The days are short, there is no light for gardening after work, and local horticultural societies are halfway through their winter programme of illustrated talks. All over the country, gardeners are gathering, in spartan village halls and echoing church rooms, on every first Tuesday in the month to listen to a ‘speaker’. These talks are designed to entertain, enlighten and generally see gardeners through until the spring, when allotments beckon, and garden visits and flower shows can once more be organised. All towns and most large villages have a horticultural society, which is impressive in an age when people increasingly refuse to join things. But then members of gardening societies are also stalwarts of Inner Wheel and the Women’s Institute, they sit on church councils and serve in charity shops. For them, the word ‘community’ has an older meaning than mere sectional interest.
For speakers like me, the winter is thus a busy time. Neither illness nor foul weather can separate me from my duty to a group of keen gardeners, who gather to hear me speak, on some aspect of gardening or gardens, for an hour (with questions). The invitation to speak usually arrives from the programme secretary, who may well be called Sue, about 18 months in advance. Sue and I discuss date, title of talk, equipment required, likely size of audience and the tricky question of payment. I am grateful for the advance warning, especially if I need to prepare a new talk. Some can be delivered without notes, and simply require the putting of pictures into a sensible order; others involve, in effect, the writing of a full-blown extended essay, a process which takes about an hour for every minute of talk delivered.
On the evening, I take a projector with me, trusting Sue’s assurances that there will be a screen, a lectern and a light waiting for me in the hall. Occasionally, communication breaks down and I deliver a talk in the dark, unable to see either notes or audience. Sometimes the ‘lectern’ is a music stand, and my notes fall through the gaps at a moment which can never be said to be convenient. In the days when I still used a slide projector, I would find that, every so often, a slide would get jammed and there would be an agonising rootling-around in the machine by a technically inclined member of the audience, while the rest, blinking like troglodytes in the unaccustomed light, grew restive.
Now I take a laptop and digital projector with me but the strain is, if anything, worse: I must avoid tripping over the myriad cables, while praying that the expensive light bulb in the machine will not blow mid-lecture, the stand on which my computer rests will not collapse and that, before the talk begins, no one carrying a chair will put one of its legs through the laptop screen.
Some difficulties never change, and everyone — politicians, clergymen, or cookery demonstrators — who speaks in public will recognise them. There are the two ladies who talk all the way through the lecture, except when I stop speaking, when they stop too, only to start up again when I do. An irreducible minority of the audience will fall fast asleep almost the moment the lights go out and the first image appears on the screen. (I take absolutely no offence at this, having a weakness for it myself.) And, although it is customary to field a range of questions afterwards, I am sometimes stumped by a particularly arcane one — on cherry slugworm, say, or EU Pesticide Regulations — and can feel pretty foolish.
Afterwards, I am rewarded with a vote of thanks from Sue, a cup of coffee, a biscuit, a courteous request to draw the raffle and a welcome cheque. People who stayed quiet during question time approach diffidently and, often, an interesting discussion ensues. A cheery sociability fills the air, like the smell of warm bread. I drive home in the fog, happy to have spent an evening with gardeners whose friendliness, enthusiasm, communal fund of experience and common sense rarely disappoint. People who, however many times they must have heard it, still find funny the old joke about Vita Sackville-West, that she was Lady Chatterley above the waist and the gamekeeper below. They want to laugh, they want to learn and they want to have a pleasant evening; in return, I gain a lot from their experiences. They are committed to a spirit of inquiry and a benign competitiveness, and are a force for good. Any more takers for a raffle ticket? The prize is a lovely cyclamen in a pot…
Ursula Buchan’s latest anthology of garden writing, which includes many Spectator pieces, is published by Frances Lincoln, price £16.99.
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