Graham Stuart Thomas' Three Gardens: The Personal Odyssey of a Great Plantsman and Gardener

As a youth, renowned rose expert Graham Stuart Thomas was considered a little daft by peers and teachers. Obsessed with gardening, the boy never applied himself in school--all his dreams centered on the flowers he'd planted in his father's small yard. He'd rush home from school to gaze at the blooms. His father's was the first of three gardens that defined Thomas's life up until 1983, when this volume was originally published. After his father's house came a large mansion, then a small bungalow, both bought for the potential of the surrounding land. Describing the creation of three gardens at three different phases of life, Thomas's book lies somewhere between memoir and garden journal.

His prose style is an interesting hybrid of casual, chatty memories interspersed with lists of Latin plant names. Although he's a winner of the Royal Horticultural Society's Veitch Memorial Medal, Thomas doesn't write like an anointed expert. Rather, he's humble and open about his own mistakes--one year planting rhododendrons under an oak where they "drooped sadly every summer," or planting ivy near a down pipe where it "thickened and forced the pipes off the wall." Thomas has faith that such small disasters are necessary events in any garden's evolution. --Emily White