A choice of gardening books
Mary Keen
current film, Dead Poets Society, is about an English master who gives his class a fresh perspective on life and literature by persuading them to stand on their desks. Like this hero, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe has `Captain My Captain' qualities and can inspire the class to heights which they never dreamed they could scale. Adopting a new vantage point in order to survey the map of the soul laid out in landscape form has always been a Jellicoe speciality. Of the garden which he made at Sutton Place he wrote, 'What I am trying to do in my later years is to create something in the environment which is deeper than what the eye sees'.
Perhaps for this reason, visiting Sutton Place was a discomforting experience, not at all like Going Round the Garden at an Average Stately Home. Curiouser and euriouser, however, sounds Jellicoe's latest garden, for he has turned 142 acres of Texas swamp into a landscape of civilisa- tion which is mainly experienced by boat. I suspect that the real thing may not be half as much fun as his account of the voyage which you can take 'through time and space into a land of the imagination' in The Landscape of Civilisation as experienced in the Moody Historical Gardens, (Garden Art Press, £25). Everything in a Jellicoe garden is not so much lovely as unpredict- able. In Texas, the 'essences' of historic gardens and landscapes are conjured out of the ground to provide the visitor with a metaphysical experience. Yen, Yang and Jung are all on offer as you take the waterbus through the Moody Historical Gardens with Jellicoe at the helm. But just when you feel like jumping ship from an overdose of surreality, he produces a lifebelt in the form of a private joke. In one Part of the garden we are told gloomy conifers predominate. On the right a ruined castle looms ominously. In front the great so-called Tracey Waterfall thunders down out of the sky from unimagined heights, to ruffle the waters and splash our faces.
The footnote to this description reads:
While creating the waterfall I discovered that the smiling cashier behind the desk at my Lloyds Bank in Highgate was unbelievably called Tracey Waterfall. A beautiful name deserving of immortality.
Lucky Tracey with her guarantee of im- mortality, for Jellicoe's gardens and writ- ings will probably outlast all the gardening books this century. His latest work had me bewitched, bothered and bewildered, but never, never bored.
There are other books around this year that may not aspire to the Jellicoe Experi- ence but which also offer a different perspective on the English person's favourite hobby. Garden Ornament (Thames & Hudson, £25) is for those who prefer gardens to gardening. Here George Plumptre has assembled an inspiring re- cord of the artefacts that are now most imitated and desired out of doors. Grot- toes, statues, urns, treillage and all the paraphernalia of the designer are cata- logued and displayed to best advantage. There is even a section of available garden ornaments from James Rylands of Sothebys so that you can, if you have the money, go out and satisfy the urge to crown a vista. Advice on the placing of purchases is contained in a chapter on the use of ornament in the contemporary garden. Jamie Garnock is severe on the settings of some examples, which is enjoy- able for the reader. The owners, however, may not be so pleased to see their mistakes underlined in print. Hugh Palmer's photo- graphs throughout the book make the reader want to jump into the page. More opportunities for page-plunging are provided by a book on Monet's Passion (Pomegranate Artbooks, £19.50) photo- graphed and written by Elizabeth Murray. This is printed in San Francisco and the quality of the pictures of Giverny is so good that you emerge from the pages punch-drunk on colour. It is not a book for the serious gardener as it is entirely full of daisies, dahlias, nasturtiums and tulips, in shades of shocking pink and orange, but colourholics will love it.
The complete antithesis to Monet's Pas- sion is Hellebores (The Alpine Garden Society, £29.50) which are Brian Mathew's Passion. This is a scholarly and definitive monograph which will settle forever those differences about how many flowers per stem you should expect to find on H. dumetorum forma pauciflorus, or what is the correct name for what I thought I was growing as H. atrorubens.
Brian Mathew works in the Herbarium at Kew and his knowledge of hellebores is unparalleled. In addition to the formidable botanical information, he contributes a sinister chapter on the toxicity of helle- bores and symptoms of poisoning, as well as plenty of tips on how to grow these arresting plants. The book is well illus- trated with photographs by the author and with watercolours by Mary Grierson, and no serious gardener can afford to be without it.
Lastly, two agreeable outsiders, which I found intriguing, and different from most of the books on offer. Postcards from Kew (H. M. Stationery Office, £5.50) is a book of picture postcards collected by Gwilym Lewis. This apparently represents only an eighth of his collection. The cards show Kew Gardens in many guises, accompa- nied by long forgotten messages like 'I should love to go with you to Henry of Navarre on Wed' which were sent with the strangely coloured rhodos, sepia buildings and visitors in hats.
Elizabeth Farrar's book on Pansies, Violas and Sweet Violets (Hurst Village Publishing, £9.25) also has a long-forgotten look, perhaps because it is home-made and privately printed, which makes a change from the glossy packages which mas- querade as books nowadays. This is small enough to read in bed and its quaint illustrations, often drawn by the author, look bio-degradable, even if they are not. The author does not persuade the class to climb on the desk in order to have a metaphysical experience, but I think this type of anti-consumer book, the Ecco Eco approach, may turn out to be a trailer for gardening books in the Nineties.
The Glory of the English Garden by Mary Keen (Bullfinch, $50) was published last month.
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