Gardens are fascinating places. They say so much about their custodians.
Sean Sheehan
Walk down a suburban street in Britain and front gardens tell all. You might see a small but manicured lawn with flower beds or an unkempt patch of grass filled with a jumble of bikes and dustbins.
The ‘garden’ might have been paved over to become a parking space but, next door, someone will have taken time to create and maintain an eye-catching arrangement of flora.
Back gardens, more private than their exposed counterparts, become extensions of the house: some are given over to decking, trampolines or other contraptions while others harbour domestic vegetable plots with fruit trees.
“British Gardens” is a book that looks at gardens as expressions of the psyche of the British people and so, at a time when the country seems at war with itself over its identity, there is no single template. The authors visit and pay homage to small gardens, from an alleyway in Belfast tended by the surrounding residents to the Islamic gardens of Cambridge Central Mosque, from private roof gardens of expensive apartments in the former Battersea Power Station to allotments in Nottingham.
For the most part, though, the book’s journey around the gardens of Britain focuses on grand affairs, many of them not even open to the public, with illustrations of gorgeous grand houses surrounded by topiary, vast flower beds, lakes and statuary.
Such gardens may be an insight into the British soul but they are also manifestations of a class society and say as much about the wealth of their owners as about their love of plants.
A reader may come to wish for a bit less statuary and grand vistas and a little more about visiting times and admission prices but, I guess, this misses the point.
“Garden voices a year of gardeners’ writing” is a very different kind of book about gardening. Entries for each day of the year fill its pages with details and musings that matter, like those of a woman who got up at 03.00 one early morning in June and stood on the steps of her garden ‘almost frightened by the awful purity of nature when all the sin and ugliness is shut up and asleep’.
Another woman gardener is awed by ‘all that opens and dies so quickly in the garden’ but finds a philosophic truth in the inevitable: “we are outraged when the supreme moments, the moments of flowering, must be waited for … and then cannot last. We reach a summit, and then have to go down again”.
As I write this, I read Beatrix Potter writing to her friend about white flower bells among the weeds, a cactus flowering and the weeds overtaking her best efforts at control. Right there with you Beatrix.
“British gardens”, by Monty Don and Derry Moore, is published by BBC Books. “Garden voices a year of gardeners’ writing”, edited by Claire Masset, is published by Batsford.
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