Books about antiques.(Book Review)

Royal gardeners

Alan Titchmarsh is the author of Royal Gardeners: The History of Britain's Royal Gardens, more than thirty books about gardening, four novels, and an autobiography. He writes for various British periodicals and appears on BBC Radio and Television, dispensing advice on gardening. He is also a business, endorsing mugs, watering systems, and related things certified effective by Alan Titchmarsh. This is not a shy Yorkshireman.

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There are no footnotes in Royal Gardeners, which is stuffed with fascinating nickel knowledge that may indeed not be footnotable. Oddly, the author's tale comes full circle from the medieval monastery gardens growing food crops on the estates the Romans had established a millennium earlier, to Prince Charles's Duchy Originals, which sells the organically grown produce from his estate Highgrove in Gloucestershire. Queen Elizabeth also has the Windsor Farm Shop near her castle, a sort of supermarket for the bounty of her estates--milk, cream, yogurt, and ice cream from the royal dairy established by George III, apples and apple juice from the Sandringham Estate, Balmoral Scotch whiskey, and pheasants, often shot by the royals. In a characteristically breezy summary, Titchmarsh writes: "Royal gardeners have come a long way in a thousand years. No longer do they think deadheading means executing an opponent in order to pinch his garden."

Herbs had many uses in the Middle Ages: "for scenting linen, to deter fleas, for strewing on the floor to kill smells and soak up spills ... for first aid, dyeing wool and flavouring ale or wine.... Many of their common names today still reflect their original uses--think of bedstraw, eyebright, self-heal, woundwort and fleabane." Some of these herbs were believed to have been marked by God so that man would know their purpose. Selfheal, for example, bears a sickle-shaped mark to show it would cure cuts. The skullcap is so shaped to infer that it would be useful to treat insomnia and other cranial problems. The spotty leaves of Pulmonaria officinalis, or lungwort, indicated it could cure tuberculosis and other afflictions of the lungs.

Although he looked like an unrepentant carnivore, Henry VIII was a great fan of fruit, which he always ate cooked lest he should come down with dysentery. He ordered up a hundred-acre fruit garden and had strawberries grown for his table at Hampton Court Palace in Surrey. He initiated the practice of eating vegetables during the meat course, and he had a particular weakness for cucumbers, a Roman vegetable that had died out because of its susceptibility to frost. Henry grew his cucumbers in greenhouses that were heated by fermenting manure and probably glazed with mica instead of glass, which could not be produced in large pieces.

Tudor times also produced intricate and closely clipped gardens of scented evergreen herbs like rosemary laid out to resemble elaborate knots. These were not only a pleasure to look down upon from a bedroom window but sent up clouds of agreeable smells to mitigate the fetid interiors. The ...