Garden words: The February Review

The Morville Hours
by Katherine Swift

This beautiful, heartfelt, classic work of garden writing is poised just at the point where the muddy business of gardening becomes something more spiritual and meaningful. It captures perfectly that elusive depth of feeling we all experience when we've got our hands in the soil. It is the kind of book I would like, one day, to aspire to when I write the story of my own garden.

It's essentially a love letter from Katherine Swift to her 1.5 acre garden at the Dower House at Morville Hall, an Elizabethan manor house owned by the National Trust in Shropshire.

Katherine – a garden historian – designed the garden to tell the history of British gardening through a series of rooms, each designed in a particular historical style. It's open to the public, so you can go see for yourself.

The book, published in 2008, tells the story of the making of this garden, from the moment Katherine first arrived there – somewhat unwillingly, since she describes the garden as her husband's 'plan to lure me home', with great reluctance, from Dublin where she was then working looking after Trinity College's collection of rare and ancient books.

But what lifts this book above just another story of how a garden was made is the fact that – like so many of the best gardeners – Katherine is a dreamer, and an uncurable romantic. Just take this paragraph, from the first page of the book.

'I came here to make a garden. In the red earth I find fragments of blue-and-white willow-pattern china, white marble floor-tiles, rusted iron nails. A litter of broken clay pipes in the flower-beds, their air holes stopped with soil. Opaque slivers of medieval glass, blue as snowmelt. Flat wedges of earthenware dishes with notched rims and looping patterns of cream and brown. Who drank from that cup, who smoked that pipe, who looked through that window? Did they stand as I stand now, watching the clouds on the hillside?'

It is beautiful writing: and she has a knack of making you see things in a new light. I've never looked at the junk I've pulled out of my garden in quite the same way since reading that paragraph: last week I dug up an old iron hook, hand-forged and rusted but still strong as an ox, and have been wondering about the Somerset blacksmith who made it – and the farmer who left it there - ever since.

She's also a wonderfully inspiring historian, seamlessly weaving historical facts and stories from hundreds of years ago with mysteries and ancient lore through the text, meandering down sidetracks every few sentences until you've forgotten where it was you started. The book itself is modelled on the Book of Hours: a guide for mediaeval monks laying out the seven Day Hours and Vigils, the Night Office (aka Matins): a strict code to follow, but within which she finds plenty of room to wander well off the beaten track.

This means that one minute she's talking about thawing the garden stopcocks, the next she's wondering whether a figurine in the local museum – thought to be a votive offering to a natural spring and found at nearby Wenlock Priory - is a Gaulish sacred relic or a Romanesque carving. And that leads on to a short history of milling and the Industrial Revolution in Shropshire: for a book about a garden, this is one with the widest possible remit.

A deep feeling of place pervades the text and you fall in love with Much Wenlock and the Shropshire Hills along with the author as she delves further into its people and its history.

It's also full of delightful vignettes: take Lady L (for Labouchere), nearly 80 and in failing health.

'There was lunch at one and tea at four, hot-cross buns at Easter and steam whistles from across the park on Bank Holiday weekends – the sound of the Severn Valley Railway on the other side of the river. The big old sitting-room was piled with books, papers, letters, photographs, Country Lifes and Christie's sale catalogues, half-finished embroideries and just-begun watercolours.'

She goes on to mention that Lady L is related to the pioneer women photographers Lady Charlotte and Lady Lucy Bridgeman, known to their descendants as 'the burnt aunts' because they died together in 1858 when their crinolines caught fire.

It's a finely-observed, sharply intelligent, sensitive book, quite unlike any other I've read. Apparently there's a successor now: after The Morville Hours was serialised on Radio 4, people woke up to the fact that Katherine had been quietly contributing gardening columns for The Times for four years. 'The Morville Year' is a collection of those columns, published this time last year. She's also currently working on a third book. But this is the one they'll all have to measure up to: and I can't think they'll find that easy at all.

Garden words: The May review

Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City
Dan Pearson
You know, I do sometimes wonder why Dan Pearson ever became a garden designer.

The thing is (and I sincerely hope he doesn't mind me saying this) he doesn't really seem to be that interested in it. This, his latest book, is a moving and poetic love song from a gardener to his London garden. And - rather refreshingly, if I'm honest - it barely gives a mention to the day job.

Dan is Kew and Edinburgh trained: he's a botanist and a gardener to the veins of his mud-grimed fingers, and it is his love of the physical act of gardening that shines out from these pages.

He talks of 'utter absorption', the rhythms of the seasons, rhapsodises about Felco no.2's in the way only a dedicated gardener can. You've got to like a man who can write, 'I have four pairs because I feel lost without them and ill-equipped if I can't feel them in my back pocket'. Is there any gardener who doesn't derive deep comfort from the weight of a pair of Felcos in the back pocket, I wonder?

