And here in West Somerset, in mid-August, I see the ultimate form of gardening: farming today. The landscape is ordered from end to end, the fields an array of geometric yellow-gold shapes sectioned off by the dark green lines of hedges. I have always been fascinated by landscape history, so I know that the shapes are eloquent also: they tell of early clearance, of changing usages, of the enclosure movement. An excerpt from Ursula Fanthorpe’s poem ‘Seven Types of Shadow’ is an elegant expression of this:
After a hot summer, fields grow talkative.
Wheat speaks in crop marks, grasses in parch marks.
Wheat or grass, what they tell is the truth
Of things that lay underneath five thousand years ago,
The forts, the barrows, the barns, the shrines, the walls.
These are the native ghosts. After a hot summer.
No haunting. No rattle of chains. They just lie there
In their rigid truthfulness, the ghosts of things.
I tramped around looking for all that, long ago. Deserted medieval villages a speciality; it was a triumph to locate one of those – the lumps and bumps of the buildings, the ridge and furrow of the once-fields. But now, above all – with my head at the moment full of gardening images – the shapes are the imposition of order, over hundreds of years, the subjection of a place that is programmed to run wild, to display the survival of the fittest. Walking Somerset lanes just now, the deep lanes with high hedge banks that are cliffs of primroses and ferns in spring but have now been sternly shorn back by Somerset County Council, I see on all sides the russet-tipped soft green of fresh oak leaves springing from the banks. This is oak country; left to itself, untouched by human hand, it would become a sea of oak, as I imagine it once was. Gardened for hundreds, thousands, of years, its oaks are restrained, kept in their place along the roadsides. Gardening as industry. And harvesting has just begun, so I am reminded that the implements required are on a somewhat different scale from the hoe and the wheelbarrow; a combine harvester approaches, and there is not room for me and it in the lane. I must either squeeze myself into the bank, at my peril, or walk briskly ahead until we reach a passing place, to the operator’s irritation, no doubt.
I suppose that my addiction to television documentaries on wild landscapes stems from some arcane need for, or curiosity about, an untouched world, before humanity stepped in and ploughed it up. Yellowstone National Park in the United States has been shown lately, at length, dramatic in its geothermal features, its lakes and mountains, for one used to the more tranquil landscape of England (tamed or not), but nicely illustrative of a primeval landscape. Similarly the Australian bush, tracts of Africa. The world before industrial gardening. I try to conjure up West Somerset before we had our way with it – a world of oak, ash and thorn, with nothing familiar except the contours that I know today: the rise of the Brendons over there, Treborough Common, our local high points – Dumbledeer, Withycombe Common, Croydon Hill. And then another combine harvester roars past, reality on the move.
What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared by flowers I fall on grass.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
A book that is a reflection on gardens and gardening has to pay tribute to the green thought in the green shade, to that gardening poem that everyone knows. Marvell’s metaphysical garden is a distinctly high-class place: apples, vine, nectarine, peach, melons, a fountain. Few seventeenth-century gardens would have risen to all that, and not many today, but that is neither here nor there; the point made is an abstract one, and any garden can apply. This is the garden as solace, the significance of a garden, of plants, of nature, as therapy. I’ll buy that. Here’s another way in which the garden defies time, gives order to the mind, the thoughts. The place of escape, of release from demands, requirements, obligations.
