Blooming marvellous
What is thoughtfulness in the garden?
It is, partly, the careful application of knowledgeabout the practical needs of plants. In addition, it is also a kind of two-stepbetween exerting tight, intellectual control over natureand, as with all creative arts, knowing when to let go.
Thus reads the central philosophy of this collection of revampednewspaper columns—together with a light top-dressing of new material—from Robin Lane Fox,for 40 years a gardening columnist on the Financial Times in London. And philosophy is not too strong a word. Mr Lane Fox is a tutor in ancient history at Oxford Universityand a fellow of New College (where he is responsible for its gloriouspublic gardens),and his day job informs every word.
No other garden writer would start a discussion of the beautyof bearded irises with a disquisition on Plato’s ideal formsand the hallucinatory experiences of Aldous Huxley.
This, his third gardening book, is alsohis first in 25 years, but little here feels fusty or irrelevant. The book was published in Britain in Septemberand is about to come out in America. In it the columns are grouped, usefully,into four seasonal chaptersand address the gamut of his horticultural life,past and present—planting and propagating,battling with wildlife at home in the Cotswolds,visiting gardens in America, Ireland, Europe and Britain,and considering other plantsmen and women.
These mini-memoirs are a strength. Some Mr Lane Fox reimagines through visitsto where they worked the earth—“the dead”, he says, “imprint themselves on gardens”—others he has direct personal experience of.
As a young man he worked with Nancy Lancaster,an influential designer-decorator,and draws an evocative thumbnail sketchof her, as a woman who “spent moneyas freely as water from her garden hose”,and her garden, with its tumbling rosesand “Italian cypresseswhose leaves smelt of paper in old books”. Valerie Finnis he describes communicating shrub news,with her proud “28 flowers on the xanthoceras”,to her housebound husband using a walkie-talkie“whose volume, eventually, she learned to control”.That “eventually” is priceless.
It is also typical of Mr Lane Fox’s donnishness,expressed both by his amused, gently amusing, toneand in his unequivocal dismissal of current trends,among them prairie gardening,organic vegetables and the creation of “natural habitats”. Wildlife lovers will blanch:Mr Lane Fox is a rabid fanof pesticides and herbicides.
He laces an oversexed rabbit’s milkwith weedkiller and recommends eating squirrels. His years of practical plantsmanshipresult in deft delineations of the colour,needs and suitable companionsof specific flower varieties:he describes one group of cone flowersas looking “as if they have startedto put their ears back in anxiety”.
But although fecund with practical advice, this not a how-to manual. Rather it is an episodic expression of Mr Lane Fox’s “thoughtfulness”,and his wry acknowledgment that despite all his best efforts—like his triennial battle to prune his classical patte d’oie ofornamental pears—real gardening begins at the moment you understand that nature “cannever be pinned down”. It’s a philosophy worth getting your hands dirty for.
What is thoughtfulness in the garden?
It is, partly, the careful application of knowledgeabout the practical needs of plants. In addition, it is also a kind of two-stepbetween exerting tight, intellectual control over natureand, as with all creative arts, knowing when to let go.
Thus reads the central philosophy of this collection of revampednewspaper columns—together with a light top-dressing of new material—from Robin Lane Fox,for 40 years a gardening columnist on the Financial Times in London. And philosophy is not too strong a word. Mr Lane Fox is a tutor in ancient history at Oxford Universityand a fellow of New College (where he is responsible for its gloriouspublic gardens),and his day job informs every word.
No other garden writer would start a discussion of the beautyof bearded irises with a disquisition on Plato’s ideal formsand the hallucinatory experiences of Aldous Huxley.
This, his third gardening book, is alsohis first in 25 years, but little here feels fusty or irrelevant. The book was published in Britain in Septemberand is about to come out in America. In it the columns are grouped, usefully,into four seasonal chaptersand address the gamut of his horticultural life,past and present—planting and propagating,battling with wildlife at home in the Cotswolds,visiting gardens in America, Ireland, Europe and Britain,and considering other plantsmen and women.
These mini-memoirs are a strength. Some Mr Lane Fox reimagines through visitsto where they worked the earth—“the dead”, he says, “imprint themselves on gardens”—others he has direct personal experience of.
As a young man he worked with Nancy Lancaster,an influential designer-decorator,and draws an evocative thumbnail sketchof her, as a woman who “spent moneyas freely as water from her garden hose”,and her garden, with its tumbling rosesand “Italian cypresseswhose leaves smelt of paper in old books”. Valerie Finnis he describes communicating shrub news,with her proud “28 flowers on the xanthoceras”,to her housebound husband using a walkie-talkie“whose volume, eventually, she learned to control”.That “eventually” is priceless.
It is also typical of Mr Lane Fox’s donnishness,expressed both by his amused, gently amusing, toneand in his unequivocal dismissal of current trends,among them prairie gardening,organic vegetables and the creation of “natural habitats”. Wildlife lovers will blanch:Mr Lane Fox is a rabid fanof pesticides and herbicides.
He laces an oversexed rabbit’s milkwith weedkiller and recommends eating squirrels. His years of practical plantsmanshipresult in deft delineations of the colour,needs and suitable companionsof specific flower varieties:he describes one group of cone flowersas looking “as if they have startedto put their ears back in anxiety”.
But although fecund with practical advice, this not a how-to manual. Rather it is an episodic expression of Mr Lane Fox’s “thoughtfulness”,and his wry acknowledgment that despite all his best efforts—like his triennial battle to prune his classical patte d’oie ofornamental pears—real gardening begins at the moment you understand that nature “cannever be pinned down”. It’s a philosophy worth getting your hands dirty for.
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