Category Archives: book review

Between the lines

10 Sunday Sep 2017

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bookpicBy far the most exciting thing to happen to me in the middle of a rainy and slightly frustrating week was the publication of my new book.

This is all a novel experience for me (sorry, dreadful pun) and I am finding it a little disconcerting: I have to draw attention to myself, for one thing, blow my own trumpet and generally go on about what I do instead of hiding in a corner of my living room bashing away at my keyboard behind the comforting anonymity of a computer screen.

However, now I find myself with book launches, author signings, talks and podcasts to do: publicity a go-go, and nowhere for a slightly reclusive gardener to hide. I can’t even go down to the far end of the veg garden where nobody can find me, as it’s (still) raining.

The book began as a simple idea: what if everyone could be just a little bit self-sufficient? Even if they lived a normal 21st century life in an ordinary house, without a smallholding, or much time, just like me?

And – as these things do – it mushroomed into an examination of what exactly it means to be self-sufficient, and from there became a gallop through the last 20 years of my life distilled into all the stuff I’ve learned about growing things and providing for myself and my family, on a journey of my own to look after myself as much as I possibly could through my own efforts.

As I’ve learned to supply more and more of my own food from my back garden, plus various borrowed fields, allotments and strips of land, I have realised lots of things.

First: there’s no such thing as self-sufficiency. Even the most dedicated off-gridder has to hew their house from the surrounding woodland with an axe someone else has smelted and forged. So once you’ve taken that on board, it becomes a question of how self-sufficient you can be.

And then you realise that everyone can supply at least some of their food by their own efforts. Even if all you’ve got is a doorstep, you can plant a rosemary bush in a pot in the sun and never have to buy herbs wrapped in plastic from the supermarket again.

Add a middle-sized garden and you can become self-sufficient in half-a-dozen vegetables really easily, and another dozen or so with a little extra effort. Start to get really hooked (and you will) and you can knock more things off your weekly shopping list, including fruit, drinks, cough and cold remedies, tea, eggs, lamb…

There will always be some things I will have to rely on others for. Flour, for one thing, and bread, pasta and rice. Butter, milk and cheese (I could keep goats, but I value my sanity: I have chased far too many of my mum’s goats across various villages in the South of France to want to ever do that again. Long story). Clothes (I can’t wear wool. Besides – woolly knickers. ‘Nuff said); cars and transport, other than walking.

So actually, in the grand scheme of things, I’m probably not that self-sufficient at all. But the point is, it is hugely important to me that I produce as much as is within my power from my own efforts.

Why? Because that way, I can eat absolutely fresh, organic food that I know for sure has never been sprayed with any chemicals at all, or injected with antibiotics unless it needs to be – and there’s lots of it, and it tastes great.

Because there is something deeply satisfying about sitting down to a plate of food and knowing that you have provided everything on it, through your own efforts. It taps into some atavistic caveman instinct and there’s something profoundly reassuring in the knowledge that, come the apocalpyse, we’ll be all right. We certainly won’t go short of home-made chutney, that’s for sure.

And because when I’m providing for myself it means I’m not sitting like a baby bird, mouth open, waiting helplessly for someone else to feed me. It’s a matter of self-respect. Plus growing what I eat, even if it’s just a part of my overall consumption, makes me really think about where my food comes from, and appreciate the effort that goes into growing it: and that makes me waste less, and pollute less, and treat the animals that produce my food better. It makes me responsible, as far as I can be, for the weight of my foot upon the world. And besides, it’s a lot of fun. Care to join me?

Grab your own copy of Growing Self-Sufficiency at a hefty introductory discount from Wordery – here’s the link!

Garden words: Purely for medicinal purposes

11 Saturday Mar 2017

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The Gardener’s Companion to Medicinal Plants
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Confession time: I do like to self-medicate.

Not, I must hastily add, in the alcoholic sense (well, not very often and only in extremis). But in the reach out into the garden and grab your remedy of choice sort of sense.

Herbal medicines can be as simple as a sprig of peppermint dunked in a mug of boiling water to ease your indigestion after an overindulgent meal: tastier than a Rennies, and at least you know exactly what’s gone into it.

Or you can go the whole hog and start boiling up comfrey roots into a sticky paste to smear over gauze in a poultice: wrap it around a sprain and it’ll ease pain and reduce swelling. Not for nothing is comfrey commonly known as knitbone.

