Life in the Garden

by Penelope Lively

  Way back, I remember relishing James Fenton’s newspaper gardening articles. Fenton is of course an eminent poet, and I doubt if there have been many, or any, other poets with such a depth of practical horticultural knowledge. The articles were engagingly witty, and nicely instructive. I wish I had cut them out and kept them, but I have a whiff of them in the form of his brief book A Garden from a Hundred Packets of Seed, a selection of articles for the Guardian. Opening it at random, the signature style jumps out at me: ‘Viola tricolor “Bowles” Black is the unanswerable self-seeder. Irrefutably black when grown in isolation it enjoys fooling around with other violas. Keen on bloodlines, are we? Then we should “rogue out” the less perfectly black seedlings.’ Fenton made a garden outside Oxford, and I remember visiting when he was in the process of designing and laying it out. ‘There,’ he said, gesturing towards a sweep of bare earth, ‘is the laburnum walk. And there’ – an area of dock, nettle and bramble – ‘is the Margery Fish garden.’

  Ah, Margery Fish. From time to time Josephine and I visit East Lambrook Manor Gardens in Somerset. The gardens were created by Margery Fish and her husband, Walter, after they bought the Manor in 1938, and are today restored much as they were when Margery died in 1969, and hold, incidentally, the National Collection of geraniums (hardy geraniums, this means). I am clocking up National Collections that I have managed to visit. Her book We Made a Garden is an account of what sounds the Herculean task of turning two acres of former farmyard and rubbish deposit into an intricate area of winding paths, beds, walls, enclosed areas. And they did it themselves, she and her husband, hauling stone, clearing away ‘old beds, rusty oil stoves, ancient corsets, pots, pans, tins and china, bottles and glass jars …’ Her account is practical and informative: if you want to know how to create a lawn where lawn there never was, go to Margery Fish. And also both inspirational and attractively candid. Inspirational in that it is full of plant references and descriptions of what they did; why on earth have I never had Dresden China daisies, I find myself thinking crossly, or a terrace garden (too late for that, but Bellis perennis ‘Dresden China’ – might just be in time there), and candid in its references to a prime instance of marital gardening discord. Not all the time – Walter Fish was largely responsible for the hard landscaping, and she seems to have deferred to his skill and energy in that respect, but when it came to plant preferences and gardening practice she was in a state of constant negotiation. Indeed, there is a subtext of forbearance throughout the book; I find myself not much caring for Walter. His taste was for large, showy stuff, with a passion for dahlias, and no interest in the winter or spring garden, just the display of high summer. Margery favoured the less flamboyant, the more subtle – the euphorbias, the hellebores, the hardy geraniums, the astrantias, vincas, snowdrops, aquilegias, pulmonarias. And I’m right behind her, remembering the garden as I have seen it in spring and early summer. Walter used to trample all over ‘her’ plants when planting out his precious dahlias (the loudest and flashiest possible), and where his gardening manners were concerned he sounds exasperating – never picking up his prunings or dead-heads but leaving them for her to clear away. Like some men in the kitchen – cooking without doing their washing-up. Still, it was a gardening partnership, if a sometimes edgy one, and Margery Fish is herself in the front ranks of gardening writers.

  The attraction of writing like hers is its unpretentious simplicity. Remember Sir George Sitwell? She is not thinking of herself as writer, but as gardener. She writes out of passionate addiction, and expertise, but the writing is straightforward, unselfconscious. The same can be said of Beth Chatto, distinguished especially for her writing of difficult gardening circumstances – gardening where it is wet, gardening where it is dry. She has written mainly of her (and her husband’s) creation of five acres of garden in Essex, comprising gravel garden, woodland garden, water garden, and so forth. Her matter-of-fact, precise style can have me as absorbed as I would be reading skilful fiction, entirely involved in her account of compost-making (an activity in any case quite out of the question in my small paved London garden). Beth Chatto’s The Dry Garden has me wanting to move at once to East Anglia, shed forty years, and start a new, robust gardening life with a garden full of artemisias, santolinas, eryngiums, grasses, all the Mediterranean things. The book is spattered with plant names; you need to read it with the omniscient iPad at hand: I see, that’s what Epimedium × versicolor ‘Sulphureum’ looks like. I find myself conjuring up a virtual-reality garden as I read. Bird books are the same sort of reading material, for me: every now and then I settle down with my Field Guide to the Birds of Australia – I shall never see a Splendid Fairy-wren again (I did once – they are sapphire blue) but I want to imagine it.

