Let Us Now Praise Famous Gardens - Couverture souple

In this unique gardening chronicle Vita Sackville-West weaves together simple, honest accounts of her horticultural experiences throughout the year with exquisite writing and poetic description. Whether singing the praises of sweet-briar, cyclamen, Indian pinks and the Strawberry grape, or giving practical advice on pruning roses, planting bulbs, overcoming frosts and making the most of a small space, her writings on the art of good gardening are both instructive and delightful. Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).

Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) was a poet, novelist, muse of Virginia Woolf and central figure in the Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers. She created the great garden at Sissinghurst with her husband, Harold Nicolson and also wrote a successful weekly gardening column titled 'In Your Garden' for the Observer for some fifteen years, from which these extracts are taken.