I use sage tea to soothe a sore throat; I try to drink a rosemary tisane at about elevenish to aid my failing memory (the redoubtable Jekka McVicar swears by this one). There’s an aloe vera plant on my kitchen windowsill in case anyone should burn themselves; and I’ll pick a leaf of feverfew in the herb garden to slip into a cheese sandwich (just a little as it’s quite bitter) to ease the pain of headaches, including migraines, which my youngest occasionally suffers from. There are loads more: in fact there’s a whole chapter on the subject, including recipes, in my new book (in all good bookshops from September 7th!)

But I wish I’d had this book on my shelf to refer to while I was writing it. My knowledge on herbal medicine tends to be a bit piecemeal, handed down from friends and relatives or snippets picked up from books and magazines. So I’m not all that adventurous, really: I stick to my known remedies and go to the doctor for the rest.

This book, though, gathers all those scraps of herbal lore into one beautiful tome, along with a whole load of other remedies I never even knew existed. Who knew you could brew hawthorn berries into a spicy wine to help with poor circulation? Or that squash leaves are anti-inflammatories – you can rub the sap on burns, apparently. Elderberries prevent colds from taking hold – take a teaspoon of elderberry-infused vinegar three times a day at the first signs of a cold and you’ll head off the worst. And chickweed, of all things, can help soothe eczema.

I particularly like the considered, measured approach to the subject. This is no flag-waving sales pitch for the benefits of herbal medicine: it’s an impartial assessment of the potential uses for each plant and – best of all – the scientific basis (if any) for its effectiveness.

So let’s take hops, for example: I’m familiar with them as a sedative, usually the dried flowers slipped into a pillowcase to help you sleep. That use is listed here (along with others including mixing it with poppy seeds to treat bruises and boils); but there’s also an analysis of the evidence. There are few clinical trials (yet) which support its usefulness for treating restlessness and anxiety; but solid evidence confirming that the essential oils are antibacterial.

A balanced view is a rare thing in the field of herbal medicine, so this alone would have earned this book a place on my “essential reading” shelf. But it’s also packed with recipes and instructions – everything from rosehip syrup to calendula lip balm and passionflower tea (it helps you sleep). And all in a book which is a useful size – a tad larger than A5, so you can hold it in one hand quite comfortably while stirring the chickweed cream with the other. And I haven’t even mentioned yet the exquisite illustrations lifted mainly from Kew’s archives of botanical art. My one and only criticism of this otherwise thoughtfully compiled book is that there is no detailed list of who painted these beautiful works of art; credit where credit is due, after all.

But overall this is one of the best books to land on my desk in ages, and one which I can already see I shall be thumbing through again and again. In short – an essential reference work for anyone who has even a passing interest in picking their medicines from the garden. I will treasure my copy for years to come.

Gardening words: An Orchard Odyssey

23 Monday Jan 2017

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orchardodysseyIt is time to think of fruit. Gleaming apples and fat ripe plums; perfumed quinces and sugary pears. Great heavy boughs of it, weighed down by abundance: gnarled trunks and sweet scents, drunk wasps and bubbling jam.

Of course all that’s in the future: at the moment, it’s more like dinner-plate boots caked with three inches of mud, the squelch of a spade and the stinging of fingertips as they gradually thaw out after planting yet another new tree.

But planting fruit in winter is among my very favourite jobs. Was there ever half an hour spent which offers as much promise? Years and years of fruit for a short burst of digging in the cold. It’s not much to ask.

I am currently waiting impatiently for the arrival of the three new apple trees I’m planting this year. They are bare root, all on MM106 rootstocks (the middle-sized one), three varieties. ‘Warner’s King’ is a cooker I’m planting in tribute to a fantastic tree in my mum’s old back garden, boughs weighed almost to the ground with fruit: we had it identified at the Barrington Court Apple Day a few years ago and I’ve wanted one of my own ever since. There’s ‘James Grieve’, which I grew when we lived in Surrey and loved as it produces both crisp, tasty eaters if you pick them early, and sweet cookers if you leave them on the tree. And finally ‘Egremont Russet’: just because I need a good storing eater and I love russets.

