Buchan, Ursula Archives

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Wonderfully Down-to-Earth

Ursula Buchan on Ken Thompson's garden writing

Like most keen readers, I imagine, I collect the works of particular authors, placing the books in satisfying runs along my bookshelves. These runs are not alphabetical or chronological, since I am not sufficiently organized for that, but at least they come easily to hand. Among these are: the fiction of Jane Austen and John Buchan, the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer, the collections of poetry by John Clare and John Betjeman – and the popular horticultural science books of Ken Thompson. The last may not be a familiar name to you, but he is to me one of the most original and readable of garden writers, ever. Those two virtues, originality and readability, have become scarce commodities in garden writing in recent years, superseded very often by desperately ordinary blogs, vlogs and social media posts, many of which contain questionable or outdated information, delivered in a tone of deadening earnestness.

2 Mar 2026

Old Testament Profits

Ursula Buchan on J. L. Carr, A Day in Summer

Nearly thirty years ago, I let down J. L. Carr, the novelist, and, as a result, regret grabs me by the throat every time I take down one of his books from the bookshelf. Reading A Day in Summer recently proved no exception.

1 Dec 2023

Fertile Ground

Ursula Buchan on Katharine S. White, Onward and Upward in the Garden

When I was a child, I was fascinated by much that was American. I particularly enjoyed Californian grapefruit, chewing gum, Westerns, Stuart Little and the covers and cartoons of the New Yorker. A dozen enormous grapefruit would arrive in a box every Christmas, sent by a cousin of my mother’s, while chewing gum (‘that dreadful American habit!’ according to my teachers) was forbidden, so its consumption was deliciously furtive. We watched thrilling Westerns on our black-and-white television at weekends and I delighted in the sublime children’s story Stuart Little, never thinking that a tale about the mouse-child of a New York couple was at all an odd idea. Most of all, I loved the cartoons in the New Yorker, a magazine I fell upon every time we visited my aunt and uncle. They had lived for some years in the States in the 1950s, when my uncle was Washington correspondent of the Observer. These enlightened relatives even owned a large cupboard that was decorated with New Yorker covers.

1 Jun 2023

The Thread that Binds Them

Ursula Buchan on A. P. Wavell (ed.), Other Men’s Flowers

Some years ago, when writing a gardening article for an achingly right-on newspaper, I used the expression ‘other men’s flowers’. I cannot now remember in what context but I have not forgotten the sub-editor changing the phrase to ‘other people’s flowers’. I had foolishly imagined that, even if my readers did not know Montaigne – ‘I have gathered a posie of other men’s flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own’ – they would at least recognize the play on the title of one of the great poetry anthologies of the twentieth century. Some hope.

1 Dec 2022

Shelving My Assumptions

Ursula Buchan on volunteering in a local public library

Last year, in response to a public consultation on the viability of my local public library, I offered to volunteer my unskilled services every Friday afternoon. This was my small way of signalling to the county council how precious a resource I believed the library to be, even if I hadn’t visited it that often since my children left school. (I would need three lifetimes to read the books already residing on my own shelves.) The library is situated in a reasonably, but not excessively, prosperous small town, with a mixed-age population; like a thousand others across the country, I guess. I was gratefully welcomed by the professional librarians and set to work putting returned books back in their proper place on the shelves.

1 Mar 2021

Shepherds’ Lives | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Greetings from Hoxton Square where, following the dispatch of our autumn publications to readers around the world, our thoughts are beginning to turn to woolens, fireside nooks and making our way through the toppling piles of books we’ve selected from a bumper crop of recent titles. One of these books is James Rebanks’s new offering, English Pastoral, a history of the Lake District farm he inherited and how the land has changed over three generations. Reading of farm life in the northern fells prompted us to revisit Ursula Buchan’s article from Slightly Foxed Issue 53, which takes us back to James Rebanks’s first book, The Shepherd’s Life, and to W. H. Hudson’s A Shepherd’s Life, the book which ‘turned the young Rebanks into a reader’.

12 Sep 2020

An Early-Flowering Climber

Ursula Buchan on the plant-hunting and garden writings of Reginald Farrer

Reginald Farrer (1880‒1920) was unprepossessing in appearance, with a hare lip (the result of a cleft palate) only partially hidden by a moustache, a ‘pygmy body’ and a high, piercing voice. The son of narrowly Anglican parents (his father was a well-to-do landowner and Liberal MP, and the family were closely connected to the Sitwells), he was educated at home, at Ingleborough Hall in Clapham, in the Yorkshire Dales, and spent his boyhood gardening and searching for rare wild flowers on the nearby peak of Ingleborough.

1 Jun 2020

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 28 April 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

When the lockdown first began and we were instructed to leave the house only for an hour’s regular exercise we started going for an early evening walk in our local park. My husband loves Clissold Park. Over the years he’s run round it, watched birds in it, observed the trees in their various seasons, pushed our daughter on the swings, and played football with our grandchildren. He feels sentimental about it, and it is a lovely park. Like a lot of London parks it was once attached to a private house, and that has now become an upmarket café where yummy mummies sit chatting in the sun with their expensive buggies beside them, and media dads queue up for posh ice creams while speaking amusingly on the phone to other media dads.

