English Gardening Eccentrics by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

But if one purpose of historical fiction is to fill in the gaps, Weir falls short. Much of her novel, despite the dramatic events it describes – war, conspiracy, murder, premature death – is flat, as if the historian is perched on the novelist’s shoulder.

‘Forced loans?’ Richard’s queen asks when the king talks about raising money from his rich subjects. ‘Did you not condemn the practice in Parliament?’

Well, yes, he did, but it’s less the sort of thing a queen would say to her king at a court feast than the sort of thing a historian would put in. Richard’s revenue-raising – and comparisons with his brother’s – have often been discussed by historians.

The Tudors and their immediate forebears have had a lot of fictional attention, led by Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy – against which most historical novelists entering similar territory are doomed to be measured.

Weir’s novel is better history than Mantel’s, who takes an almost perverse pleasure in flipping the available evidence to convince us that, say, Thomas Cromwell was good and Thomas More wicked. But, for the duration of the novels, Mantel does convince us.

Weir, despite cleaving to a much more plausible version of earlier events, does not. Partly this is a matter of style. She has a weakness for putting clichés in her subject’s mouths, though admittedly some were not clichés then. ‘Needs must when the devil drives,’ says Richard.

More than that, the book, broken up into chapters covering slices of time, seems breathless – an attempt to cram in as much of this teeming period as possible. Nor is Weir free from that curse of the historical novelist, the nudge. Prince Arthur, Henry and Elizabeth’s doomed eldest son, is sickly and frail from the beginning, while his younger brother, ‘Harry’, ‘looked as if he had been born to greatness’. Ouch.

Only when the pace slackens does Weir breathe more life into her principals. This happens whenever, as was grimly frequent in the age, a child dies unexpectedly. Historians often hurry past these deaths, concentrating on those who lived to influence the world around them. But Weir shows us these were absences that even the most exalted endured.

In grief, at least, we glimpse a shared humanity.

David Horspool is author of Richard III: A Ruler and his Reputation (Bloomsbury)

‘Let’s see ... we’ve taken you off smoking, drinking and rich food. What else do you enjoy?’

Odd garden varieties

DAVID WHEELER English Gardening Eccentrics By Todd Longstaffe-Gowan Yale University Press £30

The supposedly sedate world of horticulture is full of eccentrics. If gnome-filled flower-beds, a claustrophobia of capricious topiary or a Disney-like display of dubiously cute, oversized mutants are your idea of outdoor eccentricity, then, to quote the Bachman-Turner Overdrive song, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan (tell me, is that an eccentric name?) is a fellow ‘inexorably drawn towards eccentric personalities’. Compared with his, my own acquaintance with this peculiar and life-enhancing clan is mild indeed.

I recall the ‘eccentric’ – though thoroughly understandable – habit of a Somerset grande dame who gardened all day, every day, festooned in precious jewellery. It was, in theory, understandable because while she was beavering away outdoors, her house had previously been burgled on two occasions. And there’s the late Ian Pollard, dubbed the ‘naked gardener’ of Malmesbury, owing to his penchant for working his flower-beds in the buff.

The controversial and impossible-tododge question of taste arises. Would you say Clough Williams-Ellis’s 1925-onwards Italianate ‘fantasy’ village of Portmeirion in north Wales – a supreme example of individual expression – was in good or bad taste? Of course not.

What, then, of a neighbouring but lesser-known later model village of Italian landmarks, struggling to survive in overgrown woodland? According to the Mail Online, its ‘stunning collection of over 30 iconic buildings and structures featur[ing] a 6ft Rialto Bridge from Venice, a pint-size Duomo from Florence and a miniature Leaning Tower of Pisa’ was sympathetically built over 25 years by poultry farmer Mark Bourne. He used chicken wire and mortar and an old washing boiler to fashion the dome of his Tempietto.

In his portly and absorbing new book, Longstaffe-Gowan (TLG) – gardener, landscape architect, lecturer, writer, editor – rescues from obscurity the dramatis personae of a long-lost, almost unimaginable world. Subtitled Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries, the book reaches back to June 1663, evoking a by then ‘desolate and melancholy estate’ in Oxfordshire. It comes to a full stop in a ‘modern garden of Eden’ created by Mabel Barltrop (‘the messenger and daughter of God’) in the early-20th century. It’s quite a haul.

Each of the characters whom TLG considers has ‘approached gardening as a dynamic process. Their gardens lack finitude; each one is a work in progress, and the product of sustained, sometimes obsessive and frequently piecemeal activity.’ And they were built or animated, he says, ‘by a range of diverse materials, from bones to fossils, mummies to marsupials, minerals to fragments of the Rock of Gibraltarand the Matterhorn’.

Ah, the Matterhorn. ‘Eccentric lawyer’ Sir Frank Crisp, creator of the