Marianne Moore said that the poet’s job was to depict ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’. In truth, gardens are always imaginary because they are always the garden that you are aiming for rather than the garden you have, but the toads are real and immediate.’ So says Germaine Greer in this wonderful anthology. This collection of poems, culled from classical antiquity to the twenty-first century, includes perennial favourites such as Marvell’s ‘The Garden’ and Frost’s ‘After Apple-picking’ and Roethke’s famous greenhouse lyrics, as well as surprises like Tennyson’s anti-botanical ‘Amphion’ and Fleur Adcock’s ‘Emblem’ on the mating of slugs, not to mention small masterpieces like Philip Larkin’s ‘Cut Grass’ and Phoebe Hesketh’s ‘Death of a Gardener’. Poems for Gardeners can be read along with the seed catalogues in the dead of winter, or in the gaps between tasks on a busy day in spring, or between snoozes in the hammock in the deep midsummer.
