Life in the Garden Read online

  Penelope Lively

  * * *

  LIFE IN THE GARDEN

  Contents

  Introduction

  Reality and Metaphor

  The Written Garden

  The Fashionable Garden

  Time, Order and the Garden

  Style and the Garden

  Town and Country

  Follow Penguin

  Life in the Garden

  Penelope Lively is the author of many prizewinning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger, and was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark; and Family Album was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in 2001 and was made a DBE in 2012. Penelope Lively lives in London.

  By the same author

  FICTION

  Going Back

  The Road to Lichfield

  Nothing Missing But the Samovar and Other Stories

  Treasures of Time

  Judgement Day

  Next to Nature, Art

  Perfect Happiness

  Corruption and Other Stories

  According to Mark

  Pack of Cards: Stories 1978–1986

  Moon Tiger

  Passing On

  City of the Mind

  Cleopatra’s Sister

  Heat Wave

  Beyond the Blue Mountains

  Spiderweb

  The Photograph

  Making It Up

  Consequences

  Family Album

  How It All Began

  The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories

  NON-FICTION

  The Presence of the Past: An Introduction to Landscape History

  Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

  A House Unlocked

  Ammonites and Leaping Fish

  To Josephine

  Introduction

  Virginia Woolf goes gardening one day in May, which sets me thinking about the curious apposition between gardening as reality and as metaphor. Beatrix Potter’s swingeing parable about the superiority of rural values – The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse – invites an inspection of the traditional divide between town and country. Willa Cather’s prairie gardens made by the American pioneers remind me that gardening can be about control, the conquest of nature, but that it also defies time. My grandmother’s garden, deeply influenced by Gertrude Jekyll, in both landscaping and planting, prompts consideration of the vicissitudes of gardening fashion.

  The two central activities in my life – alongside writing – have been reading and gardening. And there has been a sense in which the two have meshed: I always pay attention when a writer conjures up a garden, when gardening becomes an element of fiction. I find myself wondering what is going on here. Is this garden deliberate or merely fortuitous? And it is nearly always deliberate, a garden contrived to serve a narrative purpose, to create atmosphere, to furnish a character.

  So this is a book in which fictional gardens act as prompts for a consideration of what gardens and gardening have been for us, over time. Why and how do people garden? Why and how have they gardened?

  I shall need to get personal. If you have been a gardener, all references to gardens, plants, gardening activities, strike a chord. Am I interested in that? Have I tried this? So there has to be a strand of memoir wound in with everything else: a life in the garden. From the first suburban plot in which my husband and I carefully rescued and planted out a whole lot of willowherb seedlings because we didn’t know what they were, to the few square yards of London that are essential today, and where I can still be rapturous about a new hellebore, or purring over the pot of snowdrops positioned so that I can see it from the window.

  I grew up in a garden. Almost literally, because this was a hot, sunny garden in Egypt and much of life was lived out of doors. Our home was one of three houses built outside Cairo in the early twentieth century, a sort of alien enclave amid fields of sugarcane and clover, canals and mud-hut villages. All three had large gardens, and my mother had created ours very much in the spirit of the English garden, with lawns, rose beds, lily ponds, pergola walks, and a necessary nod to the climate and what would grow there by way of poinsettias, lantana, zinnias, cineraria and bougainvillaea. Though she did once plant daffodil bulbs, which were rightly aghast at what was required of them, and sent up just a few spindly blooms. But, for me, the garden was a kind of intimate paradise, intensely personal, with private hiding places – a twiggy hammock in a hedge where I went to read Swallows and Amazons and Tales from Troy and Greece, a particular eucalyptus tree with which I was in animistic communion, the bamboo-shaded water garden where tadpoles massed around the roots of the arum lilies. I can still draw a map of this garden in every detail. It no longer exists; the whole of that area has long since been subsumed into Cairo’s urban sprawl, but when I went there thirty years ago I felt that its memory must lurk, beneath the slum houses and the rubble, a memory of trees and grass and flowers, and the ghost of my own alter ego.

  Gardening is genetic, as far as I am concerned, and runs down the female line. In my family, it started with my grandmother Beatrice Reckitt, who made a magnificent garden from the tabula rasa of a sloping Somerset field, complete with Gertrude Jekyll-style rill and sunken rose garden, lawns and ha-ha, kitchen garden, summerhouse and potting shed – all the attributes of the serious garden. Her daughter, Vera, my mother, gardened an English garden in Egypt. I graduated from the suburban plot to two successive Oxfordshire gardens, one with two streams running through it. My daughter, Josephine, gardens in a more informed way than any of us; a working musician, an oboist, she took Royal Horticultural Society courses many years ago in spare time that she did not have, and now gardens in London and in Somerset with expertise that I admire and envy. And her daughter Rachel, another musician, seems next in line: a serious engagement with sweet peas last year looked significant.