So with all this fruity activity going on it was timely that Naomi Slade’s latest book, An Orchard Odyssey, dropped through my letterbox. I have been absorbed ever since in its wide-ranging and eclectic mix of story-telling, people-watching and up-to-the-minute analysis of the state of our orchards today. And then in the second half of the book there’s a refreshingly modern take on setting up an orchard yourself: the 21st century kind of orchard more likely to be planted in pots than paddocks, and all the more inventive for it.

I have loved its gentle stories of how apples and pears emerged from the wild to become our best-loved fruits. Naomi has dug deep to find some truly enlightening gems, the kind of thing that sheds light on something you thought you already knew.

I greeted the appearance of Johnny Appleseed like a long-lost friend, only to find out that he hadn’t, as I’d thought, walked across America scattering seed as he went (I’d always thought it mildly unlikely that many would have germinated) but in fact set up mini-orchards which he then tended to to maturity before selling them on to settlers travelling West.

I never knew there are wild figs growing on the bank of the River Clyde, near Glasgow; or that the word ‘scrump’ comes from a 19th century dialect word meaning a withered apple. Hence ‘scrumpy’ cider, too.

I am a magpie for this kind of randomly interesting snippet. I learned that China produces nearly half the world’s output of 80 million tonnes of apples. And that you can find rhubarb growing ‘wild’ (actually, planted, but thriving) in hedgerows in Lincolnshire. Well. Who knew?

There is more: so much more. Ancient orchards and the wildlife who live there; foraging and the importance of wild fruit; nutrition, and the significance of names. How to weave fruit plants into the fabric of your garden; practical stuff about pollination groups and rootstocks; and down-to-earth instructions about looking after your trees.

And sprinkled in among them like so much blossom are pen portraits of the people whose devotion to fruit has gently shaken apples from trees and generally made a difference. Tom Burford, working to gather and protect America’s apple varieties; the dedicated fruitaholic Joan Morgan, whose epic Book of Pears has just won Reference Book of the Year at the Garden Media Guild Awards; Mark Diacono, pushing the boundaries of fruit-growing on his East Devon farm; and the wonderfully-named Barrie Juniper, who went all the way to the mountains of Uzbekistan to trace the origins of the domesticated apple.

I love books like this; the kind you can pick up to dip into on a lazy afternoon and always learn something new. It’s a little apple heavy – no surprise when you realise Naomi runs an artisan apple business and so really, really knows her apples; but perhaps I might have liked to find out more about other orchard fruit like plums, cherries, quinces and mulberries. They are mentioned here and there, but only really in passing.

But that’s to quibble about a book which is a delight from start to finish, underpinned by a deep understanding and love for the history, folklore and modern-day phenomenon which is the humble fruit tree. I will be dipping back in, again and again, for a long time to come.

Gardening words: A veritable cabaret

07 Tuesday Jun 2016

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It is a rare garden writer whose words make you look entirely differently at the plants you have known all your life.

But Richard Mabey has so far made me review my attitudes towards everything from bindweed and horsetail (in his very entertaining ‘Weeds‘ – you will never look at a patch of couch grass in quite the same way again) to fairy ring mushrooms (‘Food for Free’ – I retain a little of my natural scepticism on this one, as I’ve always thought foraging rather overrated and Richard hasn’t quite converted me, but he did provide me with a stonking good read).

So I was really pleased when my in-laws presented me with one of his books I hadn’t come across yet, ‘The Cabaret of Plants‘: and once again I was thrown headlong into a world where plants make you gasp anew in awe and astonishment.

The ‘cabaret’ is explained as the parts plants play in the ‘theatre’ of the world; but the play is one ‘full of mimicry and unexpected punchlines’ where anything goes and nobody is handing out stage directions.

It’s a good analogy: this book is setting out to rekindle our ability to marvel at plants, just for themselves: our ‘ancient sense of wonder’ at this most diverse and astonishing group of organisms.

The result is eclectic, to say the least. It’s a joy to read: Richard is a polymath who wears his learning lightly, but can’t quite help taking little darting excursions into the poetry of Wordsworth, Iberian bar snacks, the cult of the Green Man, South American shamans and their slightly dodgy drug habits, electron microscopy, the Great Western Railway and Amazon exploration in the 19th century, among other things. Many, many other things. It’s quite dizzying, and a little exhilarating.

