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Dr Hessayon’s best-selling series of Garden Expert books were pioneers of multimodal writing
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Dr Hessayon’s best-selling series of Garden Expert books were pioneers of multimodal writing
The Expert series of gardening books are best-selling classics. All of them were written by David Hessayon,1 who I celebrate here as a rare example of a writer who writes using information design as part of his grammar. He not only wrote the books, but he laid them out himself on his kitchen table. That way he could use design to show the structure of his message, and edit the words to fit the available space. This was quite unusual in 1959, when he published his first guide.
The cover mentions plain language, and declares its user-centred approach:
‘It is full of answers to questions you have so often asked and never been able to find answers in ordinary gardening books’.
Here’s a typical page:
1. Sadly, a couple of weeks after I wrote this page, Dr Hessayon died, at the age of 96. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/feb/24/david-dg-hessayon-obituary