The Well-Tempered Garden
A New Edition Of The Gardening Classic
Christopher Lloyd, foreword by Anna Pavord · Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014
The rare gardening classic where the literary reputation hasn't come at the cost of practical content. You read it for the judgement and learn technique by accident.
Lloyd was writing in an era that assumed pesticide availability which no longer exists in the UK. Read him for judgement, plant combinations and technique — not for what to spray.
What's actually in it
- Thematically organised rather than systematic — Lloyd digresses and returns to subjects by association.
- Soil and cultivation, planting technique, staking and support.
- Weeding — including a well-known passage on hand-weeding as something close to meditation.
- Propagation in depth (the chapter is called "To Make More and Still More").
- Naturalising bulbs and plants in grass; annuals; water lilies and pond planting; vegetables; pruning.
- Extensive plant-by-plant assessment with honest verdicts on what a plant is actually worth — the reason people still read it.
What it actually says
Specifics from inside the book — so you can judge whether it's telling you anything you don't already know.
- He argues against giving roses a bed of their own, on replant-disease grounds — and he meant it: in 1993 he and Fergus Garrett tore out Dixter's Lutyens-designed rose garden and replanted it as the Exotic Garden. You can read the argument and then go and look at the result.
- The hand-weeding passage, the book's most-quoted: weeding is not the drudgery it is made out to be, but "a kind of soothing monotony" that leaves the mind free to develop the plot of a novel, or perfect the repartee you should have used on a relative.
- He is openly hostile to received gardening wisdom, including from books: people believe what they read, authors are shameless plagiarists, and so mistakes get established as traditions.
- Specific technique that hasn't dated: unwrap and soak tree roots on delivery; never plant a tree deeper than it grew; check clematis for nesting birds before the February–March prune.
- On dogma: find out which plants you like and which will like you, and grow those — without fussing about country of origin. He thought organic purism carried to the point of eschewing all artificial fertiliser was a pity.
Buy it if
You want to be argued with by someone with fifty years of opinions and the results to back them.
Don't buy it if
Anyone wanting a quick-reference manual. It isn't organised for lookup, and it has no step-by-step apparatus.
Where it falls short
Nothing post-2006 — no modern cultivars, no box moth, no Xylella, no lily beetle, no climate adaptation, nothing on peat-free media, and some chemical recommendations that are now obsolete or illegal in the UK. No wildlife-gardening framing, no house plants, no contemporary photography. And it is a book of its time in a way that will jar: there are several passages that are casually sexist about women gardeners, scattered through the text. None of that is a reason not to read him — but we'd rather you met it here than on page 399.
Who wrote it
Christopher Lloyd (1921–2006) was born at Great Dixter in East Sussex and gardened there essentially all his life. He read modern languages at Cambridge, served in the Royal Artillery, then took a horticulture degree at Wye College and lectured there before returning to Dixter in 1954 to found a nursery of unusual plants. He wrote a weekly Country Life column for forty-two consecutive years and around twenty-five books, and was appointed OBE in 2000. Fergus Garrett became his head gardener in 1991 and still directs the garden. A practitioner writing from one intensively gardened site — the opposite of institutional authorship.
Where it was written
Great Dixter, East Sussex. Thoroughly British — and unusually for a southern writer, Lloyd refers to Scottish growing conditions too.
The facts
- AuthorChristopher Lloyd, foreword by Anna Pavord
- PublisherWeidenfeld & Nicolson
- Published2014
- EditionCurrent paperback of the 1970 original
- FormatPaperback, 368 pages
- ISBN-13
9781780227825 - LevelAll levels
Checked against publisher listings, UK retailers and library records in August 2026. If any of this is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.
Where to get it
Buying secondhand? Match the ISBN above — several books on this shelf have editions that look identical but aren't.