And the plants…. Once more I found myself looking at my favourite organisms in the world through quite different eyes, opened for me by Richard’s swooping flight through rivers, oceans, forests and deserts, across the ages and scooping up characters and stories as he goes.

I loved the story of the moonflower, a cactus from Brazil which climbs trees with headily-scented flowers which open on just one night a year, when the moon is full. And the intriguing evidence that Mimosa pudica, the sensitive plant, is capable of learning. Then there’s the orchid which lives its entire life underground, and the poor lonely cycad, Encephalartos woodii, which found itself in an evolutionary cul-de-sac when the last individuals turned out to be male-only. One grows today at Kew, in the Temperate House if you want to visit. Nobody has ever seen a female, so the males in cultivation (and there are none left in the wild) are doomed to an eternal batchelor existence.

I could go on, but that’s to spoil this magpie’s nest of a book, full of jewels and shiny things to make you catch your breath in admiration. And all beautifully written, too, with a poet’s feel for language. I loved it. And best of all, I came away with one overriding thought: aren’t plants amazing?

A gardener’s nightmare

10 Tuesday Nov 2015

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gyoweddingflowersI was once chatting to a gardening friend who was in a bit of a tizz.

Her daughter had asked her to grow the flowers for her wedding. She probably thought how lovely it would be to involve everyone in the family in her big day: DJing by her brother, dad driving the limo, home-grown flowers by mum…

It’s the ultimate gardener’s nightmare.

I grow to a deadline myself from time to time, usually when I’ve got Gardener’s World mag coming over to do a photoshoot for an article or two. It is an appalling amount of pressure: you do what you think is going to work, several months in advance, then along comes the weather, or a large dog, or several slugs at once, and you have to start again, only this time with just two weeks to go. There is no wriggle room, no way out, no fudge (although I have been known to panic buy plug plants – not an option for a home-grown wedding).

My friend’s solution was sweet peas: lots and lots of sweet peas, all sown at monthly intervals to make sure there would be enough for the wedding itself. Her garden was nothing but sweet peas that year: they were on every fence, over every wall, in every container. You could barely get in the back gate.

It was a lovely wedding, of course: but if only she’d had Georgie Newbery’s new book.

Then she could have calmed down, for a start: Georgie has a lovely measured, practical way of going about things with minimal panic, borne of years of doing this sort of thing herself, every weekend in fact for about 50 weddings a year (now that is my idea of a nightmare… good job we’ve got people like Georgie around, really).

She would have known to include foliage from her garden as well as the sweet peas: she could have fallen back on berries, seed heads and wildflowers. She could also have treated herself to loads of new roses, dahlias, chrysanths and late-summer bulbs like nerines and schizostylis, all of which would have filled the garden with late-summer colour for years afterwards – a fitting reward for all that hard work and stress.

She could have used Georgie’s useful tips for sidestepping the inevitable disasters: cosmos, for example, just keeps flowering and goes with everything, so you can use it to replace anything that fails; and sowing a ‘spare’ tray of each variety from seed under cover as well as sowing direct.

And there are gorgeous photos of bouquets and posies with matching recipes so you don’t even have to worry about the fact that you’re no good at flower arranging. Plus a lot of good advice on general wedding matters: which side to wear a buttonhole, for example, or which side to put the bride’s family (slightly alarmingly, something to do with swords).

I have two daughters. They are, at the moment, reassuringly far from getting married, but no doubt the day will come. And then I no longer have to dread the bright smile and ‘it would be so lovely if you did the flowers, mum’ comment. I won’t worry, because I’ll have Georgie’s book: it will be, quite literally, my lifeline.

Grow Your Own Wedding Flowers by Georgie Newbery is published by Green Books.

Garden words: The February Review

20 Monday Feb 2012

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The Morville Hours
by Katherine Swift

This beautiful, heartfelt, classic work of garden writing is poised just at the point where the muddy business of gardening becomes something more spiritual and meaningful. It captures perfectly that elusive depth of feeling we all experience when we’ve got our hands in the soil. It is the kind of book I would like, one day, to aspire to when I write the story of my own garden.

It’s essentially a love letter from Katherine Swift to her 1.5 acre garden at the Dower House at Morville Hall, an Elizabethan manor house owned by the National Trust in Shropshire.

