Christopher Lloyd’s prose is exciting; his knowledge is vast; his ideas are provocative, and he can make his readers laugh out loud. This collection of his weekly columns for Country Life captures the essence of his garden at Great Dixter.
Reviewed by Michael Leapman in Slightly Foxed Issue 59.
A Well-tempered Gardener
MICHEAL LEAPMAN
There is no good reason why an expert and dedicated gardener should be able to write elegant prose – and a survey of the gardening shelves of bookshops, along with the many magazines devoted to horticulture, will confirm that the two skills rarely converge. One glittering exception was Christopher Lloyd, known familiarly as Christo, who died in 2006 havebaying spent almost his entire adult life developing the five-acre garden at Great Dixter, his family home in East Sussex, where he was born in 1921. He wrote columns about it for Country Life and other journals, and produced seventeen books.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 59, Autumn 2018
A Well-tempered Gardener
There is no good reason why an expert and dedicated gardener should be able to write elegant prose – and a survey of the gardening shelves of bookshops, along with the many magazines devoted to...
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