What Makes a Garden, by Jinny Blom: A Review of Her Second Book

It is not often that one can say with confidence that a coffee table book is “long awaited,” but nothing that landscape designer and writer Jinny Blom creates is so easily boxed, not even her books. Although What Makes A Garden is generously proportioned and handsomely produced, you might find yourself carrying it around wherever you go until it is thoroughly digested. Like her last similar-sized book, the best-selling The Thoughtful Gardener, it’s not a volume to be flicked through.

Instead, What Makes a Garden is a glorious compendium that takes readers deep into the nitty gritty, amply demonstrating that a garden is much more than a collection of things and not limited to a particular ecological manifesto. “A garden needs to be suitably planned to allow the senses true freedom,” says Jinny early on in the book. Personal pleasure still matters.

Photography by Britt Willoughby, from What Makes a Garden.

This is not an eco-memoir or a rallying cry to ditch the old ways. Jinny has always designed nature into her gardens, promoting shaggy shrubs and laid hedges when few others were talking about habitats for ecosystems. King Charles noticed this over 20 years ago when he asked her to design his Healing Garden for the Chelsea Flower Show. Her gardens are happily “unfettered by definition,” as is the book, which leaves no stone unturned in the discussion of every element of what makes a garden, whether “esoteric” or “exoteric,” via a thorough consideration of prima materia as well as anima mundi. Yes, it will have you reaching for a dictionary, which is partly why it can only be read slowly.