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 January Review

Wicked Bugs

Amy Stewart

There are some books that just make you go 'Well. I never knew that.' And then there are books which make you say it over and over again, to the point where you start bringing up random facts in conversation with friends and family, just to get them out of your head, and when those facts happen to be about small and often fearsome things with a lot of legs your friends and family quickly start looking at you a teensy bit oddly.

Did you know, for example, that British diplomat Charles Stoddart was condemned to spend four years being eaten alive by blood-sucking assassin bugs while held captive in an Uzbek bug pit in the mid-19^th century?

Or that there is a caterpillar in south America so venomous that if you happen to tread on them barefoot you suffer massive internal bleeding and organ failure? Or that the crew who sailed to America with Christopher Columbus were driven so mad by the chigoe flea, which buries itself under a toenail and lives out its life there, that they cut off their own toes to get rid of it?

Nope, nor me.

You will have guessed by now that 'Wicked Bugs' isn't, strictly speaking, a gardening book, but since we gardeners spend such a lot of our time either encouraging in 'good' bugs (ladybirds, lacewings, hoverflies) or murdering 'bad' ones (aphids, caterpillars, whitefly, slugs: the list goes on... and on...) then a book about them can only be endlessly fascinating.

There is a section on garden pests which is... well... almost as interesting as the ones about sailors and armies (did you know some used to throw clay pots full of scorpions at advancing Roman troops, circa 200AD, by the way?) though it does suffer a little from a sudden outbreak of advice-giving. I did think the bit about aphids was horrifying though: apparently one female aphid is born already containing within her the beginnings of a 'daughter' who is herself already pregnant with a third generation. Wow. That explains a lot.

Others, though, like the terrifyingly efficient Colorado potato beetle, are given a section all their own, so dreadful are they. The Germans thought the US Army was waging biological warfare by dropping Colorado beetles on their heads from planes during the Second World War, you know.

And so Amy Stewart gambols on through tales and titbits so surprising, arresting and downright gut-churning that I have been glued to this book ever since I started on page one. I love her obvious delight in her subject and her ability to tell a good yarn; she has a talent for winkling out little snippets of unfeasibly extraordinary information and using it to grab you by the ears. I just wish I knew how she finds out this stuff.

Little niggles: this is an unremittingly American book, to which you have to adjust yourself and stop chuntering about early on. Sometimes that's a good thing: I've always loved the American ability to find an original turn of phrase (no clichés here).

But there's a general assumption that the reader's attention is wandering off all the time (surely impossible given the content of almost every page), so we've got silly little 'pull-quote' things repeating choice bits of a paragraph in a larger type, presumably to titivate the reader but which end up interrupting the flow. I trained myself to ignore them.

Otherwise, though, the book is a gorgeous little thing: I loved its styling as a battered field notebook, and the line drawings and etchings by Briony Morrow-Cribbs are simply exquisite and a master touch.

Amy already has a more plant-oriented book out, 'Wicked Plants', all about poisonous plants, and it's now on my must-have list. Incidentally. you can read a bit more about the book in Amy's own words on the BBC Gardening blog.

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 February review

It's a brave man who sets out to write a book about weeds. It's about the most unpromising topic you can think of in gardening, short of, maybe, digging techniques, or the finer points of a bowling-green lawn (though I'm revealing my none-too-well-hidden prejudices here).

But Richard Mabey attacks his subject with gusto, and the result is - amazing though it might seem - a fascinating book.

He mentions a quote from the 19th century poet John Clare several times, in the frontispiece as well as within the text, and with good reason: it perfectly captures the spirit of the book. I think it's worth reproducing in full:

"I markd the varied colors in flat spreading fields chekerd with closes of different tinted grain like colors in a map the copper tinted colors of clover in blossom... the sunny glare of the yellow charlock and the sunset imitation of the scarlet head aches with the blue corn bottles crowding their splendid colors in large sheets over the lands and 'troubling the cornfields' with destroying beauty."

It's that inherent paradox in the nature of weeds - their 'destroying beauty' - which Mabey investigates so entertainingly. He challenges so many of our long-held beliefs: the definition of a weed, for example, so often 'a plant in the wrong place'. Mabey argues that for 'place' we should read 'territory': a weed is a weed not because of any natural traits, but because we made it so.

We define as 'weeds' plants which are inconvenient to us, ignoring their part in the wider scheme of things. They slip into the corners we ourselves create for them, by farming, or making gardens, or knocking down buildings and leaving it all to rot.

