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I haven’t named the book which is the subject of this review yet on purpose. Most of our readers are still from the UK so you might assume this book will not be especially interesting to you. But I think the review may be.

It raises an issue which has bothered me for many years and I hope bothers you: people writing about gardens which they have never visited. Worse – not just writing about them, but implying that they have visited them. It happens frequently and should make everyone suspicious of every garden story or review. Don’t imagine it is only minor writers who will do this – publishers, magazines and newspapers frequently demand it of their writers, because it’s cheap. It happens a lot.

Anne Wareham, editor

 

Cover Garden Tours copyright Abby Jury

Garden Tours. A Visitor’s Guide to 50 Top New Zealand Gardens by Michele Hickman, photography by Steven Wooster. (Random House; ISBN: 978 1 86979 992 2).

Reviewed by Abbie Jury

The first thing I did on receiving what claims to be a garden visitor guide was to look at the contents to see who was included. There were some… ‘interesting’ inclusions and indeed exclusions. The entire east coast from Hawkes Bay to Poverty Bay has been bypassed.

The second thing I noticed is that a number of the public gardens got to write their own text, which seemed an interesting authorial and editorial decision in what purports to be a guidebook – ergo independent.

Five minutes. It took just five minutes of dipping in to the book to realise that at times the author was writing about places she had not visited.

I phoned a few friends whose gardens are included and they confirmed that she had never been there, a point not disputed by the publisher when queried. She carried out interviews by long distance phone calls and email from her UK base. No matter how hard you try (and the author has worked hard on this book) you can only tell so much from photographs and it was her failure to get to grips with matters of scale and proportion that alerted me to the fact she had only ever seen photos of some of the gardens at least.

In fact if you read the intro, the starting point for the book was the photo library of UK photographer, Steven Wooster. The author also makes the telling comment: “
each (garden owner) has approved the text written about their garden”. So much for independent commentary, then. It is still a mystery to me how she can write over 2000 words (10 pages including photos) on some gardens which I suspect she may never have seen in person. Others are much briefer – presumably the owners were less forthcoming on the phone.

So, had we been approached to have our garden included in this book, how would we have responded, knowing that the author had never visited? We would probably have agreed. What is not to like about free publicity written with the appearance of great authority when you even get to approve the text before publication?

The photographs are patchy. Some are lovely. Too many are not, where the light and shade are all wrong and the shadows too deep. Some of the selections fail to give a full picture of the garden and some fail to connect with the text – a problem which results from using existing photos as the starting point.  I recognised some photos from earlier use in other publications.

The bottom line is that this book should have been called: “Fifty NZ Gardens I Have Visited” by Steven Wooster (he at least did visit all of them) with Michele Hickman. To publish it as a visitor guide is outrageous. Would you expect to buy a guide to 50 top restaurants where the author had not visited them all but had written the text and had it approved by the restaurant proprietors? Of course you wouldn’t. The same goes for 50 Top Wines or 50 Top B&Bs. So why would you want to pay $49.99 for this one on gardens?

Does it matter? Well, yes it does if I can pick it up within five minutes of starting to look at the book. And saddest of all, was the resigned acceptance I heard from some other garden owners. “It shouldn’t happen, but I guess it does.” Why do we settle for so much less when it comes to garden writing?

Abbie Jury

Portrait Abbie Jury
Tikorangi – The Jury Garden
www.jury.co.nz

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