A Well-tempered Gardener

There is no good reason why an expert and dedicated gardener should be able to write elegant prose – and a survey of the gardening shelves of bookshops, along with the many magazines devoted to horticulture, will confirm that the two skills rarely converge. One glittering exception was Christopher Lloyd, known familiarly as Christo, who died in 2006 having spent almost his entire adult life developing the five-acre garden at Great Dixter, his family home in East Sussex, where he was born in 1921. He wrote columns about it for Country Life and other journals, and produced seventeen books.

Although he was deadly serious about gardening, his writing was always unstuffy, telling us almost as much about him and his acquaintances as about his plants and preferences. He would use the reactions of others to clarify his own ideas. The very first sentence of his bestknown book, The Well-Tempered Garden – originally published in 1970 and revised and reprinted many times since – hints at this: ‘Friends sometimes ask me to deliver post mortems on their less successful gardening efforts, but it is very difficult to pronounce with any certainty when their case history has been thoroughly masked.’ This slightly irritable tone, bordering on the curmudgeonly, permeates much of his writing, and is part of what makes it fun to read. The Well-Tempered Garden is today recognized as a classic of the genre; yet the essence of Christo’s approach is more sharply delineated in his numerous columns. He wrote for Country Life unfailingly every week from 1962 until 2005: a selection was published in 1993 under the title In My Garden. In 1989 he began a column for the Guardian which continued until shortly before he died. Some of these were collected in Cuttings in 2007. As it happens, 1993 was also the year when I first became acquainted with him, both through his writing and in person. He had been born into gardening; my own belated introduction to the craft was very different. In 1974 I was editor of the diary column in The Times. It was the year of the long miners’ strike, resulting in power cuts and, briefly, the three-day working week. All that brought on a general feeling that we were approaching the end of civilization as we knew it. Self-sufficiency became the watchword and there was a sudden surge in demand for allotments. To test how hard it was to acquire one I put in applications to several bodies and wrote a diary item about their discouraging responses – then forgot all about it. A year later I received a letter from the Thames Water Authority inviting me to take over an allotment outside their Brixton waterworks. I decided to take the plunge, so that I could write occasional diary items on the travails of a novice gardener. These quickly caught the imagination of readers, who sent me letters of encouragement and advice, as well as seeds and cuttings. I was even persuaded to write a book about it (One Man and His Plot, 1976). As a result, before long I was approached by editors to write about gardens – as a reporter, never an expert – adding an extra string to my journalistic bow. Because it all started with the allotment, my prime horticultural interest has always been fruit and vegetables. Although Christo did grow them – and was by all accounts an excellent cook – they were clearly secondary to his principal passion for plants. In The Well-Tempered Garden, he devotes only sixteen pages to the kitchen garden, at the very end of the book. The chapter starts in characteristically combative style, with the author quarrelling with his brother about whether it is worth growing vegetables at all. His brother seeks to goad him: ‘The difference between this cabbage and what I should buy at Bristol is that there’s twice as much waste on what you have grown.’ ‘I could not argue,’ Christo writes.

It was only too obviously true. The slugs had made deep inroads. In fact our cabbages get picked with the slugs inside them, and if not dealt with for a few days the slugs emerge and are found at night crawling around the kitchen draining board. However, when he saw our leeks, my brother did exclaim that they looked nice. He made no comparisons this time but I knew that he had in mind the market article, more than half of which consists of green leaves with only a very short, blanched stump. In a garden you can do the job properly, taking out a trench wide enough to plant a double row and then earthing them up to get a really long white stem.

See how he camouflages sound technical advice within a punchy personal anecdote. He was never averse to challenging received opinion, and in April 1993 hit the headlines by announcing in Country Life that he was going to uproot nearly all the roses from his historic rose garden – designed in 1912 by the architect Edwin Lutyens – and replace them with lush tropical-style plants. ‘Seeing that the soil is excellent for any other plant except for the rose, which has fouled its own patch,’ he wrote, ‘I do not see why I should be made a slave to this one flower, which occupies no greater a place in my affections than many another.’ Some critics were horrified, pointing out that a bed of roses has long been seen as an essential component of the traditional English garden. Would its abandonment by one of the nation’s leading plantsmen lead to its eventual demise? In the wake of this controversy I was asked by the magazine Gardens Illustrated to interview the great man. I did so with trepidation. Given the ferocity with which he expressed his opinions, I assumed he would turn out to be a crusty, tetchy bachelor. On the contrary, he was a complete charmer, the very reverse of irascible, although determined not to bend before the gales of criticism provoked by his assault on our national flower. ‘I got fed up with all the troubles roses bring in their train,’ he told me and my wife over tea and cake at Great Dixter. ‘They get a lot of diseases and you can’t replace a weak bush without changing the soil. They’re quite disagreeable and make a very spotty effect even when they’re flowering – a whole series of blobs.’ This was just one of the ways in which he defied horticultural correctness. He consistently advised gardeners to follow their own preferences rather than act as slaves to fashion. ‘Your novice upper-class, or upper middle-class, or yuppy-class gardener will be terrified of doing the wrong thing,’ he wrote in one of his Guardian columns, ‘of growing the wrong plants, of combining them stridently and, worst of all, of being commented on adversely by “friends” and acquaintances whom they regard as important. Hence the asphyxiating boredom born of the good-taste gardener, who hasn’t a fresh idea in his/her head, or any desire to develop one.’ In The Well-Tempered Garden he vents his disdain, too, for the tribe of gardening ‘experts’ – presumably unaware that, on the strength of that very book, he was soon to be counted among them.

People tend to believe what they read. There is a certain seal of authenticity about the printed word, and anyway it is much less trouble to accept someone else’s dictum than officiously go out of your way to prove each point for yourself. Authors are themselves the most shameless plagiarists, and so mistakes get quickly established as traditions, and traditions are very hard to break.

He illustrates the point with a tale about a particular clematis, described by one writer as having a delightful fragrance, then widely touted as such, when in fact it has no scent all. Great Dixter was – and remains – a popular attraction, and some of Christo’s most entertaining columns were inspired by his confrontationswith visitors. In one from In My Garden, entitled ‘Other Men’s Weeds’, he rails at those who complain about the apparent disorder of his unmown wild-flower meadow and at people who take it on themselves to do a bit of voluntary weeding in his beds. ‘Untidiness in the garden does not matter,’ he assures readers, ‘as long as the owner is aware of it and does not mind it himself.’ Then there are those pernickety visitors who would like to see more labels on his plants: ‘When I was on my knees weeding, during our open hours, I heard a disgruntled male voice addressing me obliquely through his companions. “If the plants were labelled we should know what we were looking at.” “If I was writing labels I wouldn’t be here weeding,” I replied. Silence.’ He goes on to discuss the pros and cons (mostly cons) of labelling, pointing out that if the plant in question happens to be some way from the path, keen gardeners will have no compunction about tramping over other delicate blooms in order to read the label. That column ends with an account of a lively altercation with a visitor who wanted to know the exact variety of a particular unlabelled veronica. He gave her the information grudgingly, insisting first that she acquire a pencil and paper to write it down. ‘How glad I was to put her to the trouble . . . It was a Bank Holiday; perhaps I wasn’t in the most genial of moods.’ Even the best-tempered garden might be created and nurtured by an (occasionally) ill-tempered gardener.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 59 © Michael Leapman 2018