28 Apr 2020

Well Dug In

Ursula Buchan on Charles Elliott, The Potting Shed Papers

Once upon a time, or until about 1960 that is, there existed a genre of horticultural literature called, colloquially, ‘the chatty gardening book’. In fact, the phrase did these books less than justice, for they were generally interesting, amusing, literary works written by educated, cultured people for the edification of an equally educated gardening readership. I collect as many as I can find in second-hand bookshops for, even if the spelling of plant names in them is sometimes archaic, they are still a pleasure to read.

1 Jun 2004

Posh but Down-to-Earth

Ursula Buchan on V. Sackville-West, In Your Garden; In Your Garden Again

Recently, I noticed a rather irritating poster on the Underground proclaiming: ‘You never forget your first time.’ It was an advertisement for a villa holiday company – bizarrely – but the irritation I felt (since I am not annoyed by villa holidays per se) had to do with the too obvious double entendre. In fact, one does not forget the first time that one does quite a lot of things – seeing one’s name in print, for instance, or walking along Striding Edge, that most vertiginous of paths on to the top of Helvellyn – and certainly I have never forgotten the first time I read a gardening book.

1 Mar 2005

The Unobtrusive Gardener

Ursula Buchan on Geoffrey Dutton, Some Branch Against the Sky

I had just come home from a protracted springtime tour of English gardens. Perhaps it was their ravishing fresh beauty, or their complexity, or their immaculate neatness, or perhaps I had just seen one topiary box spiral too many. Most likely, it was the stark impossibility of ever achieving in my garden anything approaching the quality I had seen elsewhere. Whatever the reason, a light melancholy descended on me, like a thin summer rain. I went deliberately to the bookshelf and took down a book which I had not read since it was first published in 1997. I needed a dose of Geoffrey Dutton – poet, gardener, professor of medical science, white-water swimmer and mountaineer – to help me regain my usual cheery equilibrium.

1 Sep 2006

A Fresh Take on the ’45

Ursula Buchan on Violet Jacob, Flemington

Flemington by Violet Jacob was recommended to me by my grandparents. Posthumously. When writing my biography of John Buchan, I came across a letter he wrote in 1911 to the author, soon after the book was published: ‘My wife and I are overcome with admiration for [Flemington] and we both agree that it is years since we read so satisfying a book. I think it the best Scots romance since The Master of Ballantrae. The art of it is outstanding.’

1 Mar 2022

Much More than a Perfect Gent

Ursula Buchan on E. A. Bowles, My Garden in Spring

I cannot think of many garden writers from a century ago in whose company I would have felt entirely comfortable. William Robinson would have ignored me, Gertrude Jekyll seen through me, and Reginald Farrer unnerved me. But I should dearly have loved to meet Edward Augustus (‘Gussie’) Bowles, and have him conduct me around his garden one sunny day in spring. For by all accounts he was a sweet-tempered and charming, funny and self-deprecating, discerning and cultured man. He spent his entire life at Myddelton House in Bulls Cross, near Enfield, and, around the beginning of the First World War, wrote what amounted to a gardening autobiography, the trilogy My Garden in Spring, My Garden in Summer and My Garden in Autumn and Winter (1914–15). Of these, the first volume is the best.

1 Mar 2012

Episode 9: Well-Cultivated Words

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Gail, Hazel and host Philippa dig into the subject of garden writing with the journalist and social historian Ursula Buchan and Matt Collins, nature writer and Head Gardener at London’s Garden Museum. The conversation meanders convivially in the usual Slightly Foxed manner, via daredevil plant-hunters, early wild gardening advocates such as Gertrude Jekyll, William Robinson and Vita Sackville-West, and the passing passions and fashions of garden design, with a peek over the hedge at Christopher Lloyd’s Great Dixter along the way. And there’s the usual round-up of the latest bookish harvest from the Slightly Foxed office and plenty of recommendations for reading off the beaten track too.

15 Jul 2019

Extremely Likable People

Ursula Buchan on the novels of O. Douglas

In the kind of house where books are handed down the generations, the chances are that on a spare bedroom bookshelf, squeezed between Guy Mannering and Roses, Their Culture and Management, you will find a copy of one of the eleven novels written by O. Douglas. Take it to bed to read and you will quickly become immersed in the cultured, if circumscribed, Scottish middle-class life of three generations ago. Whether that appeals to you will probably depend both on your attitude to Scotland and Scottishness and on whether you enjoy a well-told if old-fashioned story where only rarely does anything very startling happen.

1 Jun 2019

July News: The Last Enemy

As the Battle of Britain was being commemorated with a roar of engines and ribbons of coloured smoke for the RAF’s special centenary year celebrations overhead this lunchtime, here at No. 53 we were turning to the bookshelves to prepare to celebrate in a literary fashion for today’s newsletter . . .

11 Jul 2018