Ursula Buchan

Hooray for anthocyanin. Where would we be without it? It has long been my favourite water-soluble, vacuolar, glucosidic pigment, and I feel that this autumn has justified my preference. True, chlorophyll is more important until then, being essential for photosynthesis, so we should all be in dead trouble without it; and the carotenoids, carotene and xanthophyll, are often more obvious to us, because of the delicious golden yellow to which many native shrubs — field maple, elm suckers, and blackthorn — turn in autumn. However, even at that time of year, anthocyanin just gets my vote, because it produces the most beautiful of crimson-lake and purple tints in aging leaves.

Is Christmas creeping up on you, unawares? Again? Have you found yourself, even at this late hour, facing a nil-all draw as far as presents bought, and presents asked for, is concerned? Never mind. When, finally, you can no longer ignore what is happening all around you, at least you can be comforted by the knowledge that your gardening friends and relations are easy to buy for. Little twiddly gardening gadgets are the very stuff of mail-order catalogues, and thus available without you leaving your hearthside to sit in a traffic jam. If a paving stone weeder doesn’t quite fit the bill (although, trust me, they are very useful) you could consider a garden vacuum. I know fashion bullies think they are really naff, but take no notice, for they are brilliant.

Ursula Buchan on the new chief presenter of BBC 2’s Gardeners' World Where do you stand on the most important issue of the day, namely, whether the BBC should have passed over Carol Klein, to be chief presenter of BBC 2’s Gardeners’ World after the retirement of Monty Don, in favour of Toby Buckland? The news that Carol, a longstanding co-presenter, was not invited to apply has irritated not just feminists but the rest of us who think she is sparky, original, knowledgeable and with a very good eye. When pressed hard, she rather wittily referred to a ‘grass ceiling’ and you can see her point. Toby Buckland began his tenure on 12th September, and it was obvious pretty soon that he was personable and friendly, if entirely lacking Carol’s charisma.

The best enterprises look to the future but honour their past, which is why it was encouraging that the Royal Horticultural Society should last week have returned to the Inner Temple gardens to hold a show, almost a century after the last time it did so. The Great Spring Show was staged there from 1888 to 1911, until it outgrew the site and moved to the Chelsea Hospital grounds where it has remained ever since. This year’s show, a ‘Floral Celebration’, was appropriately enough, supported by the City firm of solicitors, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and it attracted 16,000 people over three days. Its staging should have cheered all those who think the Society has become a little careless of its two-day London Flower Shows in recent times.

I have always been reticent about recommending gardening books for anyone short of something to read on holiday. After all, gardening books are often heavy and unwieldy, their appearance is not improved by contact with sand or sangria, and they make you terribly homesick for your own garden. But, since reading Keith Simpson’s suggested summer holiday reading list for Tory MPs (and by implication the rest of us who are interested in politics), I feel less timid.

If your ears go back, like a frightened horse, at the word ‘conceptualism’ when applied to modern art, you may not be very pleased to know that this is a hot topic in landscape design at the moment. If your ears go back, like a frightened horse, at the word ‘conceptualism’ when applied to modern art, you may not be very pleased to know that this is a hot topic in landscape design at the moment. Before you gallop off round the paddock, however, I should point out that we could all be beneficiaries, if the result is brighter, more interesting public (and private) spaces. After all, there cannot be much to be said for the rigid geometry, concrete street furniture and off-the-peg greenery, which has been the norm for decades.

In the 19th century, the painting of flowers was mainly the preserve of maiden ladies with too much time on their hands, whose watercolours would be framed by indulgent brothers, and hung on bedroom walls. Scientific botanical painting was left to talented, poorly paid artists, whose work was reproduced in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine and other learned journals, or hidden in the fastnesses of botanic gardens, where it was studied by scientists in search of answers to plant taxonomic questions. Despite the rise in its status and visibility in recent years, even now there are people who believe that botanical art is an oxymoron; that the requirements for scientific accuracy inevitably undermine, even remove, the opportunities for artistic expression.

I have waited several years for this moment — in fact, ever since the late 1990s upsurge in interest in gardening began to fade, the press stopped talking about it as the new sex, and the jeunesse d’orée turned their fickle gaze elsewhere. Now, as partygoers shade their hungover eyes from the glare of financial reality, and householders look in horror at their sky-rocketing bills, the talk is all of letting the holiday home, missing out on the cruise, keeping the old car going for another year, and ...and ...even growing some vegetables. I am sorry that it has taken an economic downturn to turn some people back to the preoccupations of their parents, but you can see why this might give me a quiet satisfaction.

Among the serially misused words of our time — celebrity, passion, caring, genius — we must surely count ‘plantsman’. Thirty years ago, it was a term given only to exceptionally knowledgeable, enthusiastic and botanically inclined amateur or professional gardeners, as well as to particularly experienced and thoughtful nurserymen. However, in recent years, ‘plantsman’ or ‘plantswoman’ has come to mean anyone who knows the difference between Amaryllis and Hippeastrum, or who puts a plant in the garden where they think it will be happy, rather than consciously associating it in colour and season with others. Plantsmen knew the names, provenances and, where necessary, complex cultural requirements of all their plants.