British gardeners are often accused of being parochial, and we rarely make much attempt to defend ourselves against the charge. We think it is probably true but wonder what anyone expects, considering the advantages of climate, soil and geography we enjoy and how beautiful our gardens can be as a result. It is scarcely surprising
I have been talking tosh. Well, not entire tosh, but certainly substantial dollops of wishful thinking and airy, groundless supposition. I have come to this conclusion after reading a book by a plant scientist called Ken Thompson. However, it is written in such an engaging, amiable and witty way that it doesn’t hurt too much;
Christopher Lloyd died on 27 January. Not since the deaths of Gertrude Jekyll in 1932, William Robinson in 1935 and Vita Sackville-West in 1962 has so much homage been paid in the broadsheets to the memory of a gardener. In the nation at large, more people mourned the deaths of Percy Thrower and Geoff Hamilton,
It is a sign of the times that the Great Autumn Show, which has been staged by the Royal Horticultural Society in London in mid-September since God was a small boy, is moving to a date in early October from next year. Autumn starts later and lasts longer; that’s official. And this at a time
All my working life, I have been adapting to climate change. As an apprentice in a garden near Antwerp in the summer of 1976, I spent the early mornings and evenings (we could not work in the day since the temperatures topped 40?C) trying to save the languishing, but famous, collection of rhododendrons, by watering
Sir Edwin Lutyens reckoned that there will never be great architects or architecture without great patrons, and I rather think the same is true of botanical art. The exhibition presently on show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, entitled A New Flowering: 1,000 Years of Botanical Art, seems to reinforce the point. Displayed are works
The British have developed a number of garden styles over the centuries but none more unexpected than the ‘woodland garden’. No one in 1800, when the first rhododendrons were arriving in this country, could possibly have predicted that a sizeable number of large country gardens, situated on acid soil in rolling wooded countryside or in
There was a time, half a century ago, when vegetable gardening was the preserve of old boys on allotments and jobbing gardeners in spacious suburban gardens. No longer. These days, the vegetable grower is as likely to be a 30-year-old female social worker with a small urban garden and a Point of View about pesticides
On a mild, wet, early morning last autumn, I came across two earthworms (Lumbricus terrestris) mating on the lawn. At the vibration of my tread, they split apart and, though I try not to anthropomorphise animals (I could never have gone fox hunting if I had), such behaviour did look shifty, as if I had
In our garden, there is a two-seater, brick-built privy. It hasn’t been used for 40 years or so, but its presence in the garden still has a direct influence on my gardening. Not only does the present paved path follow the direction of the original rough concrete one which led from house to privy but,
From time to time, people to whom I am introduced mishear and mistake me for a Guardian journalist. I can’t always quite be bothered to put them right. I am not ashamed of being a gardening writer — far from it — but my profession has, in recent years, become something of a genteel ghetto.