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.