The form of the solace, therapy, will differ from person to person, gardener to gardener. For me, it has never so much been sitting about with the green thoughts but just being out there, probably doing something – sit about, and you at once spot some job that needs doing. But, at its most basic, it is simply that engagement with an impervious world; nature, I suppose you have to call it. Out there this morning, with some watering to be done, and dead-heading, and a pot or two to be moved around, I am joined immediately by the robin. It always appears, more or less at once. I do what I do, and it moves briskly about, one beady eye cocked in my direction. I am seen, I suppose, as some kind of ambulant tree, possibly a threat and therefore requiring close observation, but also useful because my activities invariably stir up insects. I like the robin, a lot; its presence lifts my spirits – that sharp black eye, its precise, purposeful hopping hither and thither. The robin doesn’t like me – let’s not get anthropomorphic – but I am an opportunity, to be seized. Whatever, we are in some kind of symbiosis. That is the therapy, the green thought, that the garden has served up. At other times, it is all the usual garden gifts: smells – a rose, a pinch of thyme, rosemary, artemisia, choisya; the turning of the year – the first green gleam of bulbs coming up, the hellebores out, roses with new growth, the acer’s spring glow. There is a mindless satisfaction in all this; out there, looking, noticing, other concerns are temporarily shelved. Therapy.
In fact, the idea of the therapeutic garden is very much in the public domain, an accepted element in the treatment of health problems of one kind and another. There are elaborate, carefully designed therapeutic gardens attached to hospitals, hospices, medical centres, retirement communities, especially, it seems, in the United States, where the design of such gardens has become an art form. It is claimed that access to nature balances the circadian rhythms, lowers blood pressure, supplies vitamin D. I find circadian rhythms hard to understand; all organisms are subject to them, it seems – they tell plants when to flower – and for us humans the essential aspect is their direction of our sleeping and waking pattern. I don’t see what the garden is doing here, I must say; vitamin D and the effect on blood pressure make perfect sense. In fact it is this last that seems to me the crux of the matter; the garden and all that is therein can have a calming effect, which is exactly what Marvell was on about, rather more elegantly. For me, a ten-minute engagement with the robin – and the dead-heading, and the watering – puts out of my head a tiresome decision to be made, chores to be done, that nagging worry; it puts into the robin various ants, and a couple of small worms (I saw). Never mind the circadian rhythms, for either of us – the garden has provided. Sustenance for the robin, green thoughts for me, or rather, a therapeutic absence of thought.
I suppose that parks and open spaces are public therapy, municipal therapy. Hyde Park, Green Park, Grand Central on the other side of the Atlantic: the great green lungs that every city needs, and that most have, acknowledgement by the state that people need space that is green and open. The need for green … I am constantly aware, and gratified, that London is a city of trees. Many of them the London plane – Platanus × acerifolia – that splendid robust tree, apparently impervious to pollution, many decades old in some of the central squares (the ones in Berkeley Square possibly over 200 years), with those handsome trunks and the trademark black bobble seed heads in winter. The planes predominate, for good reason, but every London road, great and small, has trees. A few minutes’ walk from my door there are several fine sorbus, a couple of eucalyptus, and withi
n sight of my windows a laburnum, a chestnut, three different kinds of flowering cherry.
I am lucky to live on a London garden square, not one of those snobby gated Kensington ones that are for residents only, but one owned by the local authority, accessible to all. And much used – mothers with toddlers, office workers with a lunchtime sandwich. There are always a few people out there, sitting on the seats or the grass. Admittedly, rather too many a few years ago, when a teenage gang laid claim to the gardens (the only local space not ‘owned’ by rival gangs, they told the police); much undesirable activity then, but by the next year the gang had found a better pitch, or grown up, and all was tranquil again. The square is lush with trees, has good grass spaces, rose beds where the planting is sensibly robust, much ‘Peace’ and ‘Queen Elizabeth’ – they have to take an occasional pasting from footballs.
Sometimes a lady takes a Pilates class out there, doing wonders for the circadian rhythms, I expect. People read there, sunbathe, picnic, rock a baby to sleep, stare at a mobile phone. There is plenty of bird life, and three rather stout semi-feral cats, who are fed by a local resident, but apparently not permitted house space. The gardens provide an oasis of green, and calm, in a bustling part of London.