  Marital gardening in this instance seems to have been an altogether more harmonious affair. Beth Chatto thanks her husband warmly – ‘whose life-long hobby has been to study the natural homes of our garden plants’ – saying that without him neither a garden nor a book would have been possible. That’s better. Casting a beady eye over these various gardening partnerships I can see that they work best where roles are tacitly defined – Andrew Chatto providing the scholarly ballast for a garden, Leonard Woolf as the acknowledged driving force, Harold Nicolson taking over the initial layout.

  Both Margery Fish and Beth Chatto are restrained, meticulous, orderly in style. Eleanor Perényi stands in nice contrast; she was American, and her book Green Thoughts (1981) is wonderfully different – rambling, discursive, opinionated. She was married before the war to a Hungarian baron, and lived in his castle, with a 750-acre farm, forest, vineyard and distillery where alcohol was made from potatoes. She tried to garden there, in conflict with an alien gardening tradition (and herself noting a similarity with Elizabeth von Arnim), but her real gardening life began after she returned to America in 1940 (divorcing her husband in 1945), and worked as an editor on magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar. She was living on the Connecticut coast, and so was confronted with the conditions imposed by that ferocious east-coast climate – the hot humid summers, the frost and snow of winter, and a challengingly short growing season. Spending many summers in those parts in the 1980s, with American friends, I used to admire their determination and tenacity in getting any sort of a garden going for the summer – the planting-out of annuals, and then the desperate efforts to protect them against what seemed every kind of onslaught, from the woodchucks that would dig them up to a wealth of chomping insects.

  Green Thoughts is constructed in the form of alphabetical essays from ‘Annuals’ to ‘Woman’s Place’, by way of compost, dahlias, earthworms, frost, herbs, ivy, mulches, poppies, seeds, toads, weeds, and much else – episodic, sometimes briskly dismissive, sometimes chatty, impressively well informed. Eleanor Perényi ropes in everyone from Petrarch, Virgil, Alexander Pope to Henry James. She flings out opinions right and left, sometimes condemnatory; petunias, for instance, are ‘pretty, very pretty – and as hopelessly impractical as a chiffon ball dress. Rain soils and bedraggles them; they are mostly too short and floppy to make a good cut flower and need constant shearing if they are to bloom throughout a summer.’ There, so much for the petunia. She can be lofty in her views, on colour, for instance: ‘Nature’s favorite color is a washed-out magenta, the original shade (and the one their hybrids will revert to if they go to seed) of petunias, garden phlox, sweet peas, nicotiana, foxgloves … The preferred color of the unsophisticated is firehouse red, the winner among tulips, zinnias, dahlias, salvias, impatiens, begonias etc. by a wide margin. Orange and yellow come next, then pink, with blue and white, both comparatively rare in nature, last on the list … It follows that blue and white are the choices of the discriminating, and your real garden snob will go so far as to cast whole gardens as one or the other.’

  At this point I cast a nervous eye over my own garden, today in mid-June, to see where I stand: three different kinds of white roses, so I am in the clear there, blue campanula sprawling all over the place (and a c
hoice white one in a pot), a white parahebe just opening out, a bowl of white impatiens to light up the shady side, but – oh dear – a pink trailing begonia, pink roses and red, not to mention a whole large pot of pink geraniums (but there is another pot of white, to compensate). That said, internal evidence in the book suggests that Eleanor Perényi did not by any means stick to this stark pronouncement, and, rather surprisingly, she admits to a weakness for dahlias – ‘and not the discreet little singles either’.

