Green Fingers for the Amateur
MORE FOR YOUR GARDEN. By V. Sackville-West. (Michael Joseph, 15s.) IN Japan gardening qualifies as a religion, with its own mystique, and during the Left Book Club Thirties it came very near to doing that in England. Then vast numbers who had abandoned hope of spiritual comfort from the Vicar became adherents of the plant-a-tree-and-say-a-prayer cults which flourished mightily and out of which enterprising authors made fat livings. In those days inflation didn't threaten the fixed income and if inherited privilege had landed you with a heated greenhouse you could show it the kind of devotion a Trappist monk offers to the Almighty. There was a massive literature on the ritual, your
garden week by week, day by day and very nearly hour by hour. And the man who tried to do something else with his life as well as garden had really no hope of becoming one of the elect.
Now there is a new approach to this pastime. It is brisk and efficient; the experts in their new books tend to peel away the mysteries instead of piling them on. And thank heaven for the small specialist books on specific gardening topics. These are becoming increasingly useful year by year. Three in this class are now on offer from Collingridge, all reasonably priced for value obtained. The publishers are to be congratulated on their use of illustration, big photographs, each one of them worth pages of how-to-do-it wordiness and any number of those horrid little pen-and-ink drawings which used to decorate gardening pom- posity. Hellyer's Herbaceous Borders is to be particularly recom- mended. In this seven-and-sixpence-worth are large photographs of almost every perennial one could possibly want to fill up the holes left by throwing out the Michaelmas daisy.
The Unheated Greenhouse by Deenagh Goold-Adams, also a Collingridge book, is an amiable nod in the direction of all those who have some glass but can't afford to heat it. If the excellent illustrations tell the truth it is possible to have colour the year round without paying those additional charges for electricity which make it cheaper to carry home from the florist.
What to Grow and How to Cook It, by William Blackley, is a direct appeal to the stomach. Mr. Blackley very rightly offers the exotic with the plain in this guide from seed to table, introducing some tasty foreigners like aubergines and capsicums, both of which can apparently be grown without individual electric heaters at their roots. The recipes offered are interesting, though there still seems to be a tendency towards the British culinary crime of stewing. Fifteen minutes' boilihg for tender new french beans is absurd. Five the maximum!
It is a considerable step from the plain practicality of these other books to Miss Sackville-West's More For Your Garden. This is another collection of the author's Observer essays on gardening and even with a list of plants in the front and of seedsmen at the back it is scarcely a very sensible reference work. More a bedside book for browsing in when you are getting over the attack of lumbago brought on by the spring digging; very charming, casually informative with dogmatism, a walk with the author through one of those English gardens that are traditional in the minds of foreigners and about as relevant to the daily living of most of us as the local museum.
OSWALD WYND
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