The garden is therapeutic, but it seems to be a mantra now that gardening itself fosters the health. It is claimed that gardeners can live for up to fourteen years longer. Why? Because of all that vitamin D, and the exercise, but also because of getting the hands into the soil – exposure to natural bacteria boosts the immune system. On the exercise side, two hours of energetic gardening apparently uses up the same energy as a half-marathon of thirteen miles. And even the pottering kind of gardening done by the likes of me is strongly recommended; for older people, activity on a daily basis reduces the risk of stroke or heart attack by 27 per cent, according to one study. And, indeed, a government health adviser said in 2015 that GPs should prescribe gardening to prevent the onset of dementia. Well, there are said to be six million active gardeners in Britain, so we can take heart, smugly confident that what we want to be doing anyway is also beneficial.
Someone said to me recently that getting keen on gardening had changed her life – a remark that would have interested me from anyone, but especially so in her case because she was young – around thirty. It confirmed my impression that the taste for gardening is getting younger – no longer the preserve of the middle-aged and beyond. Many lives being subtly changed … And what is it, this change?
I think it is all to do with the question of time, order – and perception. The assumption of a gardening persona gives you, me, anyone, that enriching lift out of the restrictions of now, and today. The gardener floats free of the present, and looks forward, acquires expectations, carries next spring in the mind’s eye. And remembers, also, looks back, and considers then as compared with now, and next year. A gardener is able to see incipient promise everywhere: these nondescript stems and leaves will burst out into the creamy pink flowers of Hydrangea ‘Early Sensation’, from this patch of bare earth will rise a clump of cerulean-blue grape hyacinths, come April, this dormant green shrub is going to light up spring with the rich red new leaves of Pieris japonica ‘Mountain Fire’. Gardeners are dealt a rich store of anticipation.
And then there is the imposition of order. The gardener has an objective: the weeding of that bed, the pruning of those roses, the digging of a potato trench. Nothing more salutary than a task satisfactorily completed. Cleaning a room or doing the washing-up come nowhere near it; the garden job well done is visual pleasure, you can see and savour the effect of what you have done. Where there was an unsightly tangle there is a display of what should be there, instead of what should not; the roses stand neatly prepared for next year’s growth; the trench awaits those seed potatoes. Gardening is not outdoor housework; it is a manipulation of the natural world, the creation of order where order is appropriate, the subtle adjustments of disorder where that would be effective. It is creative, in short.
Finally, the question of perception. I shall annoy non-gardener readers (should there be any) by saying that gardeners are more perceptive. Gardening, you look at how plants grow, you learn how different plants behave, you see the whole interactive process of soil, root, stem, flower, insect. You are up close and personal with nature. I remember a three-year-old granddaughter, given a trowel to keep her quiet while her mother gardened alongside, turning up a worm and gazing in utter fascination: earth had a new significance. I am always distracted by bees – the licence you have to observe them closely, as they rummage inside a flower, laden with pollen, purposeful, intent. I can no longer get down on my knees, which is where a gardener needs to be, and I miss that intimacy with the ground, the close engagement with root structures, the proper division and replanting of an iris rhizome, the sowing of seeds.
Once a gardener, you look around you differently; you notice more, you pay attention to the mundane, and you pounce at once on anything unfamiliar. Every gardener is an automatic taxonomist: the naming of things is essential, a plant you don’t know is a challenge. What is that? Today, I photographed (furtively) a nearby window-box; there was what looked like a dwarf Michaelmas daisy and you don’t reckon to put Michaelmas daisies in window-boxes; but, yes, it seems that there is one that is obligingly small – Aster ‘Dwarf Queen’, I think. The gardener ends up with a head crammed full of names; I have the universal old-age failing with names and have to fish around now, but I have not yet stared at a rose wondering what kind of flower this is, and in fact plant names seem to surface more readily than those of politicians or celebrities, which is as it should be, as far as I’m concerned.
