To pastures new

If you like to pass an idle half-hour, as I do, reading random entries in Who’s Who, you will be struck by how many distinguished people include gardening among their recreations.

If you like to pass an idle half-hour, as I do, reading random entries in Who’s Who, you will be struck by how many distinguished people include gardening among their recreations. Indeed, it is the second most popular pastime — after golf, bizarrely — in the book. To pick just a few: the Duchess of Buccleuch and Queensberry, Lord Justice Goldring, Susan Hampshire, Mark Damazer, Maeve Binchy, Lord (Chris) Patten and Crispin Blunt MP all own up to spending their spare time gardening.

For busy important people, gardening is the perfect recreation, since it is ultra-respectable, private (unless they choose to open their garden for charity, as Lord Carrington does, for example) and they can entirely please themselves how they do it. They are answerable to no Commons committee, group of shareholders, auditorium of students, court of law or church congregation. The world can go hang, for those precious Sunday hours spent outdoors, before duty takes them inside to read the papers for Monday’s meeting.

These people must have discovered that gardening offers the perfect, and complementary, combination of art and craft, the more satisfactory because it is so multilayered. It would be nice to think that some of these enthusiasts read my monthly columns — although I am, of course, just as delighted if they appeal to readers well known only to their family, friends, colleagues, pets and God.

When I began writing ‘Gardens’ for The Spectator in 1984, my husband strongly discouraged me from ever writing about writing for The Spectator, in case the readers thought that I had run out of ideas.