When I was a child, I had a scrapbook where I pasted all the photos I loved from magazines. Scrapbooks are a great way of collecting inspiration for your own garden, which is why I should have loved 1000 Garden Ideas by Stafford Cliff. The sleeve tells me that this book is a collection of the many photos Stafford Cliff has taken of the many, many gardens he has visited throughout his career. It promises to be a ‘complete sourcebook of inspiration and reference’. Every page is packed with images from gardens across the world. So why does this book leave me cold?
Perhaps it is because I feel as though I am leafing through someone else’s scrapbook, through their own collection of the things that inspire them. Or perhaps it is actually because the images themselves aren’t actually all that inspiring. The photography is rather bland, and some of the chapters feel a bit like sections in garden catalogues (how many photos of benches can you look at before losing the will to live?) And many of the ideas are just a bit…normal. There are some nice images which have given me a few ideas for my garden, but nothing which has made me want to rush out and immediately replicate it. There isn’t really very much that is innovative in this book.
One chapter, on colour, is actually rather useful. It has images of silver-leaved plants, luxuriant plants, yellow plants and white plants. This is marvellous and very inspiring, but the book lets the reader down terribly by failing to label any of these plants. Most people reading this book will not be able to identify every single plant featured (and if they could, they probably wouldn’t need this book), and so they are left entirely in the dark.
I feel regretful giving this book such a cold review. But I’m also rather disappointed. 1000 Garden Ideas could have been a fantastic book, one to long to own, and one that changes many gardens. Instead, it looks a little bit like someone else’s scrapbook, and anyone reading it feels a little as if they are just peeking over the author’s shoulder.
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