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Review
'At once entertaining, opinionated and deliciously annoying.'
(James Alexander Sinclair )'Challenging rather than bad-tempered, The Bad Tempered Gardener is certainly strongly voiced, argumentative and full of a sharp edged wisdom that those of us who want to make better, more beautiful gardens need to be attending to.’
(Sara Maitland )'When, at Veddw in Monmouthshire, Wareham replants the lines of vanished hedgerows with box and fills the enclosed spaces with grasses and hardy perennials, she is linking the land-use of the past with the aesthetic of the lordly parterre. By giving expression to contemporary sensibility about conservation, she invites intellectual engagement.'
(Germaine Greer )Anne Wareham gardens at Veddw House in Monmouthshire with her husband Charles Hawes. Their two-acre garden is quirky and so is she, but this book is full of original thought and it's honest. Two acres between two is tough going! The Lucky Jim anti-version of gardening books.
(Oxford Times )If you love gardening but hate the pretensions surrounding it, this is the book for you.
(Yorkshire Evening Post )We're used to friendly faces and kind words in the gardening world, whether it's on TV or in print. People who give gentle encouragement, enthuse about reliable plants and impart wise advice. Then there's Anne Wareham. Gardener, author and sometime TV presenter, her latest book might well get her known as the Simon Cowell of the green-fingered scene.
(Scotsman )Outspoken, candid and occasionally controversial, Anne Wareham is a unique voice in the gardening world.
(Topiarius )A different sort of gardening book.
(Western Mail Series )An intelligent, pugnacious and engaging book.
(Monmouthsire County Life )This is also a compelling book - the story of the creation of the garden at the Veddw, interlaced with the author's somewhat bumpy education as a gardener. I read it from cover tocover in just a few sittings, agreeing with some parts, violently disagreeing with other parts but transfixed by the whole idea that someone who professes to hate gardening should spend their life creating a beautiful garden like the Veddw.
(Professional Gardener )Be prepared to be both entertained and annoyed when you read Anne's book as she describes her 'outside housework' and takes a swipe at 'gushing garden stories'. If her penned thoughts and criticisms make you think a little more reflectively about gardens - and gardeners - then her book will have acheived its aim.
(Reckless Gardener )Less bad tempered than a well considered plea to consider gardens more honestly and critically.
(Garden Design Journal )This book represents a gardener who is not so much bad-tempered as frustrated, at pains to challenge accepted garden wisdom in all its forms.
(House & Garden )Definitely thought-provoking.
(Irish Garden )This is certainly the first gardening book I've read in whch the author heartily recommends separate beds - for married couples, not vegetables.
(Daily Mail )A kind of grumpy, argumentative antidote to all other gardening books.
(Evening Standard )Product Description
Seeing gardening as a serious and even outrageous art form has placed Anne Wareham well outside of what usually passes for discussion of gardens. Impatient with received ideas, eager to provoke, The Bad-Tempered Gardener is the story of her development as a thinking gardener and the creation with her husband, Charles Hawes, of their acclaimed garden in the Welsh borders, the Veddw.
From the strange (plant obsessives, a bizarre debut as a television presenter) to the everyday (deadheading, sharing a garden), with frequent paeans to favourite plants and thoughtful pieces on show gardens and status, this is an intelligent, pugnacious and engaging book. It also unflinchingly conveys the challenges, the hard work, triumphs and failures behind the creation and development of a substantial contemporary garden.
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Customer Reviews
Interweaving narrative strands run throughout the book, the central being the process of making her garden at Veddw in Monmouthshire with Charles Hawes. This learning curve with it's inherent confusions and contradictions has provoked meditations upon individuals, communities and the landscape, situating gardening activities within larger social and historical frameworks.
Critical reflections ponder the British national obsession for over planted gardens in relation to consumerism and the media. Indeed the media are castigated for their role in promoting glossy idealised notions of gardens divorced from their actual uses and surroundings. A side swipe is also aimed at the haughty-cultural hierarchy and it's supposed 'experts' dispensing words of wisdom from on high, which would have been interesting to see developed further.
Hortiphiliacs need not worry, there are plenty of chapters on plant likes and dislikes, presented from a personal perspective of gardening experiences. Here the book strays into more traditional garden territory, and as such these passages are sure raise the hackles of many plant obsessives.
Despite the serious issues raised it's not all heavy pondering. In fact the anecdotes about the making of the garden are the most entertaining reading on such an endeavour since Margery Fish's classic 'We Made a Garden' in 1956. Both providing fascinating insights into the dynamics of domestic partnerships and how they play out in the allocation of gardening tasks.
To readers with an investment in the status quo, the book may well prove to be irksome, which indeed is part of it's intention. But by asking more questions than it provides answers, it is on the whole far more reasonable than bad tempered, and refreshingly welcome for it!
So on the first read, this may seem a bad book. But if you then accept that it's about gardeners rather than gardens (and by "gardeners" I mean not only those who get down and dig but also those who are fortunate enough to own big gardens and have the cash to pay someone else to do the heavy work for them), and read it again you'll get far more from it.
When other reviewers say this is a book about Anne Wareham's garden, they miss the point. The book uses the garden as a way to demonstrate the thinking that's the thrust of the book. There is no need to publicise the garden at all - it's only open on Sunday afternoons for three months of the year (inconsiderate!) and it seems that it's only open at all because the owner grudgingly accepts that some silly people want to visit it. The owner discourages you from wanting a garden tour by setting a stupid price for that. She probably doesn't want you there at all, disturbing her nap after a nice Sunday lunch.
This is, first and last, all about the mentality of those who spend days, weeks, years, developing a garden but never actually get to enjoy it. I'm like that. Every year I spend the spring preparing and making perfect and tell myself that in the summer (if we ever have one of those) I'll sit out there and enjoy it. When summer comes (on a single day in June), out goes the deck chair but on my way back for the bottle of wine I see a weed! That's it. Rest of day spend weeding, dead heading, pruning, tidying up. Next contact with deck chair is to put it away. This is what Anne is losing her temper about.
No, it's not like a Noddy book. There's no flow (let alone logical flow) after the first dozen or so pages. The book's a series of random thoughts, rants and raves. And it's more interesting and refreshing because of that (though a better editor might have made something of the order of the rants and picked up some of the contradictions).
So read it once and rubbish it by all means. But then read it twice and I think you'll get more from it. I read it a third time and after that read I added a star to my rating. And the photographs (by Charles Hawes) are worth buying the book for even if you don't read the words!
And you might just agree with me about the poor editing. There's a definite chink in the bad tempered armour on page 137 which any good editor would have removed.
Buy this book and liberate your spade.
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