Creating a place for green thoughts
Mary Keen
LEAVES FROM THE GARDEN by Clare Best and Caroline Boisset
John Murray, £14.95
ITALIAN GARDENS by Georgina Masson
Antique Collectors' Club, £25
LANNING ROPER AND HIS GARDENS by Jane Brown
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20
Petrarch recognised that gardens were x the proper setting for poets and men or letters, but I wonder how many Spectator readers feel the same way? Modern gardeners cultivate plants rather than a sense of place and I do not think much poetry is written out of doors these days. Pope and Addison used once to fill the columns of this paper's precursor with essays on garden style, but today the fine and civilised pursuit of making a garden has everywhere given way to a preoccuPa- tion with rarities and how to grow them. Horticultural one-upmanship is fun, but It does not give one the same lurch of excitement as creating a place where you will be inspired to sit and think. Books which encourage the reader to turn their minds to gardens rather than to gardening are as thin on the ground as a Pink Sheet plant (those listed by the National Council for the conservation of plants and gar- dens). The test of a good book about gardens for this reader is one which makes me want to rearrange my own. The adrena- lin of aspiration can throw up a bower in a morning or peg out an avenue after tea, while at night it makes you lie awake wondering how to persuade everyone that the only thing that matters is to increase one flowerbed and obliterate another. (This thought often occurs a year after the very same operation in reverse.) Aspir- ational gardeners spend much of their time unravelling hopefully.
The book which currently makes me want to make the most changes out of doors is Leaves from the Garden, a collec- tion of garden writing put together by Caroline Boisset and Clare Best. Here Is William Gilpin, that authority on the pic- turesque, declaring that in a lawn of small dimensions, the loosing of the turf under the shrubs is of the utmost importance, so that it diminishes the hard line of the border, a thing that cannot be too strongly insisted upon as essential to continuity and repose. Of course. Once the new shrubs here are established, the grass or some discreet greenery must be allowed to grow under their feet. How Mr Gilpin managed this at his vicarage in the New Forest without the help of a strimmer I cannot imagine. Life is easier in the picturesque garden these days. Then there is Lady Wolseley, who founded the Glynde Col- lege for lady gardeners, suggesting an Italian pot garden. What a good idea to have a semicircular hedge of beech, back- ing pots of standard Portugal laurels; or Pots of arums lining the paths of a shrub- bery; or terracotta pots with chimney campanulas against a yew hedge to flower in August. The last is easy to arrange, but there are presently no semicircular hedges, nor any paths through shrubberies in this garden. There is here a slight conflict of interest between Mr Gilpin in the pictures- que corner and Lady Wolseley with her patterns of pots, but the anguish of decid- ing which transformation to effect only enhances the pleasures of anticipation. How tempting too to turn theherb i garden, which is such a pain to weed, into a facsimile of Russell Page's Formal Garden with Blocks of Colour. Delphiniums in one bed, Iceland poppies in the next, as well as blue cornflowers near high white marguer- ites might look much prettier than the bronze fennel, purple sage and blue flax and borage which predominate now. For the hideous asbestos roof of any lean-to woodshed Miss Jekyll has the answer. Six inches of peaty soil on top and it is possible to grow plenty of stonecrops and house- leeks to hide the eyesore, for Miss Jekyll would have nothing unsightly in the gar- den. In addition to all these excellent suggestions for improvements this book also provides some good entertainment. Beverley Nichols, for example, putting umbrellas over his foxgloves on rainy afternoons, or George Sitwell on the de- merits of grotesque statues, 'for art like laughter should be the language of happi- ness and those who suffer should be silent'; or H. E. Bates, detesting the word cultivar which sounds like an ugly Russian cross between a samovar and a collective farm', were all new to me. My only complaint about this invaluable source of texts is that it is too heavy to read in bed. Georgina Masson's Italian Gardens is an old favourite which has been out of print for some time. This is the most inspiring book of them all, but the size and scope of these gardens makes their translation to the Home Counties impossible. Perhaps this is just as well, because as Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe points out in his introduction, the temptation to reproduce their beauty and splendour at home has for many been irresistible and has almost always been an aesthetic trap. Trapped you will be, for looking at the photographs makes one sick with longing for the pavilion at the Villa Marlia, or the pool at the Villa Palmiri, surrounded by hedges and orange trees in just the style that Lady Wolseley so admired. The pictures of stone and water and the huge sculptured hedges can only make one resolve to see more of these gardens. Georgina Masson will tempt the reader not just out of doors into the garden, but across Europe to see what she describes.
Lanning Roper ought to inspire one to great changes and emulation, but somehow the book about him and his gardens by Jane Brown did not quite make me feel that his was the style 1 wanted to adopt above all others. In real life I admired Lanning Roper very much. He was a charming man whose greatest talent, I think, lay in helping clients to make gardens which were easy to maintain and pleasant to look at. His private work was pretty and never pretentious and he was a genius at steering people away from the mistakes they might have made without him. It is only four years since he died and perhaps it is still too soon to look at his work dispassionately, but Jane Brown has done a thorough and timely job on resear- ching his gardens before they disappear, which ought to prove invaluable when the moment comes to think about his work more objectively.
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