Katherine – a garden historian – designed the garden to tell the history of British gardening through a series of rooms, each designed in a particular historical style. It’s open to the public, so you can go see for yourself.

The book, published in 2008, tells the story of the making of this garden, from the moment Katherine first arrived there – somewhat unwillingly, since she describes the garden as her husband’s ‘plan to lure me home’, with great reluctance, from Dublin where she was then working looking after Trinity College’s collection of rare and ancient books.

But what lifts this book above just another story of how a garden was made is the fact that – like so many of the best gardeners – Katherine is a dreamer, and an uncurable romantic. Just take this paragraph, from the first page of the book.

‘I came here to make a garden. In the red earth I find fragments of blue-and-white willow-pattern china, white marble floor-tiles, rusted iron nails. A litter of broken clay pipes in the flower-beds, their air holes stopped with soil. Opaque slivers of medieval glass, blue as snowmelt. Flat wedges of earthenware dishes with notched rims and looping patterns of cream and brown. Who drank from that cup, who smoked that pipe, who looked through that window? Did they stand as I stand now, watching the clouds on the hillside?‘

It is beautiful writing: and she has a knack of making you see things in a new light. I’ve never looked at the junk I’ve pulled out of my garden in quite the same way since reading that paragraph: last week I dug up an old iron hook, hand-forged and rusted but still strong as an ox, and have been wondering about the Somerset blacksmith who made it – and the farmer who left it there – ever since.

She’s also a wonderfully inspiring historian, seamlessly weaving historical facts and stories from hundreds of years ago with mysteries and ancient lore through the text, meandering down sidetracks every few sentences until you’ve forgotten where it was you started. The book itself is modelled on the Book of Hours: a guide for mediaeval monks laying out the seven Day Hours and Vigils, the Night Office (aka Matins): a strict code to follow, but within which she finds plenty of room to wander well off the beaten track.

This means that one minute she’s talking about thawing the garden stopcocks, the next she’s wondering whether a figurine in the local museum – thought to be a votive offering to a natural spring and found at nearby Wenlock Priory – is a Gaulish sacred relic or a Romanesque carving. And that leads on to a short history of milling and the Industrial Revolution in Shropshire: for a book about a garden, this is one with the widest possible remit.

A deep feeling of place pervades the text and you fall in love with Much Wenlock and the Shropshire Hills along with the author as she delves further into its people and its history.
It’s also full of delightful vignettes: take Lady L (for Labouchere), nearly 80 and in failing health.
‘There was lunch at one and tea at four, hot-cross buns at Easter and steam whistles from across the park on Bank Holiday weekends – the sound of the Severn Valley Railway on the other side of the river. The big old sitting-room was piled with books, papers, letters, photographs, Country Lifes and Christie’s sale catalogues, half-finished embroideries and just-begun watercolours.’
She goes on to mention that Lady L is related to the pioneer women photographers Lady Charlotte and Lady Lucy Bridgeman, known to their descendants as ‘the burnt aunts’ because they died together in 1858 when their crinolines caught fire.

It’s a finely-observed, sharply intelligent, sensitive book, quite unlike any other I’ve read. Apparently there’s a successor now: after The Morville Hours was serialised on Radio 4, people woke up to the fact that Katherine had been quietly contributing gardening columns for The Times for four years. ‘The Morville Year’ is a collection of those columns, published this time last year. She’s also currently working on a third book. But this is the one they’ll all have to measure up to: and I can’t think they’ll find that easy at all.

Garden words: The January Review

02 Monday Jan 2012

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Amy Stewart

There are some books that just make you go ‘Well. I never knew that.’ And then there are books which make you say it over and over again, to the point where you start bringing up random facts in conversation with friends and family, just to get them out of your head, and when those facts happen to be about small and often fearsome things with a lot of legs your friends and family quickly start looking at you a teensy bit oddly.

Did you know, for example, that British diplomat Charles Stoddart was condemned to spend four years being eaten alive by blood-sucking assassin bugs while held captive in an Uzbek bug pit in the mid-19thcentury?

Or that there is a caterpillar in south America so venomous that if you happen to tread on them barefoot you suffer massive internal bleeding and organ failure? Or that the crew who sailed to America with Christopher Columbus were driven so mad by the chigoe flea, which buries itself under a toenail and lives out its life there, that they cut off their own toes to get rid of it?

