Gardens Illustrated - Barbara Segall
Travel has always been a theme in Christian Lamb's life, but put it into the context of her plant enthusiasm and it takes on a new dimension. Christian Lamb takes the search that 'run-of-the-mill' plantaholics might make for 'must-have' plants to extremes, and in the pages of her first book she highlights the travels, the plants and the plant hunters, in whose footsteps she follows. Lamb succumbed to plant-chasing in New Zealand when she was beguiled by the ruddy tones of Echium wildpretii, beautifully displayed on the book's cover. The subsequent hunt for the plant is described in detail, and the seed she finally procured from a Cornish nursery, rewarded her with blooms in May 2004.
GARDENING - Deborah Kellaway
AN OCTOGENARIAN subscriber to The Oldie has sent me her first gardening book. She hoped I might have time to glance through it'. With a doubting heart, I began to turn the glossy pages, and I was hooked. Whenever I decided to put it aside, subheadings or close-up shots of my own favourite plants drew me on: camellias, tree peonies, Romneya coulteri, Eucryphia cordifolia, Hoheria. 'Glory of Amlwch', parrotia, Lilium auratum, meconopsis, trillium, dodecatheon, Rosa banksiae... This is just scratching the surface. For every plant I grow, or wish I grew, this book deals with at least three I've never heard of.
Robin Hanbury-Tenison
It is most unusual for an octogenarian to publish her first book, for it to prove to be a horticultural tour de force must be unheard of. From page one you cannot help liking and becoming involved in this self-confessed plantaholic's passionate obsessions and her quests, both physical and literary, for flowers and their discoverers. There cannot be a gardener in the country whose appreciation of his or her garden will not be enhanced by sharing them.
This book is full of uncontrived surprises. With her exquisite and witty use of language she makes even the most ignorant of gardeners, like me, feel involved and we are swept along by her eloquent enthusiasm. It had me rushing out to look at certain shrubs with new eyes. I never knew that my Parrotia persica was named after a Dr Parrot who was the first man to climb Mount Ararat. Or that our Pieris was first grown at Caerhays Castle by my wife's cousin, J.C.Williams, from seed brought back from the frontiers of Burma and China by George Forrest in 1910, at the same time as all those famous camellias.
Deborah Kellaway, gardening columnist
An idiosyncratic gardening book, From the Ends of the Earth (Bene Factum Publishing, 2004) by Christian Lamb, took my fancy this year. It would not take the fancy of mainline publishers, as it falls into no received category, being a mixture of her own gardening experience and anecdotes of plant hunters. She is obsessional, knowledgeable and persuasive, but also self-mocking. She goes to a dinner party at a house on a Cornish beach and covets its seaweed for her compost heap: 'The slippery, bulky stuff was much heavier than I expected, and all the dinner guests had to come in their finery and help me drag it up the shore.' Her happy energy drives the book, and her own colour photographs illuminate it.
Tony Kirkham - Horticulturist, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
An infectious read on the naming and arrival of plants
It is said that 'every picture tells a story'; in this case every plant has a tale to tell about the introduction of plants to our gardens today. Such are the stories told by the author through a walk around her own garden in Cornwall. It begins with a need to obtain Echium wildpretii she sees growing in New Zealand; this in turn triggers an urge to plant a living museum from scratch at home.
A number of good books about the introduction of plants to the British Isles have been published over the last few years. There have been none like this one. Christian Lamb's steady progress toward Oxford University, via credits in botany and latin at School Certificate, was cut short by Hitler's war. Thus, she complains, her's (at 84) is an untrained mind. Untrained maybe, but a mind untrammelled by convention; witty and observant. Lamb presents, as they say, as an interesting paradox. On the one hand she is formal, precise, the able technician, in fact, quite the blue stocking.