Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Longville, Tim

Longville, Tim

Tim Longville has worked as a poet, translator, editor, publisher, copy-writer, journalist, teacher, lecturer and gardener. He regularly writes for Hortus and Cumbria Life, and his book, Gardens of the Lake District, was published in 2007. He lives in Cumbria.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [3] 21; [10] 24; [14] 82; [21] 43; [26] 82

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20040901150322

Seeds of Friendship

Tim Longville on Elizabeth Lawrence, Gardening for Love

Garden-writing is always either grimly concerned with the nuts and bolts of gardening’s practicalities or with its latest and flashiest fashions. The first kind is written by mere doers, the second by mere puffers, therefore neither is of any interest as writing. Gardening, and by extension writing about gardening, is something done better in Britain than anywhere else, certainly better than anywhere else in the English-speaking world. Wrong, wrong, and wrong again, dear reader. A single slim volume, Gardening for Love by Elizabeth Lawrence, delicately but devastatingly disposes of all those fallacies.
20060601144730 Miriam MacGregor - Tim Longville on Henry Mitchell

Full Steam Ahead and Damn the Torpedoes

Tim Longville on the gardening books of Henry Mitchell

Even today, most garden writing in Britain is still haunted by the ghosts of Percy Thrower and Arthur Hellyer. It is nuts and bolts stuff – professionals telling amateurs what to plant or build and why and how and when. The American garden writer Henry Mitchell, however, was something else. Above all, he was as much a writer as a gardener: and a good one. Know a man by his friends – and Mitchell’s included the novelist Eudora Welty and the New Yorker essayist E. B. White (who also wrote the children’s classics Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little).
20070601153740 Tim Longville on James Hamilton-Paterson, Griefwork - Slightly Foxed Issue 14

Flowering Passions

Tim Longville on James Hamilton-Paterson, Griefwork

I’ve never had anything you could call A Career. I’ve always either gone where interest suggested and opportunity allowed or just Micawberishly waited for something to turn up. Despite the supposed end of the culture of ‘a job for life’, that approach still seems to make a lot of people uneasy. And they often become even more uneasy when they discover that one of my interests nowadays is cultivating and writing about rare, difficult and often tender plants from distant parts of the world. You can almost see the bubble of unspoken doubt rising from their heads. ‘Is this just some childish joke? Or is he really serious?’ So I was delighted to stumble across spectacular support for that general approach (in the shape of James Hamilton-Paterson) and for that particular interest (in the shape of his novel, Griefwork).
20090301120343 Tim Longville, Charlotte Paul - Slightly Foxed Issue 22

They Made It

Tim Longville on Charlotte Paul, Minding Our Own Business

My nearest second-hand bookshop is in a small town five or six miles away. Like many traditional small-town shops it wears many hats. Downstairs at the front are stationery and artists’ materials, upstairs are second-hand books, while the downstairs back is devoted to a small, private, pleasantly ramshackle printing museum. It was there, in a shop of a kind she would have recognized and loved, that I found my copy of Charlotte Paul’s Minding Our Own Business. In it she wrote about the first five years during which she and her husband Ed owned and ran a small American country printing firm, the Falls Printing Company, and its associated newspaper, The Snoqualmie Valley Record. (She was Charlotte Paul Reese by birth, Charlotte Groshell by marriage, Charlotte Paul as a writer.)
20100601095826

Cold Cure from a Warm Climate

Tim Longville on Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery under Arms

Snobbery never pays. Certainly not in relation to books: not even in relation to their mere appearance. Have you ever, like me, sneered at those identikit sets of ‘great works’ bound in imitation leather, complete with elaborate mock-gilt lettering? And even so does your household, like this one, contain at least one such set, given by a relative who sweetly and sadly thought it the perfect gift for people who read a lot? And is that set, like ours, hidden on the bottom shelf of the least conspicuous bookcase in the most distant spare bedroom?

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