And worse; we make weeds by moving plants quite literally into the wrong place. The Romans brought ground elder for salad leaves, and the Victorians introduced giant hogweed into gardens (it was described in the Gardener's Magazine of 1836 as a 'magnificent umbelliferous plant': the author goes on enthusiastically to say he has given friends plenty of seed to scatter while on holidays in the north of England, Ireland and Norway). Who knows what weedy horrors lie in wait from all those imported plants we're currently planting in our gardens (it's only a matter of time before people realise bamboos are just Japanese knotweed in drag).

The book is stuffed to bursting with wonderful, unforgettable stories. I never knew that soldiers in the trenches in World War I made little gardens with weeds pulled from the battered fields around them: tiny pockets of normality in a world gone mad. In the Second World War, rosebay willowherb sprang up in thickets in central London as the streets were split apart by bombs and the hidden earth exposed; as Mabey comments, 'how thinly the veneer of civilisation lay over the wilderness'. Victorian naturalist Edward Salisbury raised 300 plants of over 20 different weed species from seed found in his trouser turn-ups; and in 1916 a garden was created in New York's Central Park (it still exists) in which all the plants mentioned in Shakespeare's works are grown - including hemlock and nettles.

And the language. Ah.... the language. It sparkles and crackles from every page: he talks of 'vegetable guerrillas', a 'ragged Arcadia', 'rage against the dying of the weeds', 'the whole plant has the jizz of a street hooligan' (this last of bristly ox-tongue, Picris echioides). It's such a pleasure to read the writing of someone who takes such delight in language and is so utterly passionate about what he's saying.

I have just one tiny criticism: the weeds are referred to by their common names throughout, and until you realise (in my case more than halfway through) that there's a glossary with the Latin names in the back, you're often mystified as to which particular weed he's on about. Even when you do know about the glossary, it's a pain to keep flicking backwards and forwards. I expect he was just revelling in the poetry of common names: but I did long for some Latin to cut through the confusion.

But I feel mean and carping just writing that. Go and find this book: sit down on a rainy evening by the fire and devour it from cover to cover. You'll come away with the way you view our least favourite plants subtly shifted: and with a richer view of the natural world.

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.

Garden words: Cooks and gardeners

'Monsieur Milbert has the disposition and the unmistakeable uniform of any French gardener. He is invariably clad in tall rubber boots, indigo blue worker's pants bought down at the market in the stall next to the cheese woman, a ragged scarf tied about his neck, and a hand-rolled cigarette clenched between his lips.

He talks in a low mumble, and the cigarette waves up and down, moving with his words like an expression on his face. He works alone, accompanied occasionally by Madame's dog, ratty little Puce, who jingles behind him with a tiny bell tied around her neck.

He is grumpy and coarse and all the things I was warned about. He takes his contest with nature very seriously and finds no comfort in its unpredictable forces. Like most gardeners, he never vacations. In winter when all is quiet and still, he would much rather spend his time fretting - about the fruit trees budding, about the relentless spring frosts that may or may not come, about the sun and the moon.

Gardeners, I discovered, are tough: content to be grim.'

- from The Cook and the Gardener, by Amanda Hesser, the story of an American cook in a French garden, currently keeping me amused and inspired while the snow lies thick upon the ground.

Garden words: Gardens as Art #2

I must confess I find portraits a bit boring. Those po-faced people you see lining the oak-panelled walls of stately homes were probably delightful people who would have made deliciously witty dinner guests, but as portraits they've never done much for me.

Well - now I know better. Now I know to look over their shoulders.

Roy Strong's 'The Artist and the Garden' is proving a revelation, and I suspect I may never see old paintings in quite the same way again.

This is probably the most famous painting where the background has caused more of a stir than the foreground:

You may well recognise the big fat king in the middle, but don't look at him - take a peek through those arches on either side. This painting hangs in Hampton Court (holiday home, of course, to Henry VIII) and the glimpse of a garden in the background is just about all that is known of Tudor gardens of the time. A Tudor garden has in fact been entirely recreated, at Hampton Court, complete with snazzy green-and-white raised beds and heraldic beasts on poles, on evidence taken pretty much solely from this painting.

This is Thomas More and family, painted in 1593-4 and currently in the V&A. Yes we all know he was executed for daring to stand up to Henry VIII but never mind that - just look at that garden. That's a hortus conclusus - an enclosed, mediaeval garden and rare evidence that even then they were doing garden rooms, fenced off with clipped hedges of whitebeam or privet.

And how about this, from 1641? Never mind Arthur 1st Baron Capel and his family - that's a heck of a garden back there. It is in fact Hadham Hall in Hertfordshire in all its glory, as it was laid out in the late 1630s. The people in the portrait mostly came to a sticky end (particularly Arthur who was executed shortly after Charles I for his loyalty to the king - spectacular example of backing the wrong horse) and so did the Elizabethan house - it was partially destroyed by fire and is now a secondary school. But at the time it boasted the most extravagant garden of its age, and this is one of the best - and only - depictions of its former grandeur. You can see it at the National Portrait Gallery.

