garden reading

The temperature outside didn't rise above three degrees Celsius, and I spent the day sitting in front of the Aga and reading about Mediterranean gardens, while the cats played at being Gumby Cats, scratching to be let out of the kitchen, then scrabbling to be let in again.  I could have pruned the roses, but my nose was running delicately and persistently like a faulty tap, and a pervasive sense of aching stickiness told me that it would be the work of a madwoman to get chilled when I didn't have to.

My luck is holding with second hand gardening books.  A copy of Vivian Russell's Gardens of the Riviera, condition described as Good, set me back a whole £1.85 (plus p&p), and while it was about as tired as you'd expect a book over twenty years old to be, it was unmarked and there was no damage apart from a rip to the back cover, which in true philistine manner I have mended with sellotape.  I've already got a couple of her books, on Edith Wharton's and Monet's gardens. It is interesting, covering some of the same gardens as Charles Quest-Ritson but also some more recent creations, and gardens made by the French themselves, with more lavish illustrations.  I am still puzzling over one plant reference and can't work out whether there were ever really yellow and orange flowered cultivars of Clerondendron trichotomum, which I've only ever encountered with white flowers followed by extraordinary blue fruits, or whether she was hit by a moment of name blindness that wasn't picked up by the editor, and if so what did she mean?

It was not all fun and games gardening on the Riviera, apart from the fact that most people did it against the backdrop of gradually eroding fortunes and two world wars.  Winters sometimes plunged below freezing, which was more of  blow in a garden largely populated by tender species than it might be in north Essex where you expect them to, summers were baking, the Mistral was capable of scorching plants if not blowing the soil away, there wasn't always any soil to speak of, water supplies were off-grid and often unreliable, and the remorseless march of property development on the surrounding terrain led to views being lost, and parts of gardens in some case summarily requisitioned by the authorities.  The 1920s sounded pretty good, though, if you were rich and well-connected.  She paints a portrait of affluent garden lovers trundling in their Rolls Royces between an endless series of lunches, teas and plant swaps, waited upon by armies of servants.

A rather different account of gardening is given in Hugh Cavendish's book A time to plant: Life and Gardening at Holker.  There is a delightful garden at Holker Hall, on the northern edge of Morecombe Bay, which we visited once, too briefly, on the way to see friends in the Lake District. His book came out (again published by Frances Lincoln) in 2012, and is still in print costing a chunky twenty-five quid.  I'd been tracking it in a desultory way since publication, and the other day bagged a copy described as Used - Very Good for £1.50.  Apart from a title page inscription it was entirely unmarked, and so clean that if that if the recipient ever read they must have washed their hands first.

The early parts are more of a memoir than an account of the garden, and make painful reading in places, but it's illuminating to hear about the practical and financial issues associated with running an historic garden that needs visitor income to survive from somebody who actually does it.  Hugh Cavendish and his wife (who took all the photos for the book, and they are very good) waited several years after taking charge before they psyched themselves up to make any changes to the garden.  Very little of the planting had been designed to be of any interest in the summer months, the circulation didn't work for visitors, and neither of them liked the modestly historic Thomas Mawson design they had inherited.  Hugh Cavendish is fairly trenchant in his belief that gardens have to work for people and that if you want to generate a decent income stream from visitors you have to give them something to look at.  Ergo, a historically accurate garden that delights neither its owners nor the wider public whose financial support is needed for its survival has little point.

I only ended up reading Quest-Ritson, Cavendish and Russell back to back because I had a sore throat and didn't fancy spending the past few days outside in my own garden, but as each deals in large part with the transitory and changing nature of gardens, especially those based on large plant collections rather than the green architecture of clipped hedges and topiary, they turned out to be quite complementary.