Passionate Gardener

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

``Gardening is a matter of inbuilt individuality,'' comments Innes, an editor of Country Living magazine. ``People who love gardens often do so with a quiet fanaticism.'' Surely true. Yet this luscious-looking picture book oddly skirts the issue. For while the charms and quirks of 23 British savants and aristocrats are catalogued here with skillful brevity, their gardens serve mostly as afterthoughts. What is lacking, for the serious reader, are details: Innes is a determined impressionist who, in luring subjects to describe their green thoughts and plots, allows Germaine Greer to natter, ``Maybe there is something female about gardening'' and Lady Bath to observe that her avocation is ``an eternal thing of forgetting what I should have done.'' Photographs of bulging lupins, maidenly English girls gathering daisies, and an ``avenue of pollarded limes in front of the manor house'' of the Earl of Donoughmore will seduce--but are offset by fairly routine shots of ``gardeners'' with good pedigrees and suspiciously clean hands. (June)