A delightful anthology on gardening, in which (after the opening from Haydn's Serenade) each spoken piece is followed by music chosen to prolong the spell of the words. The Rasumovsky Quartet, founded in 1984 by instrumentalists who already knew one another well, and named presumably in honour of the Beethoven string quartets identified by the name of their dedicatee Count Rasumovsky, offers an exhilarating and totally satisfying sound, whether in the familiar sweetness of the opening, the rich colouring of Puccini's Crisantemi or the fastidious delicacy of the Britten waltz. The readings, like the music, range widely. The 'green fingers' of Laurie Lee's mother, Vita Sackville-West, planning a white garden (which did indeed succeed, as thousands of visitors to Sissinghurst can testify), Gertrude Jekyll complaining bitterly about the wilful inaccuracies in seedsmen's descriptions of colour, Louis MacNeice's elegiac The Sunlight on the Garden and other treasures are sumptuously read by Jill Balcon and beautifully recorded. The first passage is the opening of Francis Bacon's essay On Gardens and I think, alas, that it is misread: the only versions of that memorable line that I have ever seen maintain that planting a garden ''is indeed the purest of human pleasures'', with an 's'.'