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Review: Principles of Horticulture Level 2

A serious book for serious gardeners.

When you really, really love gardening, floating about pointing at pretty flowers isn’t quite enough. You need to know how they grow, why they grow, and what stops them growing.

Over the past few months, I’ve been devoting myself to study, to improve my horticultural knowledge. And one of the books that has taught me the most in my personal studies is this: Principles of Horticulture Level 2. Its publishers describe it as a ‘serious book for amateur and seasoned gardeners’, and that’s exactly what it is.

principles of horticuture review

It’s a brisk and well-illustrated book, full of detail and also fascinating history and anecdotes. It starts off gently with a chapter on ‘Horticulture and Gardening’, but the challenge soon ratchets up, with chapters on classification and naming of plants, plant cells and tissues, propagation and soil.

You will learn a great deal from this book. It goes into real detail, and will make you a technically proficient gardener, which will make your garden better too.

It will teach you in great detail about soil:

diagrams principles of horticulture

And you will learn how to propagate using the different methods:

principles of horticulture level 2

There is also a lovely tour through the history of plant hunting, which teaches you about where plants come from, who found them, and a lot about the history of society too.

Here’s a nice snippet on food chains and webs:

‘Charles Darwin is said to have told a story about a village that produced higher yields of hay than the nearby villages because it had more old ladies. Darwin reasoned that old ladies kept more cats than other people and these cats caught more field mice. Field mice are important predators of wild bees and since these bees were essential for pollination of red clover (and clover improved the yield of hay), the increased number of bees increased the hay yield. This is an example of a ‘food chain’…’

If you don’t care much about how thing actually work in your garden, then this isn’t the book for you. But which gardener who bothers reading gardening blogs doesn’t care about getting better growth, propagating plants and improving the soil effectively?

This is one of the most rigorous books on gardening that I’ve read for a long while. Do buy it.

Principles of Horticulture: Level 2 is £29.99 from Routledge.

 

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