Gardening books
Down to earth
Mary Keen
Good in a Bed is a ghastly title for a delightful book. Ursula Buchan, the regular Spectator columnist, has just published a collection of her garden writings from these pages. She is the third generation of Buchans to write for The Spectator. Her grandfather was John Buchan, her brothers are literary and her husband judicial. Her sensible, intelligent and utterly English voice is set against a background of family holidays, cricket matches, dogs, ponies and village life. Apple crumble, cold spare rooms, grandmother's footsteps and Scottish picnics provide glimpses of a life that will be reassuringly familiar to die-hards. But this is more than a Diary of a Provincial Lady with a touch of derring-do. After Cambridge, Ursula Buchan went to Kew. Her horticultural knowledge is formidable, but she wears her learning lightly. Without sounding at all patronising, she can clarify
the nomenclature of plants or how to test one's soil. 'I rather admire people who feel at home with iron chelates and the colloidal nature of humus,' she writes.
I consider it a useful accomplishment to be au fait with the constituents of one's soil — not to be boasted about of course — but a source of quiet satisfaction, like knowing where to find the Travellers' Club without asking a taxi-driver.
Ursula Buchan is honest enough to admit that gardening can be tedious. Read her on the malevolence of plastic netting, or on planting bulbs in clay soil, as an antidote to other writers who are prone to descriptions of wandering among perfect flowers, with a glass of wine at dusk. Read her, too, for her shrewd comments on passing fashions and preoccupations_ As long ago as 1996 she was writing of climate change and a year later she described an octogenarian who practised matrix gardening long before Continental Drifts became the demier cri. Her approach is always human, always engaging, not so much 'Good in a Bed', as 'Lie Back and Think of England'.
James Fenton, the poet and polymath, lacks the self-deprecation of Ursula Buchan, nor does he serve his scholarship between domestic wrappers. The only retro tendency in Fenton's slim volume is his plea for a return to the simplest of all approaches to garden-making. It is not a book about huge projects but about 'think ing your way towards an essential flower garden by the most traditional of routes: planting some seeds and seeing how they grow'. Since this is a man who can mesmerise his reader on any topic from early armoury to Freud, you know that when he turns his attention to seeds it will never be dull.
Fenton thinks 'design has become a terribly stupid and expensive tyrant'. I wish he had mentioned it more often to his publishers, Penguin Viking, who have turned this lively and thoughtful book into something so difficult to read that only Fenton's fans will want to risk their eyes on its appalling multi-coloured, paint-spattered pages. The man is a poet, for goodness sake, and a writer of genius, but every page comes in a different colour — mauve with orange writing and white blots is the worst. Printed in Trump Mediaeval, the book is a monument to the expensive tyranny that the author decries. Buy it anyway for the poet's endorsement of neolithic Mediterranean cornfield mixtures and for his wide-ranging observations on the sillier pretensions of garden writing.
What is an architectural plant? A stand of bamboo does not remind me of any architecture I know, even though I have lived in countries where much of the architecture was bamboo. And what building looks like a phormium?
Cleverness and strength of character are what the best garden-writers have in common this year. Christopher Lloyd presents his intelligence as outrageously as ever. Colour is his topic, but this is not colour for the faint-hearted. Dare to be different is the message on every page. There is a lot of red, orange and magenta. Where Buchan empathises and Fenton pronounces, Lloyd is the arch-confronter. Writing of St John's Wort he says, 'I often see it in a front garden with pink hydrangeas. This does not work. Sometimes a red rose is of the company. That doesn't work either.' Pity the gardener with such a combination. There is no need to share the great man of Dixter's colour preferences — he is prone to purple ties on
yellow shirts but you should believe everything he writes about how plants behave. His experience of growing is unequalled.
My last choice is a quirkier book than the rest, but it also needs an intelligent reader. Peter Thompson has been on a strange quest of his own for years. Like Buchan he is ex-Kew, where he was head of the physiology department and, like Lloyd, he enjoys discovering what makes plants tick. Now he has been down under and produced a book which describes what plants in the southern hemisphere might do for gardeners in the familiar north. After reading this, you will realise that there are more ways of amazing other gardeners than are dreamt of by Christopher Lloyd. This is cutting edge stuff. I am not sure that I am ready to grow New Zealand
plants with attitude, but Peter Thompson's enthusiasm for exploring the wilder shores of horticulture makes for good armchair travel.
Good in a Bed by Ursula Buchan (John Murray, £16.99, pp. 271, ISBN 0719560268); A Garden from a Hundred Packets of Seeds by James Fenton (Penguin Viking. 110, pp. 87, ISBN 0670911089); Colour for Adventurous Gardeners by Christopher Lloyd (BBC, .E20, pp. 192, ISBN 0563537396); The Looking-Glass Garden by Peter Thompson (Timber Press, 539.99, pp. 452, ISBN 0881924997).
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