Of Generals and Gardens (signed copy)

+ Of Kings and Cabbages [two volumes of autobiography]

London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976 / 84.

Autobiography of the garden designer Peter Coats. Two volumes, the first signed on the titlepage by Coats. Both vols with excellent and unclipped dust-jackets, just some light shelfwear to the head of the spine on vol I. A near fine set. Coats was a landscape designer to the aristocracy. The son of Ernest Symington Coats and Nora Pountney, he was a legendary social bachelor, widely known for his long association with the magazine House & Garden. This publication had been incorporated into Vogue, but re-emerged in the late 1940s. Coats was appointed gardens editor soon after, and played an influential role in establishing the magazine as an arbiter of taste. He produced a steady flow of amusing articles, all illustrated with his own photographs, and demonstrated an encyclopaedic knowledge of gardens both in Britain and abroad, as well as a firm grasp of the practicalities of horticulture. Coats was born and brought up at the family home of Sundrum in Ayrshire, where he tended his first garden as a small boy. He formed an intimate friendship with Chips Channon, the Conservative politician, and the entertaining letters he wrote to Channon formed the basis of Coats's first volume of memoirs, Of Generals and Gardens. He also played a key role in the preparation for publication of Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon. During WWII he served in the Middle Bast and India, where he eventually became an ADC, private secretary and comptroller to the penultimate Viceroy, Lord Wavell, a position in which his flair for immaculate organisation found full rein.