Nope, nor me.

You will have guessed by now that ‘Wicked Bugs’ isn’t, strictly speaking, a gardening book, but since we gardeners spend such a lot of our time either encouraging in ‘good’ bugs (ladybirds, lacewings, hoverflies) or murdering ‘bad’ ones (aphids, caterpillars, whitefly, slugs: the list goes on… and on…) then a book about them can only be endlessly fascinating.

There is a section on garden pests which is… well… almost as interesting as the ones about sailors and armies (did you know some used to throw clay pots full of scorpions at advancing Roman troops, circa 200AD, by the way?) though it does suffer a little from a sudden outbreak of advice-giving. I did think the bit about aphids was horrifying though: apparently one female aphid is born already containing within her the beginnings of a ‘daughter’ who is herself already pregnant with a third generation. Wow. That explains a lot.

Others, though, like the terrifyingly efficient Colorado potato beetle, are given a section all their own, so dreadful are they. The Germans thought the US Army was waging biological warfare by dropping Colorado beetles on their heads from planes during the Second World War, you know.

And so Amy Stewart gambols on through tales and titbits so surprising, arresting and downright gut-churning that I have been glued to this book ever since I started on page one. I love her obvious delight in her subject and her ability to tell a good yarn; she has a talent for winkling out little snippets of unfeasibly extraordinary information and using it to grab you by the ears. I just wish I knew how she finds out this stuff.

Little niggles: this is an unremittingly American book, to which you have to adjust yourself and stop chuntering about early on. Sometimes that’s a good thing: I’ve always loved the American ability to find an original turn of phrase (no clichés here).

But there’s a general assumption that the reader’s attention is wandering off all the time (surely impossible given the content of almost every page), so we’ve got silly little ‘pull-quote’ things repeating choice bits of a paragraph in a larger type, presumably to titivate the reader but which end up interrupting the flow. I trained myself to ignore them.

Otherwise, though, the book is a gorgeous little thing: I loved its styling as a battered field notebook, and the line drawings and etchings by Briony Morrow-Cribbs are simply exquisite and a master touch.

Amy already has a more plant-oriented book out, ‘Wicked Plants’, all about poisonous plants, and it’s now on my must-have list. Incidentally. you can read a bit more about the book in Amy’s own words on the BBC Gardening blog.

Garden words: The May review

04 Wednesday May 2011

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Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City
Dan Pearson
You know, I do sometimes wonder why Dan Pearson ever became a garden designer.

The thing is (and I sincerely hope he doesn’t mind me saying this) he doesn’t really seem to be that interested in it. This, his latest book, is a moving and poetic love song from a gardener to his London garden. And – rather refreshingly, if I’m honest – it barely gives a mention to the day job.

Dan is Kew and Edinburgh trained: he’s a botanist and a gardener to the veins of his mud-grimed fingers, and it is his love of the physical act of gardening that shines out from these pages.

He talks of ‘utter absorption’, the rhythms of the seasons, rhapsodises about Felco no.2’s in the way only a dedicated gardener can. You’ve got to like a man who can write, ‘I have four pairs because I feel lost without them and ill-equipped if I can’t feel them in my back pocket’. Is there any gardener who doesn’t derive deep comfort from the weight of a pair of Felcos in the back pocket, I wonder?

But on the design of the garden – the structure, the hard landscaping bones – he is so brief as to be almost dismissive. There is a passing mention of cantilevered steps which hints at something more styled; but to be honest, he shows more enthusiasm for the rubber builders’ buckets he uses.

Mind you, he likes his dark limestone slab benches – though I suspect that’s because he uses one of them to house his species pelargoniums. And he’s also lyrical about the ‘shards of tumbled limestone’ which make up his path: ‘The pacing in the garden is interesting underfoot,’ he says. ‘I like the way you move from wood to solid stone to the clatter of broken limestone, then wood and clatter again as you move through the garden’. But that’s by way of taking you to his willow tree and his agonies over removing it.

This is a book to speak to the heart of any muddy-fingered, welly-clad gardener. Anyone who has ever railed at the ever-growing list of things to keep them from the garden will sigh when he says, ‘I spend as much time as possible living outside because the garden draws me there; it is the first place I go after getting out of bed and the last at the end of the day.’

