My Royal Horticultural Society Plant Collector Guide to Witch Hazels by Chris Lane has finally arrived. From America. A mere seven or eight years after I decided I would probably like a copy.
A friend exclaimed to me some years ago that I could not possibly need any more garden books, but that was to misunderstand the situation. She was right in as far as I did not need more gardening books in the same way as I needed food, say, or oxygen, but wrong in so much as my gardening library was nowhere near complete. I like books, I like gardening, and I like to combine the two. On a dark winter's evening or a wet afternoon it is very nice to be able to curl up with an author you trust, and abandon yourself to the gardens of the mind. Faced with an unfamiliar plant, or an unfamiliar question about a familiar plant, or a tricky space that needs some sort of plant, it is good to be able to lay your hand on some reliable reference sources that might guide you to the right answer. Or at least an acceptable answer.
As to why I wanted or needed a book on nothing but witch hazels, they are attractive plants and I'm interested in them. I've got six or seven in pots which are not so happy as they were a couple of years ago, and I need to get to the bottom of why that is, and another one growing at the edge of the wood that was fine the last time I looked at it. I don't have room for any more, which means that if I want to explore the genus further it will have to be through garden visits and in my imagination. And gardens tend to grow the same narrow range of popular varieties that I've already got at home. And they don't always label them. And one of the best collections is in Belgium, which I'm unlikely to be visiting in the middle of winter any time soon.
I can look at nursery descriptions on the internet, but then I'm left unsure as to how trustworthy the source is. The internet is a wonderful thing, and I use it frequently to Google plant names, but for a proper overview you still can't beat a good book. Chris Lane is a national collection holder, and has grown witch hazel commercially, so I know his views will be based on first hand observation and experience. And instead of spending time clicking on unproductive Google links I can just look in the index.
Given I am so jolly keen on Hamamelis you might wonder why I left it so long to get the book. I had it bookmarked on Amazon, but somehow buying it never quite got priority over the other things on the list. I hoped it would hit that sweet spot when clean copies were going for a song in the remaindered book trade (which is how I just acquired Anna Pavord's splendid book on bulbs for a fiver including delivery) but it never did. Then it went out of print, and suddenly copies were going for silly money, or at least more than I wanted to pay. I am interested in witch hazels, but not that interested, and anyway stalking and buying books is a sport in itself. Getting your timing right is fun. Throwing money at the problem, except in cases of dire need, is not in the spirit of the game. Instead I found a clean copy advertised on Alibris, for half what it would have cost me from any of the Amazon vendors, and with delivery from the US costing the same at £2.80 as UK book postage and packing does on Amazon.
I can't work that last bit out. Either delivery intra UK is a rip off, or Alibris international delivery is extraordinarily good value. True, the delivery time ran at very much the top of the four to fourteen business days estimate, but it got here. After waiting seven years to order it, another fortnight didn't really make a difference. The page edges bear the stamps of King County Library System WA, and a stamp applied diagonally and upside down inside the front cover reassures me that This is no longer the property of King County Library System. It was in an unprepossessing cellophane library wrapper, which I have taken off, and other than the stamps it is in extremely good condition, with minimal page wear, and certainly no scribbles or bent down page corners. In fact, I don't think the inhabitants of King County can have been very interested in witch hazels, as it doesn't look as though it's been read more than a couple of times. Oh well, their loss is my gain.
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