Review of Enid Mayfield, Illustrated garden glossary, CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne, March 2025
The author of this beautifully produced book is a botanical illustrator. Her glossary features at least one, and often several, of her own colour illustrations on every A4-sized page. Mayfield’s aims are to create a book that is a comprehensive guide to key gardening terms and a journey into the history of gardens worldwide.
At the beginning of the book, there is a four-page list of 11 themes, such as propagation, pruning and compost. Each of almost 500 entries that follow is allocated to a theme.
There are few general entries for specific plants or plant groups – ferns and ancient Greek gardens are included, vegetative propagation is but vegetables are not. The bulk of the text is an alphabetically arranged glossary running from acidic soils (often referred to as ‘sour’) and adventitious (‘growing in unusual places’, such as flowers which grow directly out of woody branches) to node (‘from which leaves, shoots and aerial stems grow’), subshrub (‘a small shrub with a woody base and herbaceous new growth’) and unisexual flowers (which have ‘pistils and stamens in separate flowers’, though these may be on the same plant).
It’s all useful information. Even if, like me, you have spent years or decades gardening, you are bound to find out facts you did not already know.
Unfortunately, there is no index. A reader might assume that the alphabetical nature of the main text would mean that things are readily found. Not always so. If you want to know what Mayfield says about asparagus, Russian sage, holly or ivy, for example, there is no way of finding out short of reading the book from cover to cover. You would then discover that both asparagus and holly are mentioned at ‘unisexual flowers’, Russian sage at ‘subshrub’, ivy at ‘adventitious’, and so on. This means that much of the information about specific plants is not easily accessible, and I therefore find it difficult to say how useful the printed version of the book might be to AGHS readers – in its searchable electronic form, this would not be a problem. The ebook is available for $64.99, the same price as CSIRO’s printed version (here, for example), or more cheaply elsewhere. I found an Amazon price of $64.42; Kobo has the ebook for $52.99.