State of veg
Ursula Buchan It might surprise you to know (or there again, perhaps not) that more vegetable than flower seed is sold by seed merchants these days. It is certainly an indication of the growing reluctance British gardeners feel towards growing their garden flowers from seed, especially that which needs to be sown under glass. But it also shows the high priority placed on eating fresh, unsprayed, unadulterated food, to provide the five portions a day, blah, blah. Since people no longer learn their vegetable gardening from their Grandad on the allotment, as was once the case, the challenge to energise and educate contemporary and decidedly picky gardeners on the subject is now the preserve of horticultural commentators. They must make what is essentially a workaday experience, satisfying but sometimes hard toil and full of disappointments, look both fun and even a bit glamorous.
The good news is that Carol Klein has cracked the first challenge and Sarah Raven and Jonathan Buckley the second.
Carol Klein's Grow Your Own Veg six-part series on BBC 2 ended last Friday evening, but I should be completely astonished if it were not repeated in the near future. (She has written a book of the same name to accompany it, which is an excellent reference book for the new vegetable gardener.) This series was filmed over a season mainly in her garden in Devon. Carol Klein is a nurserywoman of 25 years' standing and has, in the past, created wonderful displays of perennials at Chelsea, proving herself the inheritor of Beth Chatto's mantle. She is also a horticultural journalist and TV presenter of distinction.
The reason why the programmes have been so appealing is that she is a natural on television. With her Lancashire burr, her spiky-as-a-hedgehog dyed hair, her woolly scarves, her Jekyllian old boots, and her quick wit (no doubt honed years ago when she was an art teacher in a boys' comprehensive school), she is friendly and sympathetic to the viewer, without being patronising, and skilful and experienced enough to take the kind of short cuts that only skilful and experienced gardeners can get away with. She doesn't use a garden line, yet she handles the soil as if it were the rarest spice just arrived in Bristol docks from the East Indies. She even admits to having never grown cucumbers before, and you need confidence to do that on screen. She squeaks with delight when removing a mature sweetcorn from its husk, and squeaks again when, having cooked it, she eats it a matter of minutes later. (The sugar in sweetcorn turns to starch very quickly, once picked, which is why this is one of those vegetables which gardeners really benefit from growing themselves.) Sarah Raven brings an altogether more patrician, languid, be-skirted persona to vegetable gardening when she appears on BBC Gardeners' World, but rather less so in print, where her tone is informal, practical and downright enthusiastic. the great vegetable plot — delicious varieties to grow and eat (don't blame me, blame the arty designers at BBC Books), with photographs by Jonathan Buckley, is well designed, the colour reproduction is excellent, and it deserved to pick up a clutch of awards at the Garden Writers' Guild annual prizegiving last November.
Sarah Raven has an adventurous attitude and is well informed about which varieties of vegetables are the best for the amateur gardener to grow. She is also both a gifted arranger of plant material and seemingly enthusiastic cook, and the pictures of styled salads and stuffed squashes should persuade readers that kitchen gardens need not only be about carrot fly and bolting lettuces. The collaboration with Jonathan Buckley is fortunate, since he has the capacity to make a nettle patch look irresistibly inviting to lie on. The soil on potatoes looks good enough to eat, the flowers of broad beans are a deep, beautiful crimson, and even a simple pea leaf and tendril is subtly architectural. There is a wonderful double-page spread in the book of humble marigolds and borage; the combination of deep orange, caerulean blue and fresh green is winning. Sarah Raven has an obvious love of, and fascination for, vegetables; Jonathan Buckley has the eye and the patience to make them look marvellous. Together, these two have succeeded in injecting a certain glamour into vegetable (sorry, veg) gardening. I daresay it needed it.
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