Guest Author - Hellie T.

This book is a flower calendar containing watercolour paintings of wild and garden flowers is a facsimile edition of a hand-illustrated manuscript which was created in 1913 by Agnes Katherine Landale.

Agnes or Aggie lived in the village of Limpsfield in Surrey where she had large house, and a team of eight gardeners who looked after a garden that was by today's standards - huge. It was this garden that inspired Aggie to create this beautiful calendar a year after the death of her husband.
Each page has at least three hand-painted watercolour illustrations of seasonal plants. There is one painting for each day of the year and also hand-written poems for every week of the year.

Editor Review

This book is a lovely record of garden plants and wild flowers that were in English Gardens in 1913. Aggie covers a wide range of plants, shrubs and bulbs. Starting on 1st January with the Winter Aconite she works her way through the months with watercolours of many flowers - both wild and cultivated.

For example - Yellow Crocus on 6th February, Wild Sweet Violets on March 2nd, Bluebells in May, Scabious on 12th July, Buddelia on 1st September, Aster Rosea in October, Cosmos on 1st November and she ends with Golden Holly in December. Many of the plants which she has painted are still very popular in English Gardens today.

If you are looking for a book on how to look after plants - their cultivation and growing tips - then this is not the book for you.
It is a book for inspiration as to what you might grow in an English Garden. The colourful illustrations make it a delight to look through with the added bonus of the poems.

In my opinion it is ideal for giving you an idea of what grew and flowered in an English Garden in 1913. The fact that there is a painting for every day of the year gives you an idea of the wide range of plants that were available to gardeners at the beginning of the last century and you can compare them with what is available today.

The poems are by such authors as Tennyson, Shakespeare, Rossetti, Scott and Browning.

Here are sweet peas, on tiptoe for a flight,
With wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white,
And taper fingers catching at all things,
To bind them all about with tiny rings

Enjoy your garden!