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.
Garden Tours. A Visitorâs 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… âinterestingâ 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 â 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: ââŠeach (garden owner) has approved the text written about their gardenâ. 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 â 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 â a problem which results from using existing photos as the starting point. Â I recognised some photos from earlier use in other publications.
The bottom line is that this book should have been called: âFifty NZ Gardens I Have Visitedâ 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 wouldnât. 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. âIt shouldnât happen, but I guess it does.â Why do we settle for so much less when it comes to garden writing?
Abbie Jury
www.jury.co.nz
When asked I smelled a rat from the beginning and turned down the request to have our garden “written up” in this book as I was told I would be interviewed over the phone – from England. Having written about gardens for many years, I always said “no” if asked to do a ‘phoner,’ new word? and always visited a garden before writing about it, and yes, my scripts were always approved by the owner.
Hip Hooray Abbie..long gone the assumption anyone can write about far flung places like NZ and the topic as in Gardens without an informed public out there who know a ton more, have a critical eye a fine pen(or key board ) and are in cyber space in nano seconds …..it is lunatic and dangerous to think one can fool Gardeners to begin with.
Good review am sure ..dont need to even cite the book.
Whistleblowers always welcome!
I blog about gardens I haven’t seen on http://www.QuestionAndPlanter.com and feel mixed about it. While it’s a way to dive into a far-away garden using the web and books, then share images and basic info with our fans, I also know it’s promotional writing: limited and impersonal. How valuable is it, really? Abbie, you’ve got me thinking! I just re-read John Kingdon’s story about visiting Veddw in the rain. I felt I was walking with John, noticing little details, hearing him talk about the garden, experiencing it with him. I agree with Stephen Parker that “there is no substitute” for this. Like a garden itself — John’s piece has sincerity, courage, and results from hard work. If you’re feeling a little down about the book above, I hope you’ll read it and smile: http://www.rivendell.org.uk/garden/?p=434
I do appreciate the honesty and reflection here, Emmon.
That means a lot coming from you, Anne! Thanks for making my afternoon! đ
A pleasure. XXXX
I didnât even start on the purple prose and lavish praise for places the author has never been to. She did not hold herself back. From brio to subtropcalia to verticality (sic).
Of one garden she writes that it â⊠stands as a welcome rest from the sometimes anxious quest to make the definitive New Zealand garden, spurning the temptation to realise its European formal outline in native plants and minimising the contrast (or compromise) of English garden style which marries informality with formality.â Oh puh-lease.
Baffling and bizarre after this review it would seem that the book is worthless and a work of fiction. Or should we invent a new word for a book review. ‘Fractious’ or a ‘Bok’ not a book! Or we could refer to it as a ‘Book of Compost-able Material’
I suggest we ask the publisher if they would like a book written about the gardens of Antarctica. ‘I wanderer lonely as a penguin among the ice cover moss… Da de da…’
Bad, sad and dangerous.
I knew I was working too hard what with all the research, walking, photo snapping, sentence writing and phone calls.
Makes me feel a bit like I’ve been chumped.
Such guides are normally written to satisfy ‘paymasters’…be they advertisers or sponsors or worse…they are of little actual ‘value’ to any genuine garden visitor! It is always preferable to visit a garden or landscape, to respond to it, be it good or bad, it is that visitors response that is of value, and it is this memory or otherwise that gives the satisfaction of garden visiting. This is what a good guide should convey, so that the reader can respond accordingly. There is no substitute for actually visiting a garden, and it is worrying that many read these guides as if they have visited, or worse, make judgements as to visit a garden or not based on the text therein!