As well as being a passionate gardener, Dan is an inspired and poetic garden writer. His use of language is simply delicious: you revel in it, bask in it, hold it like jewels in your fingers. He talks of holly never being oppressive because the leaves ‘shine like a thousand tiny mirrors’; Magnolia ‘Porcelain Dove’ smells of ‘churches, incense and musk’, while the blooms of a Paeonia delavayi, nicked as a seedling while he weeded beds at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, is ‘dark as dried blood and satiny as an Elizabethan damask’.

There are useful tips too: a planting combination he recommends shades the tricky Erythronium californicum ‘White Beauty’ to just the right degree with filigree Dicentra ‘Langtrees’, which after it has died back in summer is replaced by the willow gentian Gentiana asclepiadea. A real plantsman and gardener’s combination – and one for the notebook.

And I was deeply reassured to find that even such a god as Dan Pearson has his ‘corner of shame’: that bit of the garden where odd cuttings, surplus seedlings, impulse buys and sentimental saplings moulder miserably for months, forgotten. Of course Dan’s corner is a cut above: it includes such treasures as balsam poplars and Euonymus planipes sown as seed from the Netherlands. But nonetheless – you can feel he gardens just like you do.

And I haven’t even mentioned Howard Sooley’s sumptuous photography: lingering, atmospheric, perfectly capturing the earthy and natural feel of the book itself. Dan has now burst the constraints of his city walls and I can claim him as an almost-neighbour, since he has moved to a smallholding not many miles from me in Somerset these days. I can’t help thinking he will be happier in the country.

Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City by Dan Pearson, is published by Conran Octopus http://www.octopusbooks.co.uk/

Garden words: The February review

27 Sunday Feb 2011

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It’s a brave man who sets out to write a book about weeds. It’s about the most unpromising topic you can think of in gardening, short of, maybe, digging techniques, or the finer points of a bowling-green lawn (though I’m revealing my none-too-well-hidden prejudices here).

But Richard Mabey attacks his subject with gusto, and the result is – amazing though it might seem – a fascinating book.

He mentions a quote from the 19th century poet John Clare several times, in the frontispiece as well as within the text, and with good reason: it perfectly captures the spirit of the book. I think it’s worth reproducing in full:

“I markd the varied colors in flat spreading fields chekerd with closes of different tinted grain like colors in a map the copper tinted colors of clover in blossom… the sunny glare of the yellow charlock and the sunset imitation of the scarlet head aches with the blue corn bottles crowding their splendid colors in large sheets over the lands and ‘troubling the cornfields’ with destroying beauty.”

It’s that inherent paradox in the nature of weeds – their ‘destroying beauty’ – which Mabey investigates so entertainingly. He challenges so many of our long-held beliefs: the definition of a weed, for example, so often ‘a plant in the wrong place’. Mabey argues that for ‘place’ we should read ‘territory’: a weed is a weed not because of any natural traits, but because we made it so.

We define as ‘weeds’ plants which are inconvenient to us, ignoring their part in the wider scheme of things. They slip into the corners we ourselves create for them, by farming, or making gardens, or knocking down buildings and leaving it all to rot.

And worse; we make weeds by moving plants quite literally into the wrong place. The Romans brought ground elder for salad leaves, and the Victorians introduced giant hogweed into gardens (it was described in the Gardener’s Magazine of 1836 as a ‘magnificent umbelliferous plant’: the author goes on enthusiastically to say he has given friends plenty of seed to scatter while on holidays in the north of England, Ireland and Norway). Who knows what weedy horrors lie in wait from all those imported plants we’re currently planting in our gardens (it’s only a matter of time before people realise bamboos are just Japanese knotweed in drag).

The book is stuffed to bursting with wonderful, unforgettable stories. I never knew that soldiers in the trenches in World War I made little gardens with weeds pulled from the battered fields around them: tiny pockets of normality in a world gone mad. In the Second World War, rosebay willowherb sprang up in thickets in central London as the streets were split apart by bombs and the hidden earth exposed; as Mabey comments, ‘how thinly the veneer of civilisation lay over the wilderness’. Victorian naturalist Edward Salisbury raised 300 plants of over 20 different weed species from seed found in his trouser turn-ups; and in 1916 a garden was created in New York’s Central Park (it still exists) in which all the plants mentioned in Shakespeare’s works are grown – including hemlock and nettles.

