My Secret Garden Paperback – March 25, 1993

I am new to British gardening fandom but I have been bingeing Love Your Garden (my favorite show in years) and was curious to know what Alan’s personal gardens look like. They are beautiful, yet very approachable, much like the soul and personality that shine through him in the show. In a future life I will get to live in Britain and work with him. ;) It takes courage and skill to create high art that also generates joy (for the self and others), and he manages to do both.

LOVED EVERYTHING!!!!!

I loved Ground Force on BBC, wish it was still on, and developed an admiration for Alan Titchmarsh at that time. He has written a lot of garden books, specifically for Britain, but still helpful. This is a gorgeous book about his newest garden, suitable for his new 16th century Georgian home. I now have English garden envy. It's a real treat.

I HAVE WATCHED ALAN ON AND OFF FOR YEARS. HE WAS ALWAYS A FAVORITE GARDNER AND PERSON. I LOVE SEEING HIS OWN BEAUTIFUL GARDEN HE HAS CREATED. GREAT WORK!

Fantastic book with wonderful and exciting ideas for landscaping for all sides of the house. All Mr.Tichmarsh books are filled with great ideas for large and small yards.

Absolutely the most GEORGEOUS Garden ever! I love his humor and honesty, in so doing he gives the reader inspiration.

Beautiful, Inspiring. I love to read this over and over, and look at all the beautiful photography. Thank you Alan!

I have read "My Secret Garden" by Alan Titchmarsh several times and I'm more impressed with it the more times I read it.Not only are Alan Titchmarsh's gardens absolutely breathtaking and the photographs by Jonathan Buckley lavishly beautiful, but the book is well designed and (rare among garden portrait books) includes enough information to satisfy serious gardeners who want to understand his gardens.Titchmarsh relates in his own words how he designed and made his new garden nearly from scratch over the 10 years since he and his wife purchased the 4-acre property with an 18th-century Georgian house in 2002. The thoughtful photos were taken over seven years and in every season, and include enough photos of the house and outbuildings to establish the relationship between them and the garden areas.He helpfully includes his own beautifully hand-drawn map of the layout of the property (although my only criticism of the book is that the map was at the end of the book, and I didn't discover it until I was finished puzzling through his descriptions of the layout throughout the whole book. In any future edition it should be moved to the front to be more helpful.)Although most British gardeners probably feel they already know Alan Titchmarsh quite well from his long career in garden television shows, being American I knew very little about him. His book describes his background and gardening experience, and the pointedly down-to-earth tone of his writing also helps us know him personally. He repeatedly plays down the formality of his garden, claiming no grandeur "above his station," and eschews the horticultural snobbery that is all too pervasive among class-conscious English gardeners. But throughout the book, he does occasionally betray a latent anxiety about tastefulness, whether a certain combination of flowers is too bright -- although this doesn't prevent him from including such fun garden ornaments as life-size lead pig sculptures.He relates both his successes and his failures, enumerating dead plants and areas that didn't work, and describes the growing conditions in the various parts of his gardens. He also gives us some tips on growing certain plants and on design of gardens -- although he insists that he is not a garden designer, just a gardener.However, I'm not sure that I believe him on that point. His garden is both lovely and very well-designed - almost too well-designed and perfectly maintained, so that it didn't seem like a real gardener's garden (perhaps because it looked as if it had been designed of a piece, instead of gradually expanding over time as most residential gardens do).But nevertheless, his gardens are truly glorious (those flowering cherry trees underplanted with bulbs!), and I imagine that they will continue to grow even more lovely as the years mellow the perfection of them. And I'm very glad that he chose to share them with us by writing such a well-thought-out book with such beautiful photographs -- one of the better books about gardens that I've seen.(For a more detailed review, including photos, please visit my garden blog: gardenfancy.blogspot)