Geoff Hamilton's Paradise Gardens

'Paradise Gardens' was English TV gardening expert Geoff Hamilton's last book. I get the sense that he was to English Gardening TV what Julia Child was to American culinary TV, and far more influential than our own Victory Garden telecasts. The first thing I notice about this book is all the ways it is different from my recently reviewed 'Garden Structures' by Linda Joan Smith. While Smith focuses on concrete classifications such as walls, walks, and fences, Hamilton focuses on moods and themes. And, while Smith spends most of her space dealing with great pictures and relatively few concrete techniques, Hamilton is all about 'how to'. He reinforces this message by appearing in most of the pics doing a lot of the 'hands on' work himself, photographed by what appears to be his brother, Stephen Hamilton. The book also has a wealth of diagrams detailing the techniques in the text. I'm afraid this does share one unfortunate feature with Smith's book. It is unlikely you will be able to make the fullest use of Hamilton's ideas without a fairly sizeable patch of property in which to plant. And yet, Hamilton is still much more about the fine details and the reasons why people plant gardens to begin with. While the book obviously reflects gardening in the southern UK, I suspect almost all of the author's advice will work in all the temperate parts of the US, especially those parts which deal with a Winter garden. A superb idea book and companion in February while you browse the seed catalogues.