curtis and Paul Whelan’s book, The Wild Food Plants of Ireland, has brought another layer, a greater depth of interest, to my wildflower wanderings along our road in recent days. The damsons on the boundary ditch of the […]
Britain’s Ferns – A Review
Britain’s Ferns – A Review. Paddy Tobin Book Review June 11, 2020 It works! Britain’s Ferns is intended to provide a practical and functional approach to the identification of ferns, and it works! I put it to the test with a number of local ferns and one horsetail and the identification keys, which are at the heart of […]
The Pollinator Victory Garden – A Review
The Pollinator Victory Garden…A Review. Paddy Tobin Book Review February 10, 2020 Small changes in our gardening can make an enormous difference to our world – The “Act locally, think globally” concept could never be applied so effectively! We can each, in our individual gardens, make small changes which will be beneficial to our environment, to the pollinators […]
Modern Plant Hunters – A Review
Modern Plant Hunters – A Review. Paddy Tobin Book Review January 31, 2020 Modern Plant Hunters – Dr. Sandy Primrose. Plant hunters have given our gardens the most wonderful range of plants; we are greatly indebted to these brave, courageous and daring people and Dr. Sandy Primrose’s account of our modern plant hunters is gripping and informative reading […]
The Scentual Garden – A Review.
Fragrance lost its importance in our gardens. We drifted away from an appreciation of scent; became more visual in our judgement and selection and nowadays rarely include scent in a description of a plant. We have fallen out of the practice of appreciating one of the central and important aspects of our gardens, the fragrance […]
Bringing the Mediterranean into your Garden – Olivier Filippi
Olivier Filippi – Bringing the Mediterranean into your Garden. Paddy Tobin Book Review December 10, 2019 This is a remarkable book, a book of extraordinary depth and of marvellous inspiration. Olivier and Clara Filippi have run a nursery, specialising in Mediterranean plants, in the south of France for over thirty years. They have travelled the world to […]
Reading Shortlist 2019
The Shortlist 2019 Paddy Tobin General Interest November 30, 2019 The Shortlist 2019 It is the end of the year, Christmas is approaching, and it is a time for gardeners to treat themselves and to be treated and few treats are better than a good book. Here is my selection from books published this past year, a […]
Scent Magic – A Review
Scent Magic! Paddy Tobin Book Review November 3, 2019 Isabel Bannerman describes scent wonderfully: Witch hazel has a clean sanatorium smell of pure alcohol and Elastoplast. The crushed gourd-shaped seed pods of Wintersweet, if crushed, smell of dusty cloves, spiced wines and the depths of unused drawers. The rose, ‘Rosarie de l’Hay’ smells of cucumber, tea and laundered […]
A Radical Shift in Perspective
A Radical Shift in Perspective Paddy Tobin Book Review October 3, 2019 Instead of engaging in a constant battle to adapt our gardens to suit plants would it not be better to search for plants that suit our gardens? This would require a radical shift in perspective which has much to recommend it and Olivier Filippi’s book, The […]
Growing Native Orchids
How to Grow Native Orchids Paddy Tobin Book Review October 5, 2019 How to Grow Native Orchids in Gardens Large and Small Enthusiasts of our native orchids might well fear that a book on growing these precious and nowadays scarce plants in the garden is simply another threat to numbers in the wild but the very first […]
Beth Chatto: A Life with Plants – Book Review
Beth Chatto: A Life with Plants – A Review Paddy Tobin Book Review September 26, 2019 There is a photograph of Beth Chatto on page 8 of this book, a black and white photograph, which I imagine is of her in her forties. She has that lean-towards-the-camera pose which was so typical of her. Her bright smile and […]
Great Gardens of London
Great Gardens of London gives an insight into a selection of the horticultural jewels of the capital city of what is probably the greatest gardening country of the world. England is a treasure store of wonderful gardens and it comes as no surprise that the capital city, London, is home to a significant and most […]
A Beautiful Obsession – Jimi Blake and Noel Kingsbury
A Beautiful Obsession Paddy Tobin Book Review August 6, 2019 In his seventeen years at Huntingbrook Garden, Jimi Blake has cut a dash through the traditional herbaceous border, the shrub border, the woodland garden and is leading the way in Irish horticulture with his innovative approach to gardening, with his new plant trials and introductions but, most […]
Cherry Ingram: The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossoms
The Cherry Man – A Fabulous Story! Paddy Tobin Book Review June 25, 2019 Some books give more than they have promised. Some books promise much and give even more and these books are to be treasured for they are rare things, giving testimony, insight and understanding to the deeper matters of our world and our lives. “Cherry […]
The Hidden Horticuturists
The Hidden Horticulturists Paddy Tobin Book Review June 25, 2019 When historic account is populated with individual stories it becomes real, all the more interesting and more accessible to us. Should we read of a First World War battle, with deaths in the thousands, we are duly shocked but should we be told of a young Lancashire […]
Cherry Ingrim – An excellent book!
The Cherry Man – A Fabulous Story! Some books give more than they have promised. Some books promise much and give even more and these books are to be treasured for they are rare things, giving testimony, insight and understanding to the deeper matters of our world and our lives. “Cherry Ingram” by Naoko Abe is […]
A Garden Can Be Anywhere!
A Garden Can Be Anywhere! Paddy Tobin Book Review April 4, 2019 We live in an age of concern about the wholesomeness of our food, about the widespread use of pesticides and artificial fertilisers, about food miles, the use of preservatives, artificial additives and colourants. We are aware of the industrialisation of food production and processing, the erosion […]
Island Gardens – Book Review
Island Gardens Paddy Tobin Book Review April 3, 2019 We attach a certain magic to islands, as we do to other remote natural areas – mountains, remote seashores and the like. We regard them as special places, places apart, places where we may be in more intimate contact with nature, places of beauty, of wildness, of ruggedness, […]
Monsters under Glass – A Review
Literally taken by the Venus Fly Trap. Paddy Tobin Book Review March 7, 2019 The title was “Monsters Under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers, 1850 to the Present” and I misinterpreted it completely. I’m sure you, like me, might have expected something about glasshouse plants and their cultivation but I was wrong and it was nothing of the […]