1928 English Rock Garden by Reginald Farrer — Complete Two-Volume Set (Fourth Impression)

Description

1928 — English Rock Garden (Complete Two-Volume Set) by Reginald Farrer — Fourth Impression

Published in 1928 by T.C. & E.C. Jack, Ltd., this is the complete two-volume set of English Rock Garden, one of Reginald Farrer’s most influential works on alpine gardening and rock garden design. Issued as a fourth impression, the set reflects the enduring demand for Farrer’s writing in the years following his death.

 

Written as both a practical guide and a philosophical reflection on gardening, these volumes explore the creation, planting, and long-term care of rock gardens, with particular attention to alpine species. Farrer’s approach is distinctive: deeply observant, opinionated, and grounded in first-hand experience rather than theory alone. His writing helped shift gardening away from being a pursuit of the wealthy toward something accessible, expressive, and rooted in personal connection to place.

Reginald Farrer (1880–1920) lived a short but remarkably productive life. Unable to attend school due to a congenital cleft palate, he spent much of his childhood exploring the Yorkshire cliffs, where he developed an early fascination with alpine plants. By his early teens he was already publishing botanical observations, and although he later attended Oxford with literary ambitions, botany became his lasting legacy. Through both his writing and his plant-collecting expeditions to the Far East, Farrer introduced numerous new species to Western gardens and helped popularize the idea that rock gardening could thrive in ordinary backyards, not just grand estates.

The books themselves are substantial. Volume I contains lxiv + 503 pages and includes 52 full-page black-and-white photographic plates; Volume II comprises viii + 523 pages with 50 full-page plates. Both volumes are illustrated throughout and give a strong physical sense of scale and seriousness of purpose.

This set is bound in original green cloth boards, with the title, author, volume number, and publisher stamped in gilt to the spines. Internally, the books are well preserved, with clean text and numerous photographic plates. The top edges and page edges retain their original uncut, rough-cut finish, a feature that gives the textblocks a particularly handsome, tactile quality. Externally, there is wear consistent with age: bumped corners, worn hinges, and rubbing to the spine tips.

Also present is a laid-in piece of period ephemera: a printed seed advertisement titled “Choice Rhododendron Seeds,” offering alpine and Himalayan varieties, including species from the Himalayas, Thibet, and China, issued by Rev. J. Farnworth Anderson of Glen Hall, Leicester, England, priced at 15 cents per packet. While not known to have been issued with the book, it is a fitting contemporary insert that closely reflects the plant-collecting world in which Farrer was writing.

A solid, complete set of an important early twentieth-century gardening work, valued both for its practical insight and for Reginald Farrer’s lasting influence on how gardeners think about plants, landscape, and the act of cultivation itself.

~See all of the pictures posted in the Gallery Area of this posting!~

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