RHS: The Garden Cure

In this feel-good treasure trove, The Times gardening columnist Ann Treneman offers up horticultural remedies to cure all ills, from broken hearts to bad backs. Bad back? Sex life a bit dull? Tired all the time? Addicted to doom-scrolling?   In The Garden Cure you'll find solutions to all these modern-day maladies, and many more. Think of this book as a kind of green-fingered pharmacopoeia, a horticultural apothecary, an open-air medicine chest. Can gardening cure a broken heart? Can it help you take revenge on someone who has done you wrong? Gardening columnist for the UK-based The Times, Ann Treneman offers lessons in life galore - tales of snails and frogs, petals and perfumery all gathered from the garden.   'Imagine you could go into an apothecary and, instead of seeing rows of jars with their cures, there would be a display of all the plants from which they came. You'd be able to point down to a tiny snowdrop or up to a very large horse chestnut tree. There would be an entire herbaceous border, sweet peas and roses, daisies and foxgloves...That is what I imagined while putting together this most unusual apothecary's cabinet of a book. It's a thoroughly modern (and sumptuously illustrated) herbal that deals with problems of all kinds for the body, mind and the always important spirit. Many ailments or dilemmas are serious, others whimsical and then there are those that spring from the kind of lives we lead now. Sex, death, life and an overwhelming desire to hear beautiful music: there's a garden cure in this book for all of us.' Ann Treneman