Gardening books, serious and otherwise
Mary Keen
Sir Roy Strong is the Director of the V & A and his special subject is the Renaiss- ance. He jogs in Herefordshire at weekends. Robin Lane Fox, just as versa- tile as one of Sir Roy's heroes, is a classics don who hunts on Saturdays, plays the piano and does his own publishing from a north Oxford Garage. I expect he is a crack shot and speaks Arabic as well. Both of these distinguished men have recently written books on gardening. Not the sort of gardening which is about how to grow a tomato, but the sort which depends on taste and style and sudden flights of fancy. Gardening in fact as a high art form, which is what it ought to be, and what, in the pages of the Spectator in the 18th century it always was. Recently I heard Mr Lane Fox championing the cause of lawns on Woman's Hour. He was taking up the gauntlet thrown down by Sir Roy on an earlier programme. The director of the V & A apparently disapproves of grass in town gardens, while the classics don thinks that everyone should have a lawn and know the pleasure of making daisy chains. Mr Lane Fox is a romantic who likes changes and chiaroscuro, and the varia- tions brought about by experience and family life. Sir Roy describes himself as design-orientated. His view of gardening is that of a set designer who sees his garden as one big stage. Both of them are con- cerned with the Matter of Taste.
Sir Roy's book Creating Small Gardens (Conran Octopus, £16.95) was commis- sioned by Conran and I am flattered to see that he has developed the ideas outlined by me, in the chapter which I wrote for the new edition of the Conran House Book. Like Sir Roy I believe (and said so in 1985) that gardening should be an extension and reflection of the house which it surrounds; that small gardens should concentrate on a single theme and that a window looking out onto a garden provides an extra picture for a room. Like Sir Roy, I too am constantly surprised by the low standards in garden design. His book is more visual than textual. There are 24 small gardens with rather vague plans (no scale or quanti- ties of plants are given) but they are all very pretty and Sir Roy describes them in glowing prose. I have to report that the prose is nowhere near as stylish as the pictures. Split infinitives abound 'a country cottage betokens rustic pergola work' and `nasturtiums bring a transitory horticultu- ral triumph to the dullest garden'. There is even a 'harbinger of spring'. The book fills a much needed gap though, the pictures are lovely, and the sentiments exactly my own.
Robin Lane Fox's Variations on a Gar- den (R & L Oxford, £10.95) is• a much deeper and more sensitive study of the aesthetics of gardening than Sir Roy's. I always preferred this book to Better Gardening which although enormous fun to read, gave the impression that it had been dashed off in the intervals of Renaiss- ance man's life. There is nothing slapdash about the revival of this thoughtful, enter- taining and witty book and the prose is immaculate. It is a book you can refer to over and over again, and it can be read with pleasure by beginners and experi- enced gardeners alike. The author is cer- tainly dogmatic, but on questions of style it is hard to haver. ,He is also authoritative and has clearly grown the things he de- scribes. Anyone who has seen the borders he controls in the gardens of New College Oxford, will have recognised the hand of a master. Renaissance-type gardeners, who can wield the spade as well as the pen, and deliver elegant results with both, are rare. Variations on a Garden is a cracker and nobody who thinks seriously about the great art of Making a Garden can afford to be without it.
The Spectator's own Ursula Buchan has produced An Anthology of Garden Writing (Croom Helm, £12.95) a homage to five great garden-writers of the late 19th and early 20th century. It furnishes a good introduction to these authors for those who have never had the chance to read them, but rather like highlights from La Scala it makes one long for more of the real thing. Miss Buchan's scholarly prose describes their lives, and links the passages they wrote. It is interesting to have all five writers in the same volume, Farrer thump- ing and throbbing, Robinson delighting in natural form and beauty, Bowles collecting peculiarities, Jekyll using plants in the best and largest and most worthy of ways, and Sackville West, in a flurry of choice and chosen flowers. There is plenty of good writing to read and although two of the writers are primarily concerned with plants, the other three believe in emphasis- ing the arrangement and art side of garden- ing.
Penelope Hobhouse has chosen 33 En- glish private gardens for her Private Gar- dens of England (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20) a handsome coffee-table book with lovely pictures. There are plenty of old favourites, but a few new ones including the garden made by John and Caryl Hub- bard in Dorset, which I think is currently one of the prettiest in England. Penelope Hobhouse describes them in an accom- plished and knowledgeable way and it is the sort of book which serious Americans will love to give one another for Christmas.
The English Garden Room by Elizabeth Dickson and Fritz von der Shulenberg, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £14.95) is yet another of those books for people who like to peer through other people's windows. When I was invited to contribute to a book about conservatories, I asked if it was a Serious Gardening book, and was told it was. (The authoress's last published work was The English Woman's Bedroom so I was a little suspicious). I became even more suspicious when the photographer arrived and took photographs of the inside of my house and threatened to include pictures of me and my eldest daughter. It was clearly not a Serious Gardening Book. It isn't but the pictures, particularly of my table and window, are lovely. So unserious are some of the other gardeners that you can see the prices on the pots of cyclamen which they have grabbed from the garden centre before the photographer came. Next time I will know better.
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