And the language. Ah…. the language. It sparkles and crackles from every page: he talks of ‘vegetable guerrillas’, a ‘ragged Arcadia’, ‘rage against the dying of the weeds’, ‘the whole plant has the jizz of a street hooligan’ (this last of bristly ox-tongue, Picris echioides). It’s such a pleasure to read the writing of someone who takes such delight in language and is so utterly passionate about what he’s saying.

I have just one tiny criticism: the weeds are referred to by their common names throughout, and until you realise (in my case more than halfway through) that there’s a glossary with the Latin names in the back, you’re often mystified as to which particular weed he’s on about. Even when you do know about the glossary, it’s a pain to keep flicking backwards and forwards. I expect he was just revelling in the poetry of common names: but I did long for some Latin to cut through the confusion.

But I feel mean and carping just writing that. Go and find this book: sit down on a rainy evening by the fire and devour it from cover to cover. You’ll come away with the way you view our least favourite plants subtly shifted: and with a richer view of the natural world.

Garden words: The January review

07 Friday Jan 2011

Posted by in book review, garden design, garden words

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I have many books about garden design on my bookshelf. The likes of Robin Williams, John Brookes, Tim Newbury, Piet Oudolf and Roy Strong snuggle together amicably there: they have, over the years, instructed me purposefully, generously and reliably. I have shamelessly nicked designs from all of them and shoehorned them into gardens with a non-designer’s lack of discrimination. Heck, I once built a brick wall on instructions from a well-thumbed copy of John Brookes’s ‘The Small Garden’.

But there are only so many times you can be told how to triangulate things. Sometimes all you require is a lot of lovely pictures of, say, pergolas so you can figure out what you like and – more importantly – what you want for whichever garden you happen to be building at the time.

And that, mostly, is what you get with The Essential Garden Book, from the unlikely pairing of uber-chic interior designer Terence Conran and thoughtful, sensitive garden designer Dan Pearson: published in 1998 but still current and a late New Year present from my other half, who knows the agonies I am in at the moment over how to design a fruit cage that doesn’t look like a fruit cage.

I have my doubts about Terence Conran’s forays into garden design, though I must admit his design template for a compost bin (was it really his, though, do you think?) remains a staple in my repertoire. He’s rather good at houses, of course: in fact this book was designed to follow his The Essential House Book.

But stick to what you know is my motto, and such sequels are often less than successful. Luckily whoever was advising him clearly knew his stuff, as he managed to collar a relatively recently-established Dan Pearson to do it (there are also – surprisingly ill-acknowledged – contributions from Isabelle van Groeningen and Andrew Wilson). The book was first published a scant decade after Pearson arrived at Home Farm, so we were only just beginning to see what he was capable of.

I’m afraid I quickly gave up on the words and just basked in all the lovely, lovely pictures. You see this is a sourcebook extraordinaire: the size of a baking tray, it is heavy and rich with ideas. There are steps, sprayed with mud and grass, growing green and hairy; wonderful dry-stone moongates; a trellis so cloaked in ivy it looks like a living sculpture; and fences made of multicoloured bottles strung on wires.

The pictures are this book’s strength, but it does get bogged down in the words. I do question how digestible and relevant an essay on void versus mass – however intelligently put – is to the ordinary backyard reader. And most non backyard readers will probably know about it already anyway. Dan Pearson is, of course, a fine writer: but this is quite obviously a book designed to be looked at, not read.

But worse: in the end it tries to be all things to all readers. How can you possibly even attempt to cover the cornucopia of perennials, bulbs and ferns in just six pages (including pictures)? I’ll tell you – woefully inadequately, and by avoiding cultivar names wherever possible, which makes it a bit of a pointless exercise. And vegetables, herbs and fruit are given just four measly pages, including exotica like kiwis, peaches and apricots. A breakneck gallop through every aspect of gardening is achieved in just 12 of the book’s 272 pages – relegated to the back, of course. It’s hard not to avoid getting cross at the priorities here.

I came away with the impression that this was a book without the confidence to be what it very nearly is: an outstanding sourcebook full of inspiration, ideas and horizon-widening examples to send you away into your garden full of renewed determination and optimism. If I’d been the editor, I would have lopped off the bits about plants and gardening and let it flourish as the design book it was meant to be.