  Hers are ‘as blowzy as half-dressed Renoir girls; others are like spiky sea creatures, water-lilies, or the spirals in a crystal paperweight’. She does not, I feel, have the Margery Fish taste for the subtle and unshowy, but wants the big and bold, and is explicit in her preference for blue: anchusa, perennial cornflowers – Centauria montana, echinops, the blue veronicas, monkshoods, catananches, and, indeed, blue delphiniums (nothing more fiendish to control than the delphinium, set on falling over as soon as you turn your back). All the same, I would like to have seen her garden (you don’t actually get much idea of it from the book), and I enjoy the way she dives into a subject that interests her – roses, herbs – truffling away for arcane information. Green Thoughts is a conversation, in effect, and like all good conversation is alternately witty, arresting, and sometimes usefully enlightening. She is excellent on compost-making; what is it about compost that seems to generate a rush to the head in such diverse writers? She delves fascinatingly into the whole question of The Lawn, and one reads her lawn-making views with respect, knowing well that a New England lawn requires unparalleled dedication, whereas over here grass just … grows. The book skips from instruction to forays into the history of the tulip, or the hybridization of roses; its charm lies in its arbitrary nature, and you find yourself reading in the appropriate way – dipping in, leafing through, becoming absorbed where you had no idea you would be interested.

  A splendidly different gardening voice is that of Karel Čapek, in his The Gardener’s Year (1929). Čapek was a Czech writer – playwright, essayist, writer of science fiction before that genre really took off. It reminded me at once of The Good Soldier Schweik, so this must be idiosyncratically Czech humour. The Gardener’s Year is Čapek’s jeu d’esprit about the perversity of gardening, written with wry humour. The garden, for Čapek, is an adversary, a cherished adversary perhaps, but nevertheless the awkward place where the gardener is forever on the back foot. Literally, more or less: ‘Gardeners have certainly arisen by culture and not by natural selection. If they had developed naturally they would look differently; they would have legs like beetles, so that they need not sit on their heels, and they would have wings, in the first place for their beauty, and, secondly, so that they might float over the beds. Of course, at a passing glance from a distance you don’t see anything of a gardener but his rump, everything else, like head, arms, and legs, is hidden underneath.’ Čapek’s gardening year sets out with the assumption that the weather is always wrong, whatever it is doing, and is the second adversary, after the garden itself. He is not so much advising the reader, as warning; there is a tacit agreement that a garden is indeed a lovesome thing, but don’t for one moment imagine that it is achieved other than by way of gargantuan struggle. Take the simple matter of watering: ‘… until it has been tamed a hose is an extraordinarily evasive and dangerous beast, for it contorts itself, it jumps, it wriggles, it makes puddles of water, and dives with delight into the mess it has made, then it goes for the man who is going to use it and coils itself round his legs’. He discusses the question of soil improvement: ‘The garden … consists mainly of special ingredients such as earth … stones, pieces of glass, mugs, broken dishes, nails, wire, bones, Hussite arrows, silver paper from slabs of chocolate …’ I know what he means, having tackled the unreconstructed soil of a London back garden. Never mind, he persists; unable in his town garden to acquire ‘guano, leaves, rotten cow-dung’, he ‘hunts about at home for eggshells, burns bones after lunch, collects his nail-cuttings, sweeps soot from the chimney’. In July, he accepts the ‘immutable law’ that roses should be grafted. Not something I have ever felt impelled to do, but pre-war Czech gardening must have been different. ‘When all is ready the gardener tries the blade of the knife on the tip of his thumb; if the grafting-knife is sufficiently sharp it gashes his thumb and leaves an open and bleeding wound. This is wrapped in several yards of lint, from which a bud, rather full and big, develops on the finger. This is called grafting a rose.’

  At one point he gets interested in urban vegetation in general, urban flora, noting that ‘one kind of vegetation flourishes in coffee-houses, and another, shall we say, at pork-butchers; that some kinds and genera grow best at railway stations … it could be demonstrated, perhaps … that another flora flourishes outside the windows of Catholics, different from that outside the windows of unbelievers and freethinkers.’ As for window-boxes: ‘There are two kinds: the poor and the rich. That with poor people is usually better; besides, with the rich it dies annually, while they are away for holidays.’

