Ursula Buchan

A feature of the gardening world, which probably strikes me rather more forcibly than it does you, is the number of amateur plant specialists there are. These are experts in one area of plantsmanship, usually, who aggregate in groups in order that they can exchange technical talk, test their skills in competition and learn from their fellow-enthusiasts. Although hidden from general view (unless you become an expert yourself and start looking for them), these people add much to the sum of our understanding about plants, whenever their expertise leaks out of learned journals and into the popular prints. The layman may find their conversation mystifying, even sometimes tedious, but it is pleasing to know that it goes on.

Attentive readers will recall that, in recent years, I have worried and wittered and wrung my hands in these pages about the increasing incidents of unusual weather episodes (OK, have it your own way, climate change) and, in particular, whether these ‘abnormal’ conditions are simply temporary blips or represent a definite trend. No longer. I don’t mean that I have stopped worrying, simply that I no longer believe that they are a temporary blip. Just at the moment it is winter temperatures which particularly concern me.

Just as embroiderers working in the late 11th century will not have appreciated the achievement that was the Bayeux Tapestry until they stood well back at the finish, so garden writers are usually too caught up with describing the details of individual gardens to consider the overall magnificence of ‘the English garden’. It was not until I really considered the matter, when writing a book on the subject, that I began fully to appreciate what a tremendous collective achievement it is. English domestic gardens (i.e., those connected to a house, however big) are as much a product of society and culture as of the individual taste and inclinations of their creators; influenced, to a very high degree, by patterns of thought and fashions at the time of creation.

There are, as we all know, many disadvantages to going away on holiday, not least the fact — so ably nailed by Alain de Botton — that we are forced to take ourselves with us. How relaxing it would be to leave home without one’s own deficiencies and inability to enjoy oneself when doing nothing. By the same token, some absolute essentials for happiness have to be left at home: in my case, my dessert plum trees. This year, in mid-August, we went away for just one week. The ‘Denniston’s Superb’ greengages were just ripening when we left, so I picked as many as I could to put in the fridge. I topped up the sugar solution in the wasp traps hanging from the branches.

There was an unexpected outbreak of common sense at Chelsea Flower Show this year. I looked hard for the usual silliness to laugh at, but I was hard-pressed to find much. (There were the celebrities who clutter up the place on Press Day, obviously, but the general public who visit Chelsea are mercifully spared those.) There was much sober purposefulness and little evident desire to épater le bourgeois. Most emperors had obviously decided that the weather warranted them wearing their oldest and warmest clothes. Was it the absence from the show of Diarmuid Gavin and his contrived spats, perhaps, or the fact that the show’s sponsor was Saga Insurance for the first time, or did the chill breeze of current commercial reality wither any desire for wackiness? I cannot say.

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 if we rarely see much reason to raise our eyes above, and beyond, the horizon. We can rely on nearly 5,000 gardens opening their gates to us, for charity or profit, at least once a year, not to mention our own gardens to enjoy each day. Who can blame us, we say, if we lack a proper appreciation of what is going on elsewhere? It is slightly shaming to say it, but only when I am abroad does this forcibly strike me.

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; especially since I can console myself that almost everybody else has been as deluded as me. Ever since Ken Thompson’s first book — An Ear to the Ground; Garden Science for Ordinary Mortals — was published in 2003, I have been a big fan.

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, but these were television personalities. Christopher’s reputation rested on a weekly column, ‘In My Garden’, in Country Life from 1963 until shortly before his death, his contributions to the Observer and the Guardian, a succession of thoughtful, opinionated books, such as The Well-Tempered Garden, and, most particularly, on his garden and nursery at Great Dixter in East Sussex, a draw for garden enthusiasts for almost 50 years. He was lucky with his situation.

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 when the modern predisposition to restlessness — part affliction, part asset — demands that we no longer treat the autumn, when it does come, as a plodding, ‘putting the garden to bed’ time of year but as a vibrant season, full of colour and life.

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 by the greats of the past — Besler, Ehret, Redouté, Jacquin and the Bauer brothers — all of whom were dependent on imaginative private patronage, and these hang alongside paintings by more than a score of contemporary artists from the collection of one patron, Dr Shirley Sherwood. She is the guest curator of the exhibition and, incidentally, wife of James Sherwood, chairman of Orient-Express Hotels.

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 deep valleys, would be filled in the next century or so with the plant riches of the Himalayas and the eastern United States. But so it has turned out.

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 supermarket carrots, or a young family who have escaped the city for the country, or a recently retired couple on an executive housing estate who want to combine flowers and vegetables in an ornamental potager. Vegetable gardening is now as much a lifestyle choice and cultural statement as it is the cultivation of a variety of (mostly) nutritious comestibles.

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 surprised a teenage couple entwined on the family sofa. I had never before in my life seen such a coupling, which is remarkable considering how many early mornings I have spent in gardens and how common earthworms are, but it underlines the fact that their lives are mostly spent hidden from sight underground. Their influence on our lives is usually therefore hugely underestimated — except perhaps by farmers and gardeners.

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, more importantly, the soil in the borders close by is freer draining and more friable than that to be found anywhere else in the garden. The effect of the annual cleaning-out of the privy — on a moonlit night in August, I am told — and the spreading of the nightsoil (even the word is indicative of its use) on the nearest border was to lighten and make more workable the heavy, claggy, limestone ‘brash’ or clay, which is the naturally occurring soil in this garden.

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. There are a number of clever, talented, cultured garden writers at work, but they have a struggle to be taken seriously by the wider world. This is thanks mainly to a narrow concentration by television producers on practicalities and personalities, but is reinforced by book publishers’ obsession with photographic images. As a result, most people now think we are all Charlie Dimmocks, minus the top hamper.