This young lady, to be found at the National Maritime Museum, is my favourite though. She's Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, painted in 1603, but never mind that. See that structure behind her right shoulder? That's worth a closer look.

It's an arbour, and it's made entirely of pleached trees. Apparently you plant a ring of trees, then pleach the tops into a 'roof'. You can incorporate extra carpentry - as here - and then plant another tree in the centre and pleach it like an umbrella to make a secondary tier. According to Sir Roy, this is the only representation we have of tree pleaching on this scale in England, although it was quite common in Italy (the Medicis, of course) and the Netherlands.

If there's one garden design feature which deserves to be resurrected, this has to be it. Anyone short of ideas for next year's Chelsea?

Garden words: Gardens as art

I seem to have been spending an awful lot of time in the 16th century lately.

First it was Adam Nicolson in Arcadia - highly intelligent and full of insights into life in Tudor, Elizabethan and Restoration England, but basically not about gardens. Something of a surprise, since it's based on Wilton which is, or rather was, one of England's great iconic gardens. He seemed inexplicably preoccupied with the house and its sundry Earls: just 'cos they hung out with Henry VIII doesn't mean they're more interesting than the garden, you know.

Anyway: now I'm wading into the history of the garden in art, in the company of the erudite and it must be said, himself rather iconic (or should that be iconoclastic?) Sir Roy Strong. Former director of the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A, and designer of bits of HRH Prince Charles's garden at Highgrove as well as author of a lot of weighty books and trustee of various charitable trusts. When you read CVs like that it just makes you want to go and curl up under the carpet.

Gardens started appearing in art for the first time in - you guessed it - the 16th century. But before I plunged into Tudor England again, I had Sir Roy's introduction to read, and that really made me think.

When you seek to picture a garden, do you set out to record an accurate representation of what the garden actually looks like? Or do you seek to capture a mood, a transient atmosphere, the feeling the garden evokes in you when you look at it?

Does it matter if you don't - ever - record pictures of exactly how the garden looks in its entirety? Does it matter if you get the layout wrong?

The thing is, in the 16th century it really did matter, although they didn't know it at the time. Gardens depicted in paintings - sometimes merely glimpsed behind the shoulder of a portrait's subject - are often our only source of historical record on the existence of entire garden styles. Garden historians have pieced together more or less the entire history of the knot garden from throwaway sketches of them in the corners of Elizabethan paintings. And we're guilty of much the same thing even today, with our 'plant porn' photos of pouting paeonies and our moody shots of good-looking corners here or well-planted pathways there.

But perhaps that's the point. Gardens are art: and if you don't record it as such, you miss an essential part of their soul. As Sir Roy writes:

"Whether on paper, panel or canvas the garden picture bestows an immortality comparable to the portrait, enabling the viewer to walk through an existing, lost or imagined garden. The artist's role was essentially to capture this transient and fragile art, one which was subject to the mutation of the seasons and the vicissitudes of time in a way unknown, for example, to a building."

Garden words

I've almost always got some book or other about gardening on the go, and as time goes on I find I'm moving gradually away from the how-to manuals and towards what I call literary gardening books - inspirational and interesting more than useful (though they're often that, too).

There are plenty of others who do fantastic book review strands - so I won't do that. But as a way of passing on a little of that inspiration I thought I'd start a little thread here sharing some of the best bits.

At the moment I'm reading Adam Nicolson's 'Arcadia' - the history of Wilton House, near Salisbury in Wiltshire, and my mum's local stately home. We visit it a lot, and I love the garden although it is a shadow of its former extraordinary and ground-breaking self.

Adam Nicolson has an impeccable horticultural background (son of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, therefore grew up at Sissinghurst, and married to the very productive but hopelessly expensive Sarah Raven). So it was a bit of a surprise to find that this is not, mainly, a book about the garden but about a more philosophical concept: the creation of Arcadian paradise in Tudor England and beyond.

This makes it quite hard going at times, but the book has a habit of chucking out absolute truths that really stop you in your tracks. I shall leave you with one paragraph written about 16th-century England, but with as much resonance, to my mind, for post-war Britain:

"It happens again and again in the history of cultures. A generation of severe, rigorous, demanding and ambitious parents, who establish a form of order and riches, gives way, in the next generation, to a more evolved world, one more intent on fineness than propriety, happy to spend what the parents had earned, indifferent to debt, more interested in display than restraint, more attuned to brilliance and intricacy than mere obstinacy and assertion."