But on the design of the garden - the structure, the hard landscaping bones - he is so brief as to be almost dismissive. There is a passing mention of cantilevered steps which hints at something more styled; but to be honest, he shows more enthusiasm for the rubber builders' buckets he uses.

Mind you, he likes his dark limestone slab benches - though I suspect that's because he uses one of them to house his species pelargoniums. And he's also lyrical about the 'shards of tumbled limestone' which make up his path: 'The pacing in the garden is interesting underfoot,' he says. 'I like the way you move from wood to solid stone to the clatter of broken limestone, then wood and clatter again as you move through the garden'. But that's by way of taking you to his willow tree and his agonies over removing it.

This is a book to speak to the heart of any muddy-fingered, welly-clad gardener. Anyone who has ever railed at the ever-growing list of things to keep them from the garden will sigh when he says, 'I spend as much time as possible living outside because the garden draws me there; it is the first place I go after getting out of bed and the last at the end of the day.'

As well as being a passionate gardener, Dan is an inspired and poetic garden writer. His use of language is simply delicious: you revel in it, bask in it, hold it like jewels in your fingers. He talks of holly never being oppressive because the leaves 'shine like a thousand tiny mirrors'; Magnolia 'Porcelain Dove' smells of 'churches, incense and musk', while the blooms of a Paeonia delavayi, nicked as a seedling while he weeded beds at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, is 'dark as dried blood and satiny as an Elizabethan damask'.

There are useful tips too: a planting combination he recommends shades the tricky Erythronium californicum 'White Beauty' to just the right degree with filigree Dicentra 'Langtrees', which after it has died back in summer is replaced by the willow gentian Gentiana asclepiadea. A real plantsman and gardener's combination - and one for the notebook.

And I was deeply reassured to find that even such a god as Dan Pearson has his 'corner of shame': that bit of the garden where odd cuttings, surplus seedlings, impulse buys and sentimental saplings moulder miserably for months, forgotten. Of course Dan's corner is a cut above: it includes such treasures as balsam poplars and Euonymus planipes sown as seed from the Netherlands. But nonetheless - you can feel he gardens just like you do.

And I haven't even mentioned Howard Sooley's sumptuous photography: lingering, atmospheric, perfectly capturing the earthy and natural feel of the book itself. Dan has now burst the constraints of his city walls and I can claim him as an almost-neighbour, since he has moved to a smallholding not many miles from me in Somerset these days. I can't help thinking he will be happier in the country.

Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City by Dan Pearson, is published by Conran Octopus http://www.octopusbooks.co.uk/

Garden words: The January review

I have many books about garden design on my bookshelf. The likes of Robin Williams, John Brookes, Tim Newbury, Piet Oudolf and Roy Strong snuggle together amicably there: they have, over the years, instructed me purposefully, generously and reliably. I have shamelessly nicked designs from all of them and shoehorned them into gardens with a non-designer's lack of discrimination. Heck, I once built a brick wall on instructions from a well-thumbed copy of John Brookes's 'The Small Garden'.

But there are only so many times you can be told how to triangulate things. Sometimes all you require is a lot of lovely pictures of, say, pergolas so you can figure out what you like and - more importantly - what you want for whichever garden you happen to be building at the time.

And that, mostly, is what you get with The Essential Garden Book, from the unlikely pairing of uber-chic interior designer Terence Conran and thoughtful, sensitive garden designer Dan Pearson: published in 1998 but still current and a late New Year present from my other half, who knows the agonies I am in at the moment over how to design a fruit cage that doesn't look like a fruit cage.

I have my doubts about Terence Conran's forays into garden design, though I must admit his design template for a compost bin (was it really his, though, do you think?) remains a staple in my repertoire. He's rather good at houses, of course: in fact this book was designed to follow his The Essential House Book.

But stick to what you know is my motto, and such sequels are often less than successful. Luckily whoever was advising him clearly knew his stuff, as he managed to collar a relatively recently-established Dan Pearson to do it (there are also - surprisingly ill-acknowledged - contributions from Isabelle van Groeningen and Andrew Wilson). The book was first published a scant decade after Pearson arrived at Home Farm, so we were only just beginning to see what he was capable of.

I'm afraid I quickly gave up on the words and just basked in all the lovely, lovely pictures. You see this is a sourcebook extraordinaire: the size of a baking tray, it is heavy and rich with ideas. There are steps, sprayed with mud and grass, growing green and hairy; wonderful dry-stone moongates; a trellis so cloaked in ivy it looks like a living sculpture; and fences made of multicoloured bottles strung on wires.

The pictures are this book's strength, but it does get bogged down in the words. I do question how digestible and relevant an essay on void versus mass - however intelligently put - is to the ordinary backyard reader. And most non backyard readers will probably know about it already anyway. Dan Pearson is, of course, a fine writer: but this is quite obviously a book designed to be looked at, not read.

