Garden Flowers

Garden Flowers (1980) by Stanley B. Whitehead – Teach Yourself Books

There comes a point in every garden when green is simply not enough.

The lawn is green.

The hedge is green.

The weeds are extremely green.

What is required, clearly, is colour.

Garden Flowers by Stanley B. Whitehead, published in 1980 as part of the familiar Teach Yourself series, is a practical guide to the plants that turn an ordinary patch of earth into something resembling an intentional garden.

This is from the reassuring era when a “Teach Yourself” book genuinely expected you to teach yourself something.

No app.

No video tutorial.

No subscription tier.

No cheerful notification congratulating you for watering a geranium.

Just a book, some sensible advice and the assumption that sooner or later you will have to go outside and actually do the work.

Whitehead guides the reader through the cultivation and enjoyment of garden flowers, helping make sense of the bewildering range of plants available to anyone who has ever stood in a garden centre wondering whether a particular specimen will become a glorious border plant or an expensive brown stick.

Flowers, after all, are deceptive things.

They sit there looking decorative and innocent, while quietly demanding the correct soil, position, feeding, pruning, watering and degree of personal attention.

Some thrive almost anywhere.

Others collapse dramatically because the morning sunlight was apparently not to their liking.

A good gardening book helps distinguish between the two.

Published in 1980, Garden Flowers also belongs to a lovely period of British gardening literature when readers were still expected to understand plants by learning their habits rather than scanning a QR code stuck into the compost.

It was an age of practical handbooks, seed catalogues, handwritten labels and gardeners who could identify a plant from twenty paces while the rest of us were still deciding whether it was technically a shrub.

The book offers the kind of straightforward guidance that makes older gardening manuals so enjoyable.

There is no attempt to reinvent the border as a “curated outdoor wellness zone”.

It is a flower bed.

You put flowers in it.

Preferably flowers that survive.

That last part is where the book becomes useful.

There is also plenty of nostalgia here for anyone who remembers the gardening fashions of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when herbaceous borders, bedding plants and carefully chosen seasonal displays were still being discussed with complete seriousness over cups of tea.

And quite rightly too.

A good flower border may look effortless, but anyone who has attempted one knows that “effortless” usually involves several hours of digging, kneeling, staking, deadheading and arguing with slugs.

This copy is in Good condition, making it a pleasingly usable example rather than an untouchable collector’s relic.

At more than forty years old, it has survived with considerably greater reliability than many of the annuals it was originally purchased to help cultivate.

Ideal for gardeners, collectors of vintage Teach Yourself books, horticultural enthusiasts, nostalgic readers or anyone who has recently inherited a flower bed and discovered that plants do not come with an instruction manual.

Fortunately, this one does.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where we believe every garden deserves flowers and every gardener deserves at least one old book telling them what they are doing wrong.

ISBN: 0340247800
Condition: Good

Keep browsing: See more Gardening books Other books by Stanley B Whitehead