Tag Archives: garden books

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!

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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?

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 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 January review

07 Friday Jan 2011

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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.

Horticultural knitting

04 Monday Jan 2010

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I’m quite easy to buy Christmas presents for, since more or less anything gardening-related will do (except plants: friends and relatives learn quickly that if I haven’t asked for it, it’s horrible to grow/horrible to look at/horrible to look after and I WON’T LIKE IT. Call me picky, but it’s better just not to buy them for me. Sorry.)

But among many lovely green-fingered gifts this year was one that made me laugh out loud, and neatly combined my other secret obsession: knitting.

Jan Messent’s Knitted Gardens, given to me by my sister-in-law, is the wackiest but most wonderful idea I’ve ever come across. It strikes me this may be the perfect way for the frustrated gardener to while away the winter months while still getting that all-important horticultural fix.

It’s pretty straightforward, and I suspect rapidly becomes very addictive. I don’t know who made the gardens photographed for the book itself but they’re exquisite: every flower is picked out, every fence scrambling with climbers, every shrub a riot of blossom and fuzzy woolly colour. There are veg gardens for the allotment-minded and very ornamental gardens for those who prefer flowers. And, this being unaffected by the seasons, you can make your garden any way you want it.

Apologies for the photographs here – they’re just pics of the book – but I got very carried away by these. This one on the left is a cottage garden – it’s actually a wall hanging and this is just one section of it. The row of cottages with their knitted roofs and crocheted conifers and the perfect pathways are just so gorgeous.

Jan tactfully mentions that this wasn’t the work of just one person: she does suggest that if you’re doing this yourself you should probably enlist the help of your local schoolchildren or at the very least the nearest WI. But oh, my knitting fingers are itching…. I can feel myself about to embark on a very silly project here.

This isn’t the only thing in the book, mind you: there are some throws (nice) and a to-die-for potager bedspread like a perfect little herb garden complete with loopy green wool lavender.


I may work my way up to the wall-hanging by way of the bedspread (that should take me at least five years at the current rate of progress: I am the world’s slowest knitter and the stack of projects-in-progress is also high and getting higher). I’ll have a warm-up with this – the smallest project in the book and a little vegetable-garden-on-a-cushion. Complete with cabbages, caulis, carrots and leeks…

If there has ever been a reason to take up knitting, this surely has to be it.

Now, once I get to the wall-hanging…. I feel a communal knitting project coming on. Any keen knitters out there want to help me out in about 10 years’ time?

Tulips again!

15 Monday Jan 2007

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I’m currently reading Anna Pavord’s “The Tulip” – it’s been around for a while, but I thought since I’ve spent much of last autumn planting over 100 tulips in my own garden it was about time I found out about them.

What a lovely book. It’s quite heavy-going, I find, largely because the scholardship is so dense: but once you’ve got into it, you can’t help but be drawn in by the extraordinary story of this unique flower.

It’s evident from the first page how well-educated Anna Pavord is: I’d always suspected it of her, but now I have proof that she not only speaks French, but 17th century French at that: the only trouble is she does rather assume her readership is as erudite as she is, and leaves great passages untranslated. I’m lucky enough to speak near-fluent modern French – but I find this is beyond me.

Never mind: it’s not necessary to enjoy the book. It’s full of little amazements: did you know, for example, that the French had their own version of tulipomania a full century or so before the Dutch? Or that the Turkish, who began the tulip craze, spurned the traditional European goblet shape (or more accurately, didn’t even consider it in the first place) for the acutely waisted shapes only seen these days in Parrot tulips and the like?

Anna Pavord is one of those people who has always existed in the horticultural firmament. I can only wish I were half as good – or indeed as successful – a garden writer as she. I can’t make out a professional gardening connection, but she’s one of the best kind of gardeners: that is, one who has learned her craft through her own personal experience. She spent 30 years restoring a garden in Dorset before moving and starting again. She made her name with this book, though she has several others to her name, all sharing her particular brand of intelligence and insight. She just seems to be a true enthusiast and scholar of all things garden-related.

It’s made me see tulips in an entirely different light. I’m looking forward to my spring blooms all the more for reading this: a whole new layer of knowledge and pleasure to add to what I hope will be a wonderful display.