Down the Garden Path

First published in 1932, this gardening memoir follows the author as he buys a Tudor thatched cottage in a Huntingdonshire village he calls Allways and sets about remaking its neglected grounds. He is a self-declared amateur, learning by catalogue, experiment, and mistake: rockeries, woodland, greenhouses, bulbs, and the English weather. Neighbours, visitors, a servant, and rival gardeners interrupt the work and supply much of the comedy. The book is not a planting manual but a first-person account of taste, obsession, and the social life of a cottage garden being invented in public, plant by plant.

Bound in green cloth cover blocked with a red image. Cream endleaves with Whistler’s illustration of house and grounds printed in browns. Dark red slipcase with section from endleaf illustration reproduced in colour on front.