  You don’t go to Čapek for gardening advice but for an entertainingly central European take on the challenge of the garden. That’s what I like him for, and for being just as far as is possible from Sir George Sitwell, though I suppose I must be charitable and see Sitwell as a cultural product also. Equally embedded.

  This has been a discussion of the written garden – two kinds of written garden, the fictional garden and the entirely non-fictional writing of those who know about gardening, the garden writers. I could of course have cited many more instances of both, but enough is enough; what I wanted to do was to explore contrasts, in both kinds of writing. The novelists (all women, I realize, and that was not deliberate – men will get a look-in later on) demonstrate, I feel, something of the flexibility of the garden as fictional material, of different ways of using it, not just as background in a story, but as rather more than that – a story element, an essential feature. And my chosen gardener writers are various also, but each of them fired into print, as it were, by their gardening addiction. Essential reading matter for any gardener, indeed for anyone.

  The Fashionable Garden

  Like most people, I have gardened according to the fashion, or the taste, of the day. I have hunted down dwarf conifers and then ripped them out a few years later; I have junked gladioli and substituted crocosmia, preferably Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’; I can barely remember staking chrysanthemums and storing dahlia tubers. Restricted now to my few square yards of London garden, I can’t go for broke with Verbena bonariensis all over the place, or alliums, or penstemons. I did have a bed of Euphorbia amygdaloides, but the local foxes lounged on it all the time, so it has been replaced with ground-cover roses, which have nicely dispersed the foxes.

  These days, garden fashion is dictated by television gardening programmes, by garden journalism, by what is available and conspicuous in garden centres. Both television and garden centres are relatively recent dictators – neither was around when I first took an interest in gardening in the 1960s. But we have always gardened according to the written word, and some very persuasively written words at that. In the early part of the twentieth century, and back in the nineteenth, writers were the garden gurus of the day. Not usually fiction writers, but devoted gardeners – maniacal gardeners, indeed – who turned themselves into writers in order to spread the message. Back in the 1970s, I planted a clematis up an old apple tree, as did many other readers of the Observer. We had been taking note of Vita Sackville-West’s gardening articles. At the time, I knew little about Vita Sackville-West; her long poem The Land was on my shelves – a bestseller in its day but now entirely unregarded. Its companion volume, The Garden, I had somehow missed out on. I did not know that she had been the lover of Virginia Woolf and many others, that she had been a figure of scandal and interest in her time. Her novels were no longer around. I had heard of Sissinghurst, her famous garden, and read the gardening pieces with attention; I just thought she was an upper-class lady with
some interesting gardening ideas. As indeed she was, and her style probably did more to affect a certain kind of gardening – middle-class gardening, I suppose – than anything for fifty years or more. Her readers rushed to get into trough-gardening, old roses, hellebores, blue flowers and white ones, climbers swarming up trees, and all small, subtle and quiet-coloured flowers. We rooted up our hybrid teas and floribundas, we threw out the chrysanthemums and the cactus dahlias, we spurned anything with showy or outsize blooms. We aspired to a white garden. The circulation of the Observer soared, and the volume of letters to Vita from her readers required a special mail-van delivery to Sissinghurst.

  She was indeed a talented gardener, though actually the design of the Sissinghurst garden apparently owed more to her husband, Harold Nicolson, who complained about her refusal to plan, to think ahead: ‘The tragedy of the romantic temperament is that it dislikes form so much that it ignores the effect of masses … She wishes just to jab in the things which she has left over.’ Ah, matrimonial gardening dissent, familiar to many of us. In fact, he was in charge of the hard landscaping, and she was the plantswoman. She was entirely self-taught, like many of the great gardening figures, and simply evolved her gardening style out of likes and dislikes, though she respected the professionals: ‘If you want real highbrow talk,’ she wrote, ‘commend me to three experts talking about auriculas. Bloomsbury is nothing to it. I couldn’t understand half they said.’