THE FOLIO SOCIETY

The Art and Craft of Gardening

MOST PEOPLE become interested in gardens and garden writing through the act of gardening itself - but this is not true in every case, and certainly not in mine. In fact a surprising number of gardening enthusiasts first came to appreciate this craft or art, or whatever you want to call it, primarily through the rather more sedentary process of reading books about it.

It does not necessarily follow that such people have a deeper understanding of the subject – perhaps the opposite is true – but it does mean that gardening and literature can become as tightly entwined as a rambler rose and a well-maintained trellis. And I suppose this feeling is only intensified among those who spend much of their time writing about gardens and landscapes. It is indeed notable how many celebrated gardeners have also been feted for their literary skills – gardening and writing have always gone hand in hand.

I became interested in gardens – really interested in gardens – when I was twenty-one. At that point I realised that anyone below the age of about thirty-seven who had a passion for this pastime would be asked many times, somewhat incredulously, ‘So how did you become interested in gardens?’ There tended to be a note almost of outrage on that last word, as if horticulture was an unseemly and unnatural preoccupation for a young(ish) person who was, presumably, expected instead to be out paragliding, recording rap records or setting up entrepreneurial websites.

Until I passed that watershed age of thirty-seven a few years ago, I had been asked this question scores of times, in the same way, by all sorts of people. At parties in my twenties, when I was working at Kew, I recall attempting to justify this apparently ridiculous predilection for gardens on aesthetic grounds, in that the medium represented a synthesis of existing interests in architecture, painting (colour theory in the garden), philosophy, literature and the performing arts (because gardens change all the time, of course). Predictably perhaps, this response served only to bewilder people even more. Since that time my answer to this familiar question has changed to: 'eighteenth-century poetry'.

Now I admit that this, if anything, is even more pretentious than the earlier response, but in my case it does at least have the merit of being true: it was the poetry of Alexander Pope in particular which made me begin to take gardens more seriously as a potential art form, inspiring visits to symbolic eighteenth-century gardens such as Studley Royal (still my favourite), Stowe, Rousham and Stourhead. The touchstone of my interest in gardens has remained a fascination for such transcendent places, rather than a penchant for getting my hands dirty growing potatoes. But both aspects of gardening can be treasured, of course, and good writing about gardens never entirely sacrifices the one to the other.

Concocting A Gardener's Year, a seasonal anthology of garden writing, and in the process enjoying all manner of passionate and evocative writing, I came to wonder whether it is possible that gardens can be experienced almost as intensely through words as through real-life experience? I believe so. Again and again poetry and prose can transport the reader to a particular time and place: a garden, where all the senses are heightened and one feels most intimately engaged with the natural surroundings – even, perhaps, subsumed into them. Some of the best garden writing can encapsulate this range of moods.

One writer springs to mind particularly in this regard: Eleanor Vere Boyle, a respectable sensualist who wrote first children's books and then garden books (a common trajectory, particularly among female writers) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Boyle's descriptions of her own topiary-filled garden are intensely evocative of its atmosphere at different seasons and at different times of the day. She probably did more to define the atmosphere of arts and crafts gardens than her technically minded friend, the far more celebrated Gertrude Jekyll, ever did.

Such writing has little to do with horticulture itself; it is all about the experience of place. The emphasis is not on horticultural advice but on the garden as a phenomenon – a cultural, historical and aesthetic experience. Such reflections are best expressed through words on the page – better, even, than in photographs or paintings, I would argue – where the gardens themselves can linger like a waft of floral scent from a flower-bed, provoking enchanting memories or kindling pleasant imaginings. The precious changefulness of gardening is somehow complemented by the delightful imprecision of descriptions of gardens in poetry and prose.

On the other hand, the rigour and responsibility of providing good hands-on practical advice can also lend prose a terse beauty or economical wit, and I have made sure that there are plenty of examples of this in the anthology. From the outset I felt it was imperative that the book's more visionary passages should be complemented by writing that is useful as well as engaging or finely wrought. The best modern example of this has to be the late, lamented Christopher Lloyd, whose frequently iconoclastic views enraged almost as much as they delighted. But there is a fine tradition of well grounded garden writing in English in the mid-twentieth century particularly – in the work of connoisseur gardeners such as Beverley Nichols, for example, or those ladies who espoused the decorous muddle of cottage gardening, Margery Fish and Vita Sackville-West. Gardening provided the perfect topic for their witty, self-deprecating style.

The balance between craft and art finds its correlative in both gardening and garden writing. Gardeners must be careful not to become too obsessed with plant collecting or technical problems, or their garden will mean little to anyone else; garden writers must ensure that they never lose sight of the fragility of garden art, and the way natural scenes are often the result of painstaking planning. As Alexander Smith, one of the anthologised writers in A Gardener’s Year, puts it: 'In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books.'

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