Gardens
Rare specimens
Ursula Buchan
Al that is left of Christmas are the precious memories — of piped carols in the shopping centre and disaster movies on television — and there is time now to read all those gardening books bought and received on the strength of favourable Christmas round-up reviews.
About 40 titles were published in the last three months of the year but, if the experience of earlier years is any guide, few have much chance of becoming endur- ing classics. Unless energetically marketed by their publishers, which is by no means inevitable, the average gardening book has a hold on life as tenacious as a mayfly's. This is partly because of the sheer weight of numbers bearing down on a decidedly finite number of hardback book buyers, but also because not all will combine good writing with original information to a sufficiently high degree to earn a place in posterity.
Because reviewers must concentrate on the new, it is easy for readers to forget that there is a body of gardening classics which should form the core of any collection. Even those who know of them complain they are too hard to find. True, it is more often the ephemera of earlier generations which line the 'Gardening and Gardens' shelves in second-hand bookshops; for every prized set of E. A. Bowles's trilogy there will be five of The Garden That I Love by the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, or Mrs Cran's Garden of Experience. (Ear- lier women gardening writers were much given to discursive chat about the benefits of public school, or how to speak to Cook.) However, there is always the chance of finding gold amongst the dross — at a price.
The poor, or mean, amongst us must rely on facsimile editions, of which there have been a rash in the last ten years, often, though not exclusively, as the works of some excellent pre-war writers emerge from copyright. Except for bibliophiles, these represent no disadvantage. It is true that the pictures are sparse and rarely good, being photographs of photograhs, but then the originals were often very far from distinguished. In pre-war books on plant-hunting, for example, the Himalayas look just like Scotland. Some facsimiles, like the imaginative series of books by plant-hunters published by Cadogan Books, are inexpensive paperbacks.
The best known of all old gardening books is William Robinson's The English Flower Garden, of which second-hand copies abound because it went through so many editions and reprints. The style is vigorous and uncompromising, particularly in the later editions and on the subject of the summer bedding craze. It contains contributions by many other gardeners; the chapter on colour in the garden, for example, was written by Gertrude Jekyll. I have to say I prefer his The Wild Garden (Century Paperback) despite his barmy insistence on anglicising Latin names.
Gertrude Jekyll is sought after both for the elegance of her writing and for the enormous influence she had on garden fashion. Her best book is Wood and Garden, followed closely by Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden, which, according to E. A. Bowles, 'has been responsible for many an overcrowded, gaudy jumble of flowers believed to be a colour scheme, and sometimes called a Jekyll Border'. I do not read all her books with equal pleasure: Home and Garden goes on too much about cats for my taste and Roses for English Gardens rarely catches fire. All her books are available in facsimile published by the Antique Collec- tors' Club.
Reginald Fairer is remembered for his books on plant-hunting and his magnum opus, The English Rock Garden, which runs to 1,000 most readable pages in two volumes. It is long out of print. No one has ever written with such verve and colour about alpine plants. Farrer is also very funny, and the same goes for his friend, the amateur botanist/gardener, E. A. Bowles, whose books My Garden in Spring, My Garden in Summer and My Garden in Autumn and Winter describe the year in the garden at Myddelton House, Enfield.
The facsimile of this trilogy, published by David and Charles, is now out of print but easier to find than the original. Their contemporaries, whose books are worth searching for, include A. T. Johnson, E. J. Salisbury (for his fascinating botanical work, The Living Garden), and Clarence Elliott, the first man to grow alpines in stone troughs. Nearer our own time, there are Margery Fish, Frank Kingdon-Ward (on plant-hunting in the Far East) and Vita Sackville-West (whose Garden Book, a collection of her Observer articles between 1947 and 1961, has recently been repub- lished by Michael Joseph).
Classics are, of course, still in the mak- ing. One only has to think of the contribu- tions of Christopher Lloyd, particularly in his best works, The Well-Tempered Garden and Foliage Plants, recently brought out in paperback by Viking Penguin) and of Robin Lane Fox, especially Variations on a Garden (R & L). These books are so well-written, lively and well-informed that in 50 years' time (if I am spared) doubtless I will be found indoors, dodging the boredom of dull January days, in their company.
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