An Early-Flowering Climber

When I was a student at Kew Gardens in the late 1970s, all my horticultural knowledge not acquired in lectures or through practical work in the gardens was drawn from the written word. A bookish childhood had given me a taste for fine writing, the more florid the better, which was not satisfied by the severely utilitarian prose of Percy Thrower, Roy Hay or Arthur Billitt, the bestselling garden writers of those days. I was driven to collect works by the prominent gardening writers of the previous hundred years, in particular William Robinson, Gertrude Jekyll, Frank Kingdon Ward, E. A. Bowles, Vita Sackville-West and, above all, 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. Farrer went up to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1897, where things got much more complicated. He was desperate to be popular with his peers, but his waspish tongue put off those Olympian beings, such as Raymond Asquith, whom he wanted to attract. His deep feeling for Aubrey Herbert (‘the man who was Greenmantle’) was never reciprocated; indeed, it seems Herbert found his suffocating attentions a nuisance, not surprisingly. Then, in his twenties, Farrer converted to Buddhism, thereby alienating his parents, probably deliberately. This temperament and his subsequent talent for mischief-making in print made many prominent gardeners wary of him. Nevertheless, he became a hard-working, practical plant nurseryman and a highly skilled botanist. He was also a gifted and assiduous plant-hunter, in the days when freelancers roamed the temperate regions, bringing back plants for British gardens. He was brave with it, for the Tibetan lamas, for example, whom he encountered on his travels in the Himalayas, deeply resented interlopers and could be fiercely hostile. The plants he collected on his travels included such staple garden stalwarts as Viburnum farreri, Potentilla fruticosa, Daphne tangutica and Buddleia farreri but also extremely rare Himalayan poppies and Alpine forget-me-nots and saxifrages. Despite his wish always to shine in company, he spent months on end alone, except for native servants, in remote places, seemingly content. Although he aspired to be a novelist, it was as a gardening writer that he has had an enduring influence. He more or less invented the ‘natural’ rock garden, and certainly promoted it widely. And, posthumously, he inspired the foundation in 1929 of the Alpine Garden Society, which helped to foster generations of British gardeners devoted to cultivating difficult (or what Farrer called ‘miffy’) rock plants. Among influential garden writers, I found no more intriguing, paradoxical individual than Farrer, nor one who excited in me compassion, admiration and exasperation in pretty equal measure. Although at times a conceited, thoughtless show-off, he was capable of inspiring deep affection in his (more pacific) friends, for he was cerebral, cultured and, intermittently, kind. When I was a student I couldn’t afford to be a bibliophile so, with the exception of his magisterial The English Rock Garden in two volumes, which cost me more than a week’s wages, I possessed no fine editions of his work. I tended to buy one of the many cheap facsimiles that were published at a time before the Internet, when first editions of important horticultural works commanded high prices. (No longer.) The most thumbed of my facsimile copies is My Rock Garden, brought out by Theophrastus of Vermont in 1971, but originally published by Edward Arnold in 1907 – with many subsequent editions appearing until 1949. What appealed to me about this, and indeed all Farrer’s books, was his unselfconscious enthusiasm, which could sometimes elevate a pretty ordinary flower to heavenly status (especially if he had found it in the wild); his superb descriptive powers, borne of an observant eye and vast experience; his sometimes ridiculous flights of fancy; the precision of his instructions on how to grow alpine plants, which I believed implicitly; and his over-ripe, mock-heroic descriptions of his adventures in the European Alps and the Himalayas. My interest in him became keener still after a visit to my elderly grandmother, who told me that she and my grandfather had stayed with Farrer at Ingleborough some time before the First World War. She said no more and it was only quite recently, while reading letters between the two men for my biography of John Buchan, that I realized the enduring bond between them. Buchan, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, had always a tenderness for the lame and the halt, and he had known Farrer at Oxford, when the latter was probably at his most tortured. Farrer was unfit for military service, so Buchan, who became Director of Information in early 1917, sent him off to tour the battlefields of the Western Front and Italy and report back. Farrer collected his dispatches into a deeply poignant and heartfelt book, The Void of War, which he dedicated to his friend, ‘the onlie begetter’. In 1919, Farrer’s magnum opus, The English Rock Garden, was published in two large volumes. It is an impressive achievement, written in prose that is witty and cultured as well as erudite. He then took himself off to Burma with Euan Cox, a rhododendron enthusiast, who had also worked under Buchan during the war. Cox came home after a year, but Farrer stayed on, botanizing in the rain-soaked frontier ranges of Burma and China. Between January and October 1920 he travelled a thousand miles, on foot or on horseback, collecting 400 plant specimens and writing field notes, dispatches for The Gardeners’ Chronicle, a full-length novel and a book of ‘historical fantasies’. He depended for company on the works of his ‘divine Jane’ (Austen). In October he fell ill at Nyitadi with bronchial pneumonia. His servant ran four days without stopping to the nearest source of medical supplies but arrived back only shortly before Farrer died. He was 40 years old. It is hard now to recapture the impact Reginald Farrer had on the gardening world, since we don’t make large rock gardens any more. Modern anxieties about the conservation of water-worn limestone, Farrer’s favourite material, together with lack of professional gardening help (for rock gardens are labour-intensive, as I discovered when I was set to weed the one at Kew), have all but banished rockeries from British gardens. Nevertheless, it is still fun to read My Rock Garden. In it, Farrer electrified his readers by pungent and witty descriptions of the three types of rock gardens that should not be made.

The first is what I may call the Almond-pudding scheme, and obtains generally, especially in the north of England. You take a round bed; you pile it up with soil; you then choose out the spikiest pinnacles of limestone you can find, and you insert them thickly with their points in the air, until the general effect is that of a tipsy-cake stuck with almonds. In this vast petrified porcupine nothing will grow except Welsh Poppy, Ferns, and some of the uglier Sedums. The second style is that of the Dog’s Grave . . . Plants will grow on this, but its scheme is so stodgy and so abhorrent to Nature that it should be discarded. The third style is that of the Devil’s Lapful, and prevailed very largely when Alpines first began to be used out of doors . . . The plan is simplicity itself. You take a hundred or a thousand cartloads of bald square-faced boulders. You next drop them all about absolutely anyhow; and you then plant things amongst them. The chaotic hideousness of the result is something to be remembered with shudders ever after.

Sixty years after his death, alpine plant specialists were still talking about dogs’ graves, almond puddings and devil’s lapfuls. Moreover, in My Rock Garden, he first popularized the idea of the ‘moraine’ as a home for rock plants, an effective alternative to a rock garden, which can still be found in the gardens of enthusiasts, as well as in public collections such as the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. His advice, though sometimes baroque and overblown in form, was severely practical and enlightened in substance. He brought back from his travels vivid memories of the conditions in which difficult alpines will grow. My Rock Garden, although it runs to less than 300 pages, cannot be read in one session since, after the introductory chapter, it consists mainly of descriptions of the looks and cultivation requirements of dozens of alpines and small perennials, a fair few of which have changed their names over the years. But it is the gateway drug to the rest of the Farrer oeuvre: of the others, I recommend particularly the plant-hunting books: Among the Hills (1910); The Dolomites: King Laurin’s Garden (1913); On the Eaves of the World (1917); and The Rainbow Bridge (1921). You will encounter an opinionated, mischievous, but appealing individual, who never wrote a dull paragraph and always went his own way.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 66 © Ursula Buchan 2020