Charity shop treasures: the best gardening gems I’ve picked up this year

An ode to these high street mainstays – and why you should always browse from the ground up

Mar 08, 2022

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It wasn’t until I left home for university that I had my first meaningful experience of charity shop shopping. It was the early noughties, and indie was in. My hair was getting longer; my trousers needed to get tighter. And it was a charity shop where I purchased my first pair of skinny jeans – a time-worn relic dating back to the original owner’s own teenage rebellion. The jeans soon fell out of favour, but the newfound love of charity shops endured.

Throughout my 20s, most of my clothing purchases came from charity shops, for reasons equal parts stylistic and economic. I seldom strayed from the rail or two given over to “men’s fashion”. But then that all started to change. When my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I moved into our first rented flat together, we discovered a shared appreciation for tchotchkes, knick-knacks, bric-a-brac and other objets.

All of a sudden, charity shops went from being somewhere you might luck out and find a pair of retro high-top Nike Blazers in weirdly good condition and near-enough the right size to justify purchase, to being an Aladdin’s cave of trinkets and treasure. As a result, our home today looks like a fusty old vintage shop stacked with chipped chinaware cats and novelty woodcuts of York Minster, only (I hope) without the fust.

Later, after our son was born, these same charity shops further unfurled themselves, revealing buckets, rails and shelves of previously unexplored goodies. I was now grabbing bargains on overpriced-when-new baby-grows, battery-powered Bob the Builder-branded diggers, and a bag-for-life full of building blocks.

For the gardener, charity shops are truly wondrous places, where one can find entire collections of books, accumulated over a former owner’s lifetime, on every aspect of horticulture

I’ve come to realise that the manner in which we mosey and nosy our way around charity shops merely mirrors our meandering voyages through life. You could say this of course about any of our consumer habits – where we once bought jeans in H&M, now it might be M&S – but charity shops, as Tardis-like troves of pre-loved bounty, are one-stop-shops for our ever-evolving tastes and interests.

And so you will be unsurprised to learn that these days, upon entering a charity shop, I find myself heading straight for the secondhand books. Specifically: gardening.

I say that as if such a section exists. As anyone who has ever browsed the books in a charity shop will know, they tend not to be quite so conveniently arranged. Gardening books – which more often than not are large, hardback items – are usually intermingled with other such tomes, requiring you first to sift through books about macramé wall hangings, the amphibians of Latin America, O-level French, and the history of aviation in order to find the one dog-eared copy of Joy Larkcom’s ‘Creative Vegetable Gardening’.

This, of course, is all just part of the sport of charity shop shopping; the challenge of rummaging harder, burrowing deeper than your fellow shoppers to find the most tantalising gems. If you want an easy ride, go to a bookshop. If you’ve got the stamina, enter a charity shop.

The stamina and the strength. I can’t help but notice that gardening books invariably occupy the bottom-most shelves, not just at charity shops, but also local libraries. This might just be down to their aforementioned size. Or it could be due to their (lack of) popularity. Or, as I suspect, this lowdown placement of gardening books is just a cruel joke at our expense, knowing how much of our time already is spent hunched over, backs arched and knees creaking. “Here Gary, get a load of this: another gardener trying to grab that 1994 RHS plant encyclopaedia without doing their back in!”

Whatever the reason, this added inconvenience has not stopped me browsing, nor has it stopped me buying. For the gardener, charity shops are truly wondrous places, where one can find entire collections of books, accumulated over a former owner’s lifetime, on every aspect of horticulture. (It is best, of course, not to dwell too much on how or why these collections came to be there.)

These ramshackle rooms, found on almost every single high street in Britain, are endlessly surprising and rewarding destinations that have mirrored and rewarded my maturing interests. Wherever life takes me next, I know one thing for sure: it’ll be via the charity shop.

To illustrate the sort of garden-related riches one can find in charity shops, I thought I’d share with you just a small selection of my most recent purchases.

#1 V. Sackville-West’s ‘The Illustrated Garden Book’, £1.50 from Scope on Walthamstow High Street

Vita Sackville-West was many things, including an author and garden designer, though today she is probably best known for having been the friend and lover of Virginia Woolf. For 15 years, she was also a garden writer for the Observer, and this book, a “new” (1986) anthology by Robin Lane Fox, is a collection of these writings, illustrated with botanical illustrations and photographs of Vita’s own garden at Sissinghurst Castle. I found it reduced from £3 to £1, though I was charged £1.50 and decided not to kick up a stink.

#2 Hand-painted miniature ornamental watering can, maker unknown, 75p from Barnardo’s on Wanstead High Street

Just look at it! How could anyone resist? ‘What purpose does this tiny metallic watering can serve?’, you might ask. The answer of course is none, other than to bring a smile to my face.

#3 ‘A Colour Guide To Familiar Garden & Field Birds’, 50p from New Hope on New Road, Croxley Green

I picked this one up on a visit to my in-laws’ local charity shop. I grew up with a keen fascination with the planet’s more box office animals – your leopards and pandas, orcas and polar bears – but the birds of Britain have always been a bit of a blindspot. No longer! Armed with this pocket book (if there is a pocket out there large enough to hold such a book, I am yet to meet it), and its “nearly 200 illustrations”, I will finally know a Chaffinch from a Chiffchaff.

#4 Factory-made ceramic bird thing, possibly Scandinavian in origin, £1 from British Heart Foundation on Wanstead High Street

One day, my near-future-self will lift the glossy ceramic head from this pretty bird and place inside its hollow belly an item of unimaginable importance – such as the key for my bike lock, or one of those expensive little tablet-shaped batteries – and then I will instantly forget having done so, much to my far-future-self’s frustration. But for now, it is perched atop a bookshelf, and it looks nice.

#5 ‘The Garden Book’ by David Stevens and Ursula Buchan, £2 from British Heart Foundation on Walthamstow High Street

I foolishly volunteered to redesign a garden for some friends (more on which in a future edition of The Earthworm, I’m sure). As such, I figured I should probably read up on the rudiments of practical garden design. Enter David Stevens and Ursula Buchan, in association with the RHS.

Have you picked up any horticultural treasures at your local charity shop? If so, what?! Let me know by leaving a comment or, if you prefer, by hitting reply to this email.

The Earthworm