Today was piercingly beautiful, the sun shining in a calm, bright blue sky. And cold. The frost never melted in the corners where the sun didn't touch it. If I'd been planning to garden that would have been a problem, but I only went outside to restock the bird table, and once more to top up the chickens' food and switch on the heaters in the conservatory and greenhouse. I feel desperately profligate when I run the heaters, but fortunately it is forecast to start warming up again after Monday, with overnight temperatures back to five degrees by the end of next week.
Instead I spent the day in front of the Aga, reading about the English gardens made abroad by expatriates, and rich English people who couldn't stand our winters and moved south for the duration. There are times when I can see their point. The Iris unguicularis on the terrace are very nice, and I'm looking forward to the snowdrops and the hellebores, but just now Madeira might be even nicer. The book is The English Garden Abroad by Charles Quest Ritson in a 1996 Penguin edition, which I picked up second hand on Amazon for a penny plus two eighty postage and packing. It is a little shelf worn, but certainly clean enough to read without feeling the compulsion to wash your hands afterwards.
The Preface contains an unexpected and forthright swipe at the British Library for charging so much to reproduce their images that the book does not contain all the illustrations he would have liked. I don't know how much the British Library charges, and it's a tricky question how much it ought to. On the one hand, it is presumably under pressure to contribute as much as possible to its running costs. On the other hand, it is a national repository of knowledge whose contents ought to be available to works of scholarship in areas of niche interest at prices they can afford.
Amazon had quite a few copies of The English Garden Abroad on offer for very modest sums. A text that's over twenty years old, dealing with gardens many of which no longer exist, or only exist in reduced and degraded form, or are not open to the public, without any big shiny photographs by famous garden photographers, it is most definitely not a coffee table book. It's still worth reading if you're interested in that sort of thing, since so far as I know there isn't anything more recent or better researched on the subject.
Another of his books, Ninfa : the most romantic garden in the world, is more in the coffee table bracket, published only in 2009 by Frances Lincoln. They do quite a lot of gardening books, aimed at a more general readership but with authors who know what they're talking about, and lavish illustrations. I missed this one when it came out, and wanted a copy after reading a magazine article about Ninfa. Alas, by then it was out of print and second hand copies were being offered on Amazon for north of a hundred quid and rising. It was not to be had cheaper from Alibris, or Abe Books, or the specialist garden book dealer near Bristol I've used in the past, and I couldn't find an alternative English language book on Ninfa that I liked the sound of.
But part of the fun of buying second hand books lies in the chase, since I could never read all the books I'd enjoy if only I did read them, even if I did nothing else for the rest of my life. Once a copy bobbed up on Amazon for over forty pounds, and I took a deep breath and decided I still didn't want the book that badly, but if one in acceptable condition came up for thirty then I'd have it. Finally, after several years' stalking, on the eleventh of January I spotted an ex library book for £29.95 with Amazon Prime delivery. Reader, I bought it. The top edge of the cover is a little saggy, it has the ISBN number on the spine, and the front page is damaged where the wallet for holding the library card was ripped out, but apart from that it's a clean copy. Not collectable, but eminently readable. The cheapest used one is now up at £185 while the new ones still lurking in warehouses around the world would set me back £799.
I have told the Systems Administrator to be careful disposing of my garden books if I should suddenly die, as some of them could be quite valuable, but the SA says the same thing about his vast collection of railway books.
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