But worse: in the end it tries to be all things to all readers. How can you possibly even attempt to cover the cornucopia of perennials, bulbs and ferns in just six pages (including pictures)? I'll tell you - woefully inadequately, and by avoiding cultivar names wherever possible, which makes it a bit of a pointless exercise. And vegetables, herbs and fruit are given just four measly pages, including exotica like kiwis, peaches and apricots. A breakneck gallop through every aspect of gardening is achieved in just 12 of the book's 272 pages - relegated to the back, of course. It's hard not to avoid getting cross at the priorities here.

I came away with the impression that this was a book without the confidence to be what it very nearly is: an outstanding sourcebook full of inspiration, ideas and horizon-widening examples to send you away into your garden full of renewed determination and optimism. If I'd been the editor, I would have lopped off the bits about plants and gardening and let it flourish as the design book it was meant to be.

Horticultural knitting

I'm quite easy to buy Christmas presents for, since more or less anything gardening-related will do (except plants: friends and relatives learn quickly that if I haven't asked for it, it's horrible to grow/horrible to look at/horrible to look after and I WON'T LIKE IT. Call me picky, but it's better just not to buy them for me. Sorry.)

But among many lovely green-fingered gifts this year was one that made me laugh out loud, and neatly combined my other secret obsession: knitting.

Jan Messent's Knitted Gardens, given to me by my sister-in-law, is the wackiest but most wonderful idea I've ever come across. It strikes me this may be the perfect way for the frustrated gardener to while away the winter months while still getting that all-important horticultural fix.

It's pretty straightforward, and I suspect rapidly becomes very addictive. I don't know who made the gardens photographed for the book itself but they're exquisite: every flower is picked out, every fence scrambling with climbers, every shrub a riot of blossom and fuzzy woolly colour. There are veg gardens for the allotment-minded and very ornamental gardens for those who prefer flowers. And, this being unaffected by the seasons, you can make your garden any way you want it.

Apologies for the photographs here - they're just pics of the book - but I got very carried away by these. This one on the left is a cottage garden - it's actually a wall hanging and this is just one section of it. The row of cottages with their knitted roofs and crocheted conifers and the perfect pathways are just so gorgeous.

Jan tactfully mentions that this wasn't the work of just one person: she does suggest that if you're doing this yourself you should probably enlist the help of your local schoolchildren or at the very least the nearest WI. But oh, my knitting fingers are itching.... I can feel myself about to embark on a very silly project here.

This isn't the only thing in the book, mind you: there are some throws (nice) and a to-die-for potager bedspread like a perfect little herb garden complete with loopy green wool lavender.


I may work my way up to the wall-hanging by way of the bedspread (that should take me at least five years at the current rate of progress: I am the world's slowest knitter and the stack of projects-in-progress is also high and getting higher). I'll have a warm-up with this - the smallest project in the book and a little vegetable-garden-on-a-cushion. Complete with cabbages, caulis, carrots and leeks...

If there has ever been a reason to take up knitting, this surely has to be it.

Now, once I get to the wall-hanging.... I feel a communal knitting project coming on. Any keen knitters out there want to help me out in about 10 years' time?

Tulips again!

I'm currently reading Anna Pavord's "The Tulip" - it's been around for a while, but I thought since I've spent much of last autumn planting over 100 tulips in my own garden it was about time I found out about them.

What a lovely book. It's quite heavy-going, I find, largely because the scholardship is so dense: but once you've got into it, you can't help but be drawn in by the extraordinary story of this unique flower.

It's evident from the first page how well-educated Anna Pavord is: I'd always suspected it of her, but now I have proof that she not only speaks French, but 17th century French at that: the only trouble is she does rather assume her readership is as erudite as she is, and leaves great passages untranslated. I'm lucky enough to speak near-fluent modern French - but I find this is beyond me.

Never mind: it's not necessary to enjoy the book. It's full of little amazements: did you know, for example, that the French had their own version of tulipomania a full century or so before the Dutch? Or that the Turkish, who began the tulip craze, spurned the traditional European goblet shape (or more accurately, didn't even consider it in the first place) for the acutely waisted shapes only seen these days in Parrot tulips and the like?

Anna Pavord is one of those people who has always existed in the horticultural firmament. I can only wish I were half as good - or indeed as successful - a garden writer as she. I can't make out a professional gardening connection, but she's one of the best kind of gardeners: that is, one who has learned her craft through her own personal experience. She spent 30 years restoring a garden in Dorset before moving and starting again. She made her name with this book, though she has several others to her name, all sharing her particular brand of intelligence and insight. She just seems to be a true enthusiast and scholar of all things garden-related.

It's made me see tulips in an entirely different light. I'm looking forward to my spring blooms all the more for reading this: a whole new layer of knowledge and pleasure to add to what I hope will be a wonderful display.