How to be a Gardener Back to Basics Book One

Alan Titchmarsh

ISBN 10: 056353740X / ISBN 13: 9780563537403

Published by BBC Books, 2002

About this Item

Size: 4to - over 9¾" - 12" tall. Seller Inventory # 006079

Bibliographic Details

Title: How to be a Gardener Back to Basics Book One

Publisher: BBC Books

Publication Date: 2002

Binding: Hard Cover

Condition: Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

Edition: First Edition.

About this title

Synopsis:

How to be a Gardener Book One, available at long last in paperback, is the fastest-selling gardening book of all time with sales in excess of 600,000 copies.

In How to be a Gardener Book One, Alan Titchmarsh draws on his knowledge and passion for gardening, and his many years of experience, to give you a comprehensive guide that explores every aspect of your garden and how it works.

In this, the first of two volumes, Alan starts with the basics that every gardener needs to know. He includes information on how plants work and what they need to survive, as well as advice on where to begin if youre a first-time gardener.

Released to coincide with How to be a Gardener Revisited, a reversioned series of HTBAG 1 & 2 featuring new footage with Alan Titchmarsh in January 2005.

In setting out the basic gardening principles and explaining the hows and whys, Alan gives the novice confidence and increases the skills and understanding of more experienced gardeners, too.

Review:

No safer pair of hands than those of Alan Titchmarsh could be imagined to coax the nervous would-be gardener into picking up a spade. The BBC evidently think so, as they have commissioned the two series and accompanying volumes of How To Be A Gardener, their most ambitious gardening project to date. The elevation of gardening in recent years from a genteel pastime to national mania, fuelled largely by television, seems to have engendered a large audience of virtual gardeners, keen to get their hands dirty but unsure of how to begin.

No doubt the outstanding success (even by her own standards) of Delia Smith's comparable How to Cook trilogy formed an encouraging precedent. Just as Delia set out to give her readers and viewers the basic skills from which to build a confident technique, so Alan Titchmarsh in this first volume takes his pupils back to the basics ("Back to Basics" is the book's sub-title) of soil types and management, plant growth, seasonality, maintenance and pest control. It's a thorough, utterly professional, novice-friendly job; not all that different from a number of other manuals of garden basics, but self-recommending by the confidence its author inspires--the product on the one hand of a lifetime's expertise and on the other of his inimitable personality. --Robin Davidson