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The Garden in the Clouds: From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise

By (author) Antony Woodward

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A warm, witty memoir of one manâ€™s escape from the city in an unlikely quest to create out of a mountainous Welsh landscape a garden fit for inclusion in the prestigious Yellow Book â€“ the â€˜Gardens of England and Wales Open for Charityâ€™ guide â€“ in just one year. It was a derelict smallholding so high up in the Black Mountains of Wales it was routinely lost in cloud. But to Antony Woodward, Tair-Ffynnon was the most beautiful place in the world. Equally ill-at-ease in town and country after too long in Londonâ€™s ad-land, Woodward bought Tair-Ffynnon because he yearned to reconnect with the countryside he never felt part of as a child. But what excuse could he invent to move there permanently? The solution, he decided, was a garden. In just a year heâ€™d create a garden so special it would be selected for the prestigious Yellow Book â€“ the famous National Gardens Scheme guide to gardens open to the public for charity. Itâ€™s an unlikely ambition to entertain in this most unlikely of settings, and one that soon sees Woodward driven by odder and odder compulsions â€“ from hauling a 20-tonne railway carriage up the mountain to making hay with hopelessly antiquated machinery. The path to Woodwardâ€™s elusive sense of belonging turns out to be a rocky and winding one, taking in childhood haunts, childrenâ€™s books and Proustian nostalgia trips. As the family battles gales, mud and Welsh mountain sheep of marble-eyed cunning, not to mention the notoriously fastidious NGS County Organiser, it remains deeply uncertain whether the â€˜Not Gardenâ€™ and the â€˜infinity vegetable patchâ€™ (that grows only stones) will ever make the gradeâ€¦ Warm, thought-provoking and brilliantly funny, this is a memoir of a hopeless romantic with a grandly ludicrous ambition â€“ an ambition to which anyone whoâ€™s ever dropped into a garden centre, or opened a packet of seeds, has already succumbed.

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Bonsai Success in Southern Africa

Carl Morrow
Paperback / softback
160 pages
was: R 320.95
now: R 288.95
Stock is usually dispatched in 6-12 days from date of order

In this uniquely Southern African book, Carl Morrow and Keith Kirsten guide readers step by step into the magical realms of bonsai as a hobby, horticultural practice and art form.

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Fifteen Dogs

AndrÃ© Alexis
Paperback / softback
176 pages
was: R 280.95
now: R 252.95
Available from overseas. Dispatched in aprox 4-8 weeks as local supplier is out of stock

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The Ballerina and the Bull: Anarchist Utopias in the Age of Finance

Johanna Isaacson
Paperback / softback
288 pages
was: R 306.95
now: R 275.95
This title will take longer to obtain, and should be delivered in 6-8 weeks

Our moment has seen the resurgence of an anarchist sensibility, from the uprisings in Seattle in 1999 to the Occupy movement of 2011.

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