Gardening, we step beyond the dictation of time. We create order. We design and direct. We get right in there with the plants, escape worldly worries, do in our knees and our backs, set spinning our circadian rhythms, jack up our immune systems, and possibly live a few years longer. When hard at it, none of this is relevant; it is simply a matter of intense engagement with cutting back, taking out, putting in, with this rose, that weed, these seeds, bulbs, tubers. As an occupation, it seems to me unparalleled; productive, beneficial, enjoyable. What more could you want?
Style and the Garden
Gardening style is a social indicator. Eleanor Perényi noted this in Green Thoughts, recalling the discussion of U and non-U (upper class and non-upper class) prompted by the professor of linguistics at the University of Birmingham in 1954, and taken up by Nancy Mitford in an essay in Encounter. Speech was the matter at issue – whether you said napkin or serviette, what or pardon, drawing-room or lounge, but Perényi extended it to flowers, observing that while, in Mitford’s terms, everything transatlantic would be considered non-U, certain plants are definitely non-U either side of the Atlantic: gladioli, scarlet salvias, wax begonias, red-hot pokers, orange marigolds. Wax begonias, incidentally, are those small ones with thick waxy leaves, dark green or purple-brown, and clusters of pink, white or red flowers, often used as bedding plants. And here I put my hand up, defiantly. I have some white ones this summer, sharing a huge shallow pot with white impatiens, acquired at a garden centre because the combination looked a good idea, and it is.
Nancy Mitford did not mention plants, focusing entirely on language, but she was clearly aware of the garden as social indicator. In her The Pursuit of Love (1945), young Linda, offspring of aristocratic landed gentry, as U as you can get, makes an unwise marriage to the son of Sir Leicester Kroesig, a nouveau riche banker. The Kroesig country house is in Surrey, which is of course not the shires, not real country at all:
The garden which lay around it would be a lady water-colourist’s heaven, herbaceous borders, rockeries, and water-gardens were carried to a perfection of vulgarity, and flaunted a riot of huge and hideous flowers, each individual bloom appearing twice as large, three times as brilliant as it ought to have been and if possible of a different colour from that which nature intended. It would be hard to say whether it was more frightful, more like glorious
Technicolor, in spring, in summer, or in autumn. Only in the depth of winter, covered by the kindly snow, did it melt into the landscape and become tolerable.
Spring brings out the very worst:
You could hardly see any beautiful, pale, bright, yellow-green of spring, every tree appeared to be entirely covered with a waving mass of pink or mauve tissue-paper. The daffodils were so thick on the ground that they too obscured the green, they were new varieties of a terrifying size, either dead white or dark yellow, thick and fleshy; they did not look at all like the fragile friends of one’s childhood.
I think I recognize those daffodils: they sound like ‘King Alfred’, that largest and most strident of all, beloved of parks and other municipal planting.
Perényi blames the hybridists for the introduction of ‘unheard-of vulgarities to the garden world’ – the creation of double this and that, larger and larger blooms, and indeed this condemnation ties in nicely with Vita Sackville-West’s taste for all the small, single, discreet and unshowy varieties. Bold and brash was definitely déclassé.
In Angus Wilson’s The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958), Gordon and David are a gay couple who run a nursery garden. Not a garden centre – those were not around yet, and, if they had been, would have been considered vulgar, populist, as compared with a proper nursery, which grew most of its own stuff. And still does – plenty exist today. Gordon and David are themselves connoisseurs of good-taste gardening, but commercial necessity obliges them to cater for a wide spectrum of customers:
Azaleas and rhododendrons for the richer soil of the expense-account, weekend gentry who were their neighbours in the Forest to the north; delphiniums, dahlias, the most ordinary regular annuals for the ‘new poor’ ladies below the chalk line to the south, from cottage gardens in the Downs to sad, windswept gardens without hope in the seaside refuges of the retired. And shrub roses for the more sophisticated – the rich ‘resting’ stage stars, the lady novelists, and the local friends of Glyndebourne. It was a triumph of practicality over self-indulgence, David reflected.