Gardening on air #4: Of Austen and arcadia

Did you know the 18th century landscape designer Humphry Repton turns up in Jane Austen's novel, Mansfield Park?

No, I didn't either: but a rather wonderful programme about him in the series 'Escape to the Country', about people who make the transition from city to countryside, had me scurrying to my dog-eared edition of Ms Austen's book to check. It's true - it's the bit in chapter 6 where they're talking about Sotherton Hall:

"It wants improvement, ma'am, beyond anything. I never saw a place that wanted so much improvement in my life; and it is so forlorn that I do not know what can be done with it."

"No wonder that Mr. Rushworth should think so at present," said Mrs. Grant to Mrs. Norris, with a smile; "but depend upon it, Sotherton will have every improvement in time which his heart can desire."

"I must try to do something with it," said Mr. Rushworth, "but I do not know what. I hope I shall have some good friend to help me."

"Your best friend upon such an occasion," said Miss Bertram calmly, "would be Mr. Repton, I imagine."

"That is what I was thinking of. As he has done so well by Smith, I think I had better have him at once. His terms are five guineas a day."

The first programme in the series was all about Mr Repton and his five-guinea-a-day designs. It's presented by Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen, who I have until now chiefly associated with wafting around Chelsea in very large cuffs, but clearly I've been doing him an injustice.

Humphry Repton was the one responsible for places like Tatton Park, Longleat Park, Woburn and Kenwood House. He was the one after Capability: Llewelyn-Bowen describes him as the 'feminine' to Capability Brown's 'masculine'. (He also describes him, with I hope a deliberately tongue-in-cheek irony, as 'a makeover artist'). And in a very real sense he took up the reins from Brown, beginning his landscaping career at a time when Capability Brown bestrode the landscape and indeed was largely shaping it.

Repton was all serpentine paths, terraces, balustrades and topiary, often plonking them right in the middle of Capability landscapes in an expensive 18th-century exercise in nose-thumbing. He didn't do what Capability did and sweep away any villages and pesky peasants who got in the way of the grand vision: though what Repton did wasn't much better, as he framed them as part of his presentation of a kind of bucolic Arcadia to be viewed from the terraces of the big house.

The main bit about Repton which stuck in my memory from garden history lessons is also mentioned here: he drew his gardens in beautifully-painted watercolours in red books which he then gave to his clients: the early precursor to a Vectorworks printout, perhaps.

You can listen to this edition of Escape to the Country until next Sunday by the miracle of Listen Again: it's here.

Gardening on air #3: Painting with words

A little poetry today, written by Andrew Young, a 19th-century Scottish botanist and clergyman who is said to have seen almost every single British plant for himself: no mean feat in those days. I hadn't come across this before, but it's one of the most vivid evocations of the end of winter I've ever heard.

Last Snow

Although the snow still lingers

Heaped on the ivy's blunt, webbed fingers

And painting tree trunks on one side,

Here, in this sunlit ride, the fresh, unchristened things appear

Leaf, spathe and stem with crumbs of earth clinging to them

To show the way they came

But no flower yet to tell their name

And one green spear stabbing a dead leaf from below

Kills winter at a blow.

As heard on Poetry Please with the inimitable Roger McGough yesterday on Radio 4.

Gardening on air #2: Not a lot of people know this but...

Quotes from the priceless interview with Michael Caine for the Christmas edition of Desert Island Discs, which I've only just got around to listening to (we recorded it, so apologies to those of you for whom this is old news):

"I bought a mill house at Windsor which had a private gate on to Windsor racetrack. It was funny because I had about five or six acres there right on the edge of the Thames, and the Queen had the right to go through a gate and the path at the back of my garden. And so it was quite extraordinary, one day I'd be gardening and I'd look up and the Queen would go by in a Range Rover. She just waved."

"I took [my mother] to Beverley Hills for the first time. It was in the middle of winter here, like January, and of course in Beverley Hills all the flowers were out. We were driving through it talking and I said, looking out of the window, ‘What do you think of it, Mum?’ And she said, ‘Oh, it’s lovely, all that hysteria growing up the walls.'"

I shall never think of climbing wisteria in quite the same way again. Unfortunately you can't listen to the programme again (copyright restrictions or some such) but you can take a look at his esoteric music choices - most of them, I'm convinced, chosen by his teenagers as a wind-up for Kirsty Lang - here.

Gardening on air

Another little occasional strand for the New Year here: as well as being an avid book-reader, I'm an obsessive Radio 4 listener, though without the tendency (or time) to write cross letters to Feedback every five minutes (I just shout at the radio in the privacy of my own kitchen instead).
The radio accompanies me out into the garden when I'm up for a long session, and I therefore get to listen to alot of those funny, quirky little daytime programmes which pop up more or less at random when relatively few people are able to listen to them. This means I often hear horticultural snippets buried in programmes masquerading as something else entirely unrelated to gardening: and it seems a bit of a shame to let them drift off unremarked into the ether so I thought I'd give them a little mention here instead.

Open Country last week, for example, went to visit Elspeth Owen, who is frankly bonkers though rather endearing in an English eccentric sort of way (do visit her website - it's quite extraordinary). She's an artist and grandmother, and at the age of 71 chose to celebrate last month's blue moon by living outside in the Cambridgeshire Fens with nothing to separate her from the sub-zero December temperatures but a three-sided open shelter. Which makes her more of an endurance competitor than a seeker of profound truths, but anyway....

Elspeth is not only a keen composter (though she says she's now iffy about adding her number twos after someone told her you should only do that if you're vegetarian) but also the daughter of a keen gardener. This meant she was particularly appreciative of the wild pear tree growing nearby, and I loved the image she used:

"It has these rather unappealing-looking really hard, hard fruit but it has the most incredible blossom... When we very first came to live here and I was looking at it from a distance, I thought the blossom was a sail, because it was down by the river. Of course, you couldn't have a sail on this river really: but I can remember that moment and it made it something magical."

Thanks to the wonder that is Listen Again, you can enjoy the programme in its entirety here: as well as composting and wild pears it encompasses the training of husky dogs, a singing post (aka a farmer's metal gatepost) and midnight bead-burying rituals. Only in England, eh?