A choice of gardening books | 20 December 2008

This is the time of year for dutiful appraisal of current garden books. The heart sometimes sinks at the thought of conning the same old material in a newer and glossier arrangement, but Ronald Blythe’s Outsiders is a genuinely original find. Like Akenfield, his portrait of an English village, his latest work breaks the mould. I cannot remember enjoying a ‘garden’ book so much for years. The author remarks that ‘so much of my favourite garden-writing has nothing to do with gardening books’. If by that he means reading something that makes you feel you are in a garden, rather than gazing at photographs of other people’s borders, or learning how to do it, I think he has a point. Colette, Jane Austen, Mr Pooter, D. H. Lawrence, Alison Utley . . . More writers than there is room to mention blow in and out of his pages. A whole chapter is dedicated to John Clare, ‘a mighty lover of flowers’, and there is plenty of inconsequential information of the most literary and surprising sort, but the learning is lightly worn and the writing lyrical. John Keats, listening to bird-song in his Hampstead garden, walks about in ‘orchestrated air’, Pope calls Bathurst and Burlington ‘his vegetable lords’, Alain-Fournier, that creator of a pastoral idyll, loved Chiswick’s flowery shrubs.

The book is by turns a memoir or a diary, a commonplace theology and an elegy for the rural life that is over — ‘no one looks at fields any more’, Blythe writes. It is also an acutely observant account of living close to nature. Outsiders has something in common with Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne. The descriptions of the changing year — autumn reeking ‘a little of decay, sadness, chilliness and smoke’, the ‘thrilling, faintly worrying, smell of coming snow’ — are those of a real writer.