It is tempting to review this book by simply offering a series of quotes. For everyone’s favourite garden poem is somewhere in here. Plus a good few that will be new to many.
There is humour too as in the poem ‘Capability Brown’ by William Cowper. The owner of the recently made-over garden smiles,
‘‘Tis finish’d, and yet, finish’d as it seems,
Still wants a grace, the loveliest it could show,
A mine to satisfy the’enormous cost.’
Or Vita Sackville-West’s The Garden which sneaks in a put-down of Wordsworth:
‘The sheeny celandine that Wordsworth praised
(He was no gardener, his eyes were raised’)’.
My own favourites are all here: Ecclesiastes ‘To Every Thing there is a season; Browning’s Home Thoughts from Abroad, Keats, To Autumn, Blake’s Ah Sunflower!, Marvell’s The Garden and more.
But I also discovered Gael Turnbull’s A Fragment of Truth and John Agard’s Palm Tree King with its trenchant criticism of the number-crunching, sight-seeing tourist industry:
If 6 straw hat
and half a dozen bikinis
multiply by the same number of coconut tree
equal one postcard
how many square miles of straw hat
you need to make a tourist industry?
This is a five-star collection, beautifully illustrated and organised by seasons, gardening, plants, creatures, gardens, past, present, future.
I highly recommend it as a classic anthology for your reference shelf.

I have to start mentioning the cover: I loved it! It is really beautifyl

I say that I found these poems clear and to the point. The author I expected the least to show here is Dorothy Parker - I didn't even know that she had written poetry. There are also other unexpected sides of gardening, as the mentioning of bugs and bees. And when I read them, I thought Of course! they belong to the ecosystem of a garden.

My favourite poems are a close draw between Plath and Keats, and my least favourite, the Sheakespeare one. It was the most difficult poem for me to read, and the one that didn't flow at all.

On a more touchy-feeling side of my opinion, my mind wandered several times to spring and summer and I absolutely LONGED for winter to end. And the pandemic. I also want that to end. This book was a consolation.. Spring will show up as usual later in the year.

Sorry if I haven't mentioned the illustrations. An excellent edition. Quarto has nailed it!

Thematic poems about earthly subjects. I was a bit disappointed to be honest but I think because it was a various collection from romantic poets to modern, and I'm not a big fun of modern, so personal taste really but otherwise a good collection with Keats, Wordsworth, Rossetti and John Clare to name a few.

*I received an ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks for the free collection of poetry.*

I am a huge fan of English gardens and poetry, the combination of both thus was quite nice. You find a lot of well known poets but also some lesser known ones. I overall enjoyed most of the poems, I'd say. The illustrations work well with the poems.

The only criticism is that most poems are very old and mostly very white and English. Sure there is more out there?!

4 Stars

this was a lovely little selection of nature poems! as someone who loves nature and poetry (and nature illustrations), this was a wholesome and healing read. the illustrations are all gorgeous and do well to accompany the poems that they are paired with. the poetry ranges from keats to shakespeare to syliva plath, all a plenty reminder of the romantic era of poetry when everything rhymed and nature was a goddess and peonies meant peonies with no deeper meaning. after reading a lot of contemporary poetry, charged with undertones upon undertones, freestyle selections of serious topics (don't get me wrong, i love that kind of poetry but sometimes you need a break every now and again), reading this was like a refreshing breath of morning air in the warm spring. i could see this as a nice coffee table book that you peruse while you wait for your date to get ready, or a book that you find on display in an IKEA on a rustic looking bookshelf in the living room section of the store, or at a small, cozy, plant-filled cafe down the street. i definitely needed this to remind me that romanticism is still alive and well and maybe all is not so bad in the world.

I absolutely adore this book and will buy it once it is released so as to have it in my home library. The combination of verse and illustration is well executed. Each of the poems evokes a sense of a place, a season, a feeling or more. Starting with verses from Ecclesiastes and moving through poets in many time periods this book is an engaging resource. Gardeners and flower lovers, those who enjoy poetry, give this one a look!

