A Year in a Lancashire Garden

Smoke, salt breezes and occasional chemical odours challenge the four acres that Henry Arthur Bright tends in Lancashire. His monthly notes, written in 1874, record the work and pleasures of a garden with lawns, a small wood, fruit walls and an orchard. The opening follows the last autumn flowers, the handling of fallen leaves and experiments with an arbutus that rarely bears fruit. Bright treats success and failure as part of gardening's appeal, while linking plants to poems and remembered reading.

His account of flower beds gives these personal observations a sharper edge. He objects to repeated arrangements chosen chiefly for bright colour and argues for attention to individual plants, their scents and associations. He also describes combinations he has tried, from blue agapanthus with yellow gazania to clematis trained across a bed. This collection of essays offers readers a gardener's observations, literary interests and practical decisions across the seasons.