The Sound of a Leaf

In lateish middle age we sold our house in Devon and moved to France, planning a new project in a new place. Living in a caravan for a year while we renovated, we vastly improved our French (words for ‘beam’, ‘wheelbarrow’ and ‘high blood pressure’ proving useful) and only one of us was ever homesick. For some reason I’d taken with me Ronald Blythe’s Outsiders: A Book of Garden Friends (2008) and, although on balance I was enjoying living in France, this did make me slightly wistful. It’s a collection of his essays on gardeners, gardening, botanists, plantsmen, great gardens, garden memories, writers’ gardens, the seasons. To anyone even mildly interested in gardening it’s a collection of treasures.

Ronald Blythe was born in Suffolk and there, a little over 100 years later, he died. He said with some satisfaction that he had never spent more than four consecutive days in London, and although he travelled about the world he was always properly rooted in East Anglia. My grandmother was born and brought up on a farm just down the road from Blythe’s home and my father (a Raj orphan, with all the potential for a tragic childhood) was brought up by elderly cousins on a mill farm near Hadleigh, rhapsodizing about this blissful time for the rest of his life. So, since much of Blythe’s writing centres on this patch of Suffolk, I was sentimentally disposed to be a fan. As a young man, Blythe was caught up in, possibly nurtured by, the group of artists and writers revolving around Cedric Morris’s East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, set up at Benton End in Hadleigh in 1940. This circle included Vita Sackville-West, John Nash, Elizabeth David, Benjamin Britten, Beth Chatto and many others. Blythe writes that while Cedric Morris was a skilled gardener and painter, he was not especially articulate, so ‘it was inevitable that I should become the Benton End scribe’. He goes on affectionately to say that Morris showed ‘a seriousness about art and humanity which had a way of pulling one up, of forcing one to be entirely truthful about what one said next’. Further, ‘“Not a boring thing” was his ultimate accolade.’ Blythe – a prolific ‘scribe’ over his long life – clearly absorbed this lesson, consciously or unconsciously. Nowhere in this series of essays is he dull. Everything he says is worth saying, not a word is aimless or unnecessary. Each paragraph contains some fact, some reference, some allusion to a poet or the Bible or an old country custom or French literature or Roman history, which leaves one making mental notes to go away and look something up. It is stimulating stuff and hard not to feel richer for having read it. His lively mind leaps discursively from one thing to the next, never staying still, never boring. He didn’t attend university but early in life was a reference librarian with the time to do a lot of reading, and it shows. He manages to be erudite in an astonishing variety of areas; in a short essay about Fritillaria meleagris, he not only describes these beautiful flowers but links them to Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Elizabethans, Roman soldiers (who carried a dice-box, or fritillus, wherever they went), an archaeological find near Perth dating back to Agricola in 87, John Gerard’s Herbal and the Crucifixion. And this in the first paragraph alone. He goes on to describe ‘Queenie Fox’s famous fritillary meadow’ which he would visit in late April, trying not to tread on the flowers.

Queenie had no such qualms. She strode around picking handfuls of both purple and white fritillaries to press on us. It was what all country people did when their relations and friends visited their gardens. You couldn’t leave without a generous bunch of sweet williams in particular

His memories of childhood and descriptions of old country ways are fascinating – not sentimentally nostalgic or even particularly regretful, just clear, accurate accounts of the way things were. (Readers of his book Akenfield already know this: see SF no. 11.) Blythe recalls his first childhood home:

In winter the bitter Suffolk winds entered and exited this ancient building as they liked. Fires roared away on the hearth, inviting gales to join them. Water was drawn from a well in galvanized pails and I can still hear the silvery clinks of the chain. The pails were placed on a brick floor in the larder and froze overnight . . . in bed, we could hear small creatures burrowing down . . .

Equally interesting to me, descriptions of his home for many years – Bottengoms Farm – keep creeping into his writing. Except for a short piece about the roses none of these essays are specifically about Bottengoms, yet he was obviously so wedded to the place that he repeatedly alludes to its joys and its shortcomings. In fact, the ostensible shortcomings are often what he most loved. Without mains water, he depended upon ‘two horse ponds, a deep clear boundary ditch, bubbling springs and a series of tanks which lure some of it into the roof’. He used to get snowed in in winter, a fact which bothered him not at all. And he could find no fault with the hornets nesting on a south wall, saying he once watched his cat perching in the vine in a ‘bouncing hail of hornets’ yet remaining unstung. He relished the onset of winter when he immersed himself in reading and writing, despite domestic distractions:

I pick apples and lay them out in the old larder with its always mildly damp brick floor and its retained odours, a mixture of onions, potatoes, saved jam-jars, wine, baskets, cobwebs, useless but not thrown out kitchen equipment, ladders, and probably a mouse . . . This larder comes into its own in October. It contains the month, holds it in its walls . . . I should turn it out, but it would not like it. But I will scrub its waving brick floor and bring up its greeny yellows and moist browns.

He writes as evocatively about his garden, maintaining that gardens are for listening in as well as looking at. He talks of ‘the sound of leaf and flower and bough being activated by weather which can make lying in the summer garden – or slaving in it – such a transcendental business. Drug it may be, but it is one which I freely allow myself.’ He slept with his window open, ‘the bed as much in the garden as in a room . . . once I heard the cat snoring in the flowers below, and this after he had slept all day on hot flagstones’. For many years Blythe was a lay reader, regularly taking Sunday services in three local churches; he describes his sermons as ‘brief literary lectures’ and his congregation as ‘old, old friends’. One senses, reading his essays, both gentleness and acuity. He is crisp about modern housing, mentioning ‘the sparsity of ornament, the mechanical proportions and the rotten little gardens’, adding, ‘Do the buyers want such houses, or do they just have to have them?’ He is clear-eyed about humanity’s foibles: ‘Prolixity causes us to demote species. If pigeons were as rare as nightingales we would adore them.’ And in a piece about Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica, he writes ‘There are a great many ways of holding on to our sanity amidst the vices and follies of the world, though none better than to walk knowledgeably among our native plants.’ His sermons must have been a treat. Not only is each piece studded with gems and nuggets of fact, observation and good humour: they are a delight because what seems like chattiness masks real style. His sentences are short and to the point, his vocabulary apposite, and he concludes almost every paragraph with a thumping flourish, either to make you sit up and think, or smile, or nod in agreement. On the subject of great classic parklike gardens, one paragraph ends, ‘the bliss of having forty trim acres to oneself! Or more or less. Just the far howl of the chainsaw.’ A later one concludes, ‘Trees do not just rustle here, they quote Virgil.’ At the other end of the scale he writes affectionately about allotment-holders, ‘deplorable old chaps untamed by lawnmowers and edging knives, men who were addicted to wire-netting, corrugated iron, hip-baths in the open, and tall stories. Men who had escaped the property ladder by sinking out of sight into a nice row of double digging.’ I did make a garden in France (despite the best efforts of the wild boar which nightly took against my lavender), and I believe some of the trees and roses we planted are growing well, but after eight years homesickness triumphed. It’s possible Ronald Blythe contributed to this. But wherever you are rooted, this is a book even a half-hearted gardener must enjoy, gorgeously illustrated as it is with drawings, etchings, woodcuts and photographs. My father would have loved it.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Posy Fallowfield 2025