Pursuits For garden-minded people in an urban or suburban neighbourhood, Ben Dark's The Grove will ring bells.
Subtitled A Nature Odyssey in 19½ Front Gardens, it tells the often surprising stories that cling to a score of everyday plants – magnolias, buddleias, camellias, privet, tulips, hollyhocks, wisteria. These trees, shrubs, climbers, perennials and bulbs are known even to the least horticulturally-minded bod.
The Grove refers to Grove Park in the London Borough of Lewisham, ten minutes’ walk from Dark's house, as familiar to him as the creases in the palms of his hands.
As a gardening teenager, recently transplanted to a city on the south coast from a rural Cotswolds village, I, like Dark, took an interest in the plants all around me. I was soon hooked on fuchsias (named…