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this title. All opinions are my own.

A perfect read for garden and flower lovers!
This collection of poems takes you back to the era of Romanticism when nature was its own goddess and embracing her beauty was a common past time.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

As a lover of both plants and poetry I was excited to dive in to this beautiful volume. The poems are taken across the length of history, from the Bible to Modernist works, which kept the collection interesting. I do wish there had been a little more diversity in the breadth of the selection though, I would have loved to read more poems in translation, for example.

The illustrations selected pair beautifully with the poems and make this book a real pleasure to leaf through. I imagine many gardeners would be delighted to receive this book as a gift.

Prose of the Garden

This is a beautiful book of pictures and poetry relating to the garden. Flowers, bugs, fairies and the garden in general, from trees to bees. It consists of a collection of famous poets.

I love the illustration and the poetry contained in the book. It’s a lovely calming read for a quiet afternoon or a few minutes waiting for something such as an appointment. If you love poetry, if you love gardens, or both you will fall in love with this book.

Many thanks to The Royal Horticultural Society, Quarto Publishing Group, and NetGalley for allowing me to read a copy of this lovely book for an honest review.

this was so cute and wholesome, I didn't know there were so many poems about flowers and gardening, and it was so nice to have them all together and by so many great poets.

and the illustrations were so beautiful, they made me miss spring and summer so much. now I just have the very pressing urge to go out in a forest and touch trees and grass and leaves ah.

it was just lovely, that's the word.

Uncomfortable with their intimate dependence upon plants, human beings have asserted dominion over their lowly green companions. For generations, from Gilgamesh's whacking at the holy Cedar Forest, to the expulsion from Eden, to medieval botanists collecting herbs for their signatures to healing, to Charlotte de la Tour's explication of flower dialects, to Luther Burbank's seed catalog, and Monsanto's genetic insertions into corn and soybeans, humans have considered plants as cultivars and instruments, like pebble-tools, fire, querns, or rototillers. Uncomfortable with the thought that plants might be transcendent beings with long-term strategies of their own, most humans maintain a strictly I-It relationship—except for poets. Decorous in the best sense of a well-matched counterpoint of the verbal and visual, the Royal Horticultural Society Book of Garden Verse, published by Quarto in the Frances Lincoln collection of illustrated gardening books, is a splendid addition to the long tradition of miscellanies and anthologies of horticultural verse. Happily neither comprehensive nor predictable, but concise and surprising, it is like a country walk, welcoming inquiry at every turn. The expected favorites make an appearance—Kilmer's Trees, Herrick's Cherry-Ripe, Housman's Loveliest of Trees. But all is not cowslips and golden daffodils. Here also find Sharon Olds' lowly slug with its gelatinous trail, Sylvia Plath's mushrooms who "shoulder through holes", and the weedy patch that will not yield, no matter how much Housman "hoed and trenched and weeded." The prints are as dramatic as they are apposite to the text. With no sign of desiccated, flattened specimens or botanical preciosity, the roses and marigolds float from page to page like greetings from a country walk to Colley Hill or Banstead Heath. Like Edwin Morgan's "strawberries/ like the ones we had/ that sultry afternoon/ sitting on the step," these prints and poems make a sweet gift for the gardener with muddy knees and for the wintry-minded bookish naturalist who takes her greens in water-colors, in this garden of diction, you will find palms with island dialects and low plants with American vowels, mingling with the verbal cataracts of English Romantics, and the word-intoxicated intensity of Elizabethans. References to other works, like the poem, "April," from Vita Sackville-West's The Garden, will lead, like the "couch-grass throwing shoots at every node" into the larger company of green beings with lives and minds of their own. #TheRHSBookofGardenVerse #NetGalley
--Richard L. Rose Review: https://frameshifts.com/ Author Site: https://formsofresistance.com/

See links at https://www.facebook.com/Richard-Rose-335826440462518, https://twitter.com/Frameshifts/status/1344047011176329217,

An ode to anyone who loves gardening. Beautiful illustrations in poetry commemorate the garden and the gardener. I adored this book.