Dirty hands with green fingers
Jane Gardam
A LITTLE HISTORY OF BRITISH GARDENING by Jenny Uglow Chatto & Windus, f15.99, pp. 342, ISBN 0701169281 The unpretentious title of this excellent, delicious book is clever. Does it mean 'a modicum of garden history' or, in a Victorian sort of way, 'a little volume' of it? Either, for it is beautifully produced, would make you want to buy it but neither would prepare you for nearly 350 pages of entertaining, scholarly riches; fine type, fine text, colour plates, MS reproductions from Aelfric to The Ladies' Flower Garden, illustrations, drawings, cartoons and photographs.
British gardens began early BC, with nomadic clearings in the wilderness and thorn hedges to keep out wild animals. The book ends with 2003 AD and the children's Mughal Garden in Bradford and the Eden Project in the south-west. Following Jenny Uglow's formidable biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, Hogarth and, last year, her 18th-century The Lunar Men, you might expect this book on gardens to have been something planned for light relief as she takes breath. But nothing of the sort.
The text rattles eagerly along from the Bronze Age excavations in East Anglia, through the Roman occupation, the mediaeval monasteries (she very much regrets that it is impossible to recreate a monastery garden), Tudor and Stuart gardens. Then the vast 18th-century estates with their Olympian designers, to the 19th-century bourgeois villa, full of blowsy ease and standard and pergola roses. Then the sooty city strips, like Mr Pooter's in Brickfield Terrace that so disappointed him. (Historians tell us now, says Uglow, that Mr Pooter hadn't a hope with his hardy annuals as 'very few flowers would grow then in Holloway') She ends with the decking and ornamental grasses recommended nationwide on television in the last few years; and also with the more chilling and intellectual aspect of the 21st-century garden, like Derek Jarman's that stands in the shadow of the nuclear power station at Dungeness. She notes that at another nuclear power station at Harwell the surrounding low hills have been renamed after Greek gods!
There is a lot about women gardeners, from the nameless early herbalists and potion-makers to the great Gertrude Jekyll (a little sketch of her by Lutyens, chinless but unassailable, regarding a sunflower) and the astonishing Mrs Lawrence of the emerald-green fingers who at her house in Ealing Park outdid all the gardeners of Chatsworth in the matter of the Amherstia nobilis. There is a chapter about the women's horticultural colleges that sprang up in the 1870s, and a wonderful photograph of the 'ladies in bloomers who gardened at Kew', who are indistinguishable from swaggering lads in their breeches and cloth caps. Women dominated gardening through the wars. There is the glamorised poster of the Women's Land Army of the second world war — the rosy cheeks and glossy hair and jodhpurs — a far cry from their grandmothers who, deprived of the chance of a scientific education, took up gardening to experiment with the delights of dung, and displayed their 'disgustingly' dirty hands at tea-time.
But social history is kept in its place here. The book is mainly concerned with the earth and our instinct and need to do things with it. It is a human book full of individuals, as gardeners have probably always been, from the unknown man who owned, 2,000 years ago near Peterborough in the Fens, 'some beautiful bronze shears in a special wooden case', to the Emperor Probus who made a special journey to plant our first vine, at a place still called 'The Vine' in Hampshire.
For me, it is the Romans who come out of this book best and whom I can see as heroes for the first time. They were cold, the weather was unpleasant 'with frequent rain and mist' but they soldiered on over the centuries. They brought us the sour cherry for Morello cherry jam, the sweet chestnut and crocuses, pansies and new roses. They mixed manure into their flower beds — sometimes you can see the spade marks and find a woman's dropped hair-pin. (I wonder if she had dirty hands?) Our soil they found fertile and they worked it diligently around 'a thousand' villas. They were optimistic — there has been discovered somewhere an outdoor reclining bed. They brought us walnuts and almonds, apricots and quince, plums and figs, mulberries and medlars. All their gardens seem to have disappeared, but their plants remain.
If only all history kept to the garden, as the Lord said once in Eden.
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