Social History of the Wine Vine, combining his passions for social history and viticulture, and arguing for hybrid viticulture. Hyams' most famous work was Soil and Civilisation (1952), a history of farming which advocated organic farming and came out against mechanised agriculture. Soil and Civilisation has been described as an early example of "environmental literature". It also included a favourable depiction of the Incas. From 1959 to 1974 he penned the gardening column for the Illustrated London News. He was consulted by the government of Iran when the National Botanic Garden in Tehran was being built. One of Hyams' last works, published posthumously in 1979, was The Story of England's Flora. Fiction, literary, and translation work Hyams' fiction included science fiction, ghost stories, often satirical, and often with a clear political bent. His novels included The Astrologer (1950) a satirical science fiction novel about an ecological disaster, and Gentian Violet (1953), a satire in which the hero managed to get elected to Parliament as both Conservative and Labour without being discovered. Hyams began submitting short fiction to the BBC Third Programme and the New Statesman in the 1950s; after they were accepted, he became a regular contributor to both. Hyams' literary output also encompassed literary essays, and numerous translations from French of many works of fiction and scholarship. (He won the Scott-Moncreiff Prize in 1964 for his translation of Joan of Arc By Herself and Her Witnesses by the French historian Régine Pernoud. His translations of work by Roger Peyrefitte and Zoé Oldenbourg were also notable, as were his translations of a history of the Marquis de Lafayette and Chopin. Hyams' work was praised by both Anthony Burgess and Ronald Bryden, the latter describing Hyams as "the most exasperatingly gifted writer in England". Politics and social/political writings Hyams remained political his entire life. An anarchist, Hyams was concerned in particular with the politics of land and agriculture, including the effects of the enclosures of the commons); as such, he has been influential in eco-anarchist thought, and indeed, much of his scholarship anticipated later thinking about the influence of agriculture on civilization. He wrote a biography of anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. In the 1950s and 1960s he broadened his travels, ultimately leading to publication of The Last of the Incas (1963) and a 1969 survey of botanic gardens worldwide (Great Botanical Gardens of the World). Hyams was also interested in the role