Gardens of Oxfordshire

Books and Videos

My #1 recommendation for the trip is Monty Don’s 4-part tv series The Secret History of the British Garden, starting with the 18th century and right up to our current era. Available on You Tube as well as through various streaming services. It provides a wonderful overview of the evolution in British garden design. And Monty Don, if you don’t know him already, is wonderful.

*A Little History of British Gardening by Jenny Uglow is an intersting romp through garden techniques and aesthetics, starting with the Romans and continuing up to the present.  Excellent background to our trip as well as a very good read.

 Penelope Lively’s slim Life in the Garden is a lovely reflection on her own life as a gardener as well as gardening’s relationship to literature, art, and philosophy.  She claims the best novel in which a garden figures prominently is the young-adult fantasy novel Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce.  So of course I read it, and was delighted.

 Oxford College Gardens by Tim Richardson.  A coffee table book with beautiful photos and informative texts.  A great souvenir and now quite reasonable on Amazon.

Jane Brown is a wonderful garden historian.  Her biography of Capability Brown is a good introduction to this landscaping phenomenon as well as to his times, even if in places it dwells too heavily for this reader on aristocrats and politicians I’ve never heard of.  Title:  Lancelot Capability Brown, 1716-1785:  The Omnipotent Magician.   For sure read the section on Stowe, which we will visit.

 Though not a garden book, P. D. James The Children of Men is set in Oxford, sometime in the future when England and indeed the entire world is in a state of crisis:  no woman has conceived much less given birth to a child in decades.  Don’t bother with the film version, which is good but only slightly reminiscent of this excellent book.  

 Again, not a garden book, Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy, is a heartbreaking novel of a promising young stone carver who dreams of studying at Oxford.  I loved this book, which presents Oxford University as a cruel elitist institution, which I’m sure it was and perhaps still is in some ways.

 And here are a couple deliciously delightful Oxford Novels:  Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey mystery set in an Oxford women’s college, Gaudy Night, and Zuleika Dobson, a silly tale of love, rowing teams, and heartbreak by Max Beerbohm.  

 Peculiar Ground, a novel by Lucy Hughes-Hallet, moves forward and backward in time from the 18th c. when a stately English country home is being landscaped by a Capability-Brown type figure, to the 1960s and 70s when new owners confront a world that is very different yet at the same time similar.  A boldly expansive novel with a wonderful sense of time and place.  It reminded me of Stoppard’s Arcadia, which deserves inclusion.  

 Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, the title of which references William Hogarth’s influential 18th c. writings on landscape design, is a wonderful book.  Not particularly about landscape design though landscapes and gardens figure in.  But instead a vivid portrait of London and Oxford during the 1980s.

 An avid reader has recommended The Morville Hours by Katherine Swift.  This delightful and at times moving account of a Shropshire garden takes the form of a book of hours, with each season bringing new interest and challenges to the landscape.

 Then there are the novels and films!  Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Forester’s Room with a View and Howard’s End, which was made into a move as well as an excellent television mini-series.   And don’t forget Jane Austen who loved gardens and who captured so vividly the mores and foibles of the 18th century.

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