Anna Pavord

Landskipping is a ravishing celebration of landscape, its iridescent beauty and its potential to comfort, awe and mesmerise. In spirit as Romantic as rational, Anna Pavord explores the different ways in which we have, throughout the ages, responded to the land. In the eighteenth century, artists first started to paint English scenery, and the Lakes, as well as Snowdon, began to attract a new kind of visitor, the landscape tourist. Early travel guides sought to capture the beauty and inspiration of waterfall, lake and fell. Sublime! Picturesque! they said, as they laid down rules for correctly appreciating a view.
While painters painted and writers wrote, an entirely different band of men, the agricultural improvers, also travelled the land, and published a series of remarkable commentaries on the state of agricultural England. They looked at the land in terms of its usefulness as well as its beauty, and, using their reports, Anna Pavord explores the many different ways that land was managed and farmed, showing that what is universal is a place's capacity to frame and define our experience.
Moving from the rolling hills of Dorset to the peaks of the Scottish Highlands, this is an exquisite and compelling book, written with zest, passion and deep understanding.

In THE CURIOUS GARDENER Anna Pavord brings together in 12 chapters - one from each month of the year - 72 pieces on all aspects of gardening. From what to do in each month and how to get the best from flowers, plants, herbs, fruit and vegetables, through reflections on the weather, soil, the English landscape and favourite old gardening clothes, to office greenery, spring in New York, waterfalls and garden design, Anna Pavord always has something interesting to say and says it with great style and candour. This is the perfect book to guide you through the gardening year. And, on days when the weather keeps the most courageous gardener indoors, this is the perfect book to curl up with beside the fire.

Nomenclature is no easy sport. Dreaming up names for any species, genus, group or even 'thing' has occupied and ravaged some of the world's greatest minds. The business of naming all varieties, all colours and all sizes of flower has its own vibrant list of characters, as well as a remarkable history stretching back to ancient Greece.
Anna Pavord's eagerly awaited THE NAMING OF NAMES investigates an engrossing tale of botanical history throughout its formative stages in classical civilisation, through to the European Renaissance and beyond. She discovers botanists willing to travel to the furthest reaches of the known world to uncover new varieties of flower, who fought through treacherous jungles searching for as yet unnamed trees and who celebrated their new-found blossoms in books such as 'Joyfull news out of the newe founde world'.

Accompanying this fascinating story are stunning illustrations of flowers and trees that give THE NAMING OF NAMES a genuine sense of the history of its subject. Anna Pavord gives us a wonderfully evocative yet authoritative investigation into a remarkable science, as well as an insight into a group of great and competing minds.

Herbaceous perennials are the star performers in the garden; but to create maximum impact they need the right partners, and the knowing which plant to put with which is an art that often eludes even the most knowledgeable of gardeners.
Here, Anna Pavord helps to solve this tantalising problem by suggesting 60 plants – her star plants – that she feels deserve a place in every garden, and by choosing a partner to accompany each one. She shows, season by season, how to create irresistible planting associations that juxtapose texture, shape, colour and scent. Stunning photographs and Anna’s unique ability to awaken us to the delights and idiosyncrasies of these, her favourite plants, work together to provide a marvellous source of planting ideas.