Monday, 19 September 2022 at 8:00 pm - 9:15 pm
If Ambra’s name sounds faintly familiar, you may well have come across it in your weekend Telegraph or Guardian, or one of Britain’s glossier gardening magazines. She is an award-winning writer and garden historian, (three times voted Garden Journalist of the Year), whose work ranges from scholarly articles in Hortus to Country Living and Good Housekeeping.
Annoyed at the lack of appreciation accorded to Britain’s outstanding cohort of Head Gardeners, Ambra resolved to set the record straight, and her book Head Gardeners was published in 2017. The response was overwhelming, both within the garden profession and among ordinary gardeners, and the book was named Book of the Year by the Garden Media Guild.
This was followed by the National Trust’s definitive guide to the history of the English garden, The Story of the English Garden (2018), and a global history of gardening, The Story of Gardening (2019), written with doyenne of English gardeners, Penelope Hobhouse. An updated and expanded version of Head Gardeners was published last year, including the plant-hunter Head Gardener at Abbotsbury in Dorset. So perhaps it’s no surprise that her latest book, The Plant Hunters Atlas (2021), tells the weird and wonderful stories of how plants have travelled across the globe.