Ursula Buchan

In the hot summer of 2020, during the Covid pandemic, Olivia Laing and her husband Ian moved from Cambridge to a beautiful Georgian house in a Suffolk village and began work on restoring the neglected, extensive walled garden behind it. She was vaguely aware that the garden had been owned and loved by the well-known garden designer and plantsman Mark Rumary, who had died in 2010. He had been the landscape director for the East Anglian nursery of Notcutts, and I remember him as a genial man overseeing extensive, award-winning tree and shrub exhibits at the Chelsea Flower Show in the 1980s. I once owned a copy of the Notcutts Book of Plants, written by him, which was an indispensable reference book for garden designers before the advent of the internet.

What makes a garden is an increasingly pressing question, in the light of what Jinny Blom, in her witty and wise What Makes a Garden: A Considered Approach to Garden Design (Frances Lincoln, £35), calls ‘hairshirt hubris’. By that she means the refusal of some gardeners to call any native plant a weed or any slug or aphid a pest. She wishes to inject a little sense into what has become an ill-tempered dialogue between ‘traditional gardeners’ and the self-deniers who cannot see gardens as anything but parcels of sacrosanct earth, in which any major intervention by a human is to be regretted. But to Blom, garden-making is one antidote to the modern curse of solipsism. ‘Gardens insist we care for them as much, or more, than ourselves.

Important historic gardens fall into two main categories: those made by one person, whose vision has been carefully preserved down the years, sometimes for centuries, and those that are altered and developed by succeeding generations. Rousham, in Oxfordshire, is an example of the first and Bodnant, in the Conwy valley in north Wales, the second. Books on both have been published this year. Francis Hamel is an artist, whose studio is in an old stable close to ‘the big house’ at Rousham, which was built in 1635 by the Dormer family.

Ever since a consensus emerged that trees and, by extension, their ecosystems, were both vastly interesting and badly threatened, great tottering logpiles of books about woods or individual tree species have seen the light of day. Of these books, one of the most influential has been The Hidden Life of Trees (2018), written by Peter Wohlleben, who for many years has looked after a forest in the Eifel mountains in Germany. I read that book with interest, and needed no persuading that woodland trees form, in effect, a community, both as a result of the scents they give off and the interactions between their roots underground.

Dan Pearson is one of the finest of all British garden designers, blessed with sensitivity, a wonderful eye, deep plant knowledge and a willingness to experiment. In Tokachi Millennium Forest: Pioneering a New Way of Gardening with Nature (Filbert, £40) he describes how a 400-hectare parcel of agricultural land and forest in the shadow of the Hidaka Mountains on Hokkaido has been returned to an augmented natural landscape, thanks to a newspaper magnate, Mitsushige Hayashi, with deep pockets and vaulting ambition, who bought it 30 years ago.

Viewed from a purely private garden perspective, this has been a ver mirabilis. The blossom has been wonderful and long-lasting, the sun has shone on the daffodils and tulips, and there has been enough moisture in the ground for impressive growth in trees, shrubs and vegetables. Thanks to lockdown and all its confinements, I have enjoyed an intensity of engagement with my garden I’ve rarely experienced since the days when I was a young, mustard-keen apprentice gardener. I feel as if I have watched every leaf unfurl, every flower open, every bird swoop across the lawn. Spring gardening, with its pleasant, mindful monotony of pricking out seedlings and pulling up speedwell, has soothed my nerves, consoled my sadness, calmed my fears, and brought a welcome sense of proportion.