Book Review: Gardens That Can Save the World by Lottie Delamain Thames & Hudson, £30

It is RHS Chelsea Flower Show week as I write this, and the temporary city of blooms feels completely removed from the real world. And yet, as I visited this year’s show gardens and floral displays, I was struck more than ever by its importance. Garden after garden displayed naturalistic planting schemes – buttercups, even herb robert, shared the soil. In a dye garden created by students at Sparsholt College, nettles, weld, madder and their companions grew – ancient providers of colour whose story runs through The Nature of Fashion and through much of what this newsletter cares about.

Four years ago, I worked with the garden designer Lottie Delamain on A Textile Garden for Fashion Revolution at Chelsea – a garden that asked visitors to think about where fibre and colour comes from. Lottie has now channelled that same thinking into a book that is, on the surface, a beautifully photographed survey of 65 gardens around the world doing remarkable things. Underneath, it is an argument about what gardens are actually for.

Gardens That Can Save the World is organised around five verbs: Repair, Empower, Nourish, Heal, Reimagine. Lottie is not interested in the aesthetics of these gardens – although they are frequently stunning. She is interested in gardens as interventions in broken systems, as responses to food poverty, ecological collapse, social isolation and cultural erasure.

The pages tell this story vividly. Hortas Carioca, the urban community garden initiative in the heart of Manguinhos, one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest favelas, grows food for 50,000 local families every year across twenty-seven acres, turning a former rubbish dump into a source of both nutrition and dignity. PIGMENT Organic Dyes in Devon – Sophie Holt’s regenerative care farming social enterprise – combines organic plant dyeing with therapeutic farming practices for people with learning difficulties, neurodivergent young adults and those who have experienced trauma. At the Newt in Somerset, Koos and Karen Bekker and their team have spent years restoring a working estate, weaving miles of sinuous hurdle fencing by hand and training apple trees into double helices along the paths. The result is a testament to what happens when traditional crafts are provided with investment and purpose.

What connects the wildly different gardens in this book is exactly what connects the themes of this month’s newsletter: community, the long view, and the understanding that the health of land and the health of people are not separable questions. This book is a useful mirror for the fashion industry. The same principles that make a good community garden – buy-in from the people most affected, respect for traditional knowledge, patience with slow processes, resistance to the logic of extraction – are the same principles that make a good supply chain. And while fashion won’t save the world, perhaps gardening might.

Gardens That Can Save the World by Lottie Delamain is published by Thames & Hudson, £30. thamesandhudson.com