  You don’t discover your own gardening potential until you have gardenable space of your own, if only a humble window-box. Jack and I were fired up by the suburban plot. Though there might have been a streak of genetic compulsion for him as well: his father had gardened with a sort of fanaticism in the family’s council-house garden in Newcastle. A garden in which all expense was avoided, the patch of lawn made from clumps of grass dug up by the roadside, everything grown from seed, seed collected always for next year, runner beans rubbing shoulders with hollyhocks, lettuces nudging alyssum and lobelia. The other end of the spectrum from my grandmother’s Somerset acreage, but the drive and the commitment the same. The urge to garden transcends social circumstance, which accounts for the allotment movement, of which more later, and the floral energy of small front gardens up and down the land. I remember a visiting American friend gazing in wonder at the flamboyance of June: ‘Everyone in this country grows a rose.’ If three acres and a cow was the land-reform slogan of the nineteenth century, today’s requirement would be that minimal plot where a person can grow something, anything, can get their hands into the earth and defy time.

  We garden for tomorrow, and thereafter. We garden in expectation, and that is why it is so invigorating. Gardening, you are no longer stuck in the here and now; you think backwards, and forwards, you think of how this or that performed last year, you work out your hopes and plans for the next. And, for me, there is this abiding astonishment at the fury for growth, at the tenacity of plant life, at the unstoppable dictation of the seasons. As I write, in late winter, the first snowdrops have nosed out of the earth, the ground-cover roses h
ave tiny red knobs that say they are remembering what they have to do come June, a single white choisya flower is unseasonal but obedient – the days are a bit warmer, time to get going. Everything will happen anyway, that is what it is programmed to do, but the point of being a gardener is that you can manipulate this marvellous process, contrive, direct.

  But plenty will resist direction, of course. The weeds will fight back. Anthropomorphism is unavoidable, I am finding, in writing about gardening: weeds don’t just grow, they grow with intent, they grow aggressively. Well, they do, as any gardener knows. They sneak in and swarm up when your back is turned. There is always this sense that the garden is a living entity, with its own agenda – hundreds of conflicting agendas – and that you are in control only up to a point, a precarious relationship in which it is not clear who has the upper hand. Fanciful, I dare say, and perhaps this animistic view is just the lingering effect of my childhood immersion in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: ‘We can talk,’ says the Tiger-lily, ‘when there’s anyone worth talking to.’ The flowers make personal remarks about Alice (as adults tend to do of children). ‘You’re the right colour, and that goes a long way.’ ‘You’re beginning to fade, you know – and then one can’t help one’s petals getting a little untidy.’

  The literary garden may have acted as prompt very early on, for me, reading probably in that personal space within an Egyptian hedge, and reading with that unique, never to be recovered, immersion of childhood reading, when a fictional world invades the real one, and you no longer know quite which is which. I know I talked to that eucalyptus tree when I was a child, and quite possibly to flowers too, wandering from the pages of Alice out into the garden.

  I don’t now, but perhaps I should. Prince Charles does, it seems. In 1986, he was quoted as saying that he spoke to his trees and plants, that it was important to engage with them, and that they responded – though he does not seem to have specified in quite what way. He was ridiculed for this, in some quarters, but somewhat later, in 2009, the Royal Horticultural Society, it was reported, decided to test his theory by reading works of literature to tomato plants by means of attaching the headphones of an MP3 player to their roots. Passages from Shakespeare and from John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids were selected as test recordings, with plant growth to be measured against that of a set of control plants left in silence. Please note that the original newspaper reports of this were dated 31 March 2009, and one could draw the obvious conclusion, were it not that in June of that year the Telegraph reported the results; apparently there had indeed been a response from the plants, with read-to plants putting on more growth than those left in silence, and the female voice having an appreciably greater effect. Well, well. I can absolutely see why The Day of the Triffids was chosen, but the report does not state if that proved more effective than Shakespeare. If it did, I think we should start to worry.

  So much for the sentient plant. What cannot be disputed is that gardens themselves are eloquent, in that they speak for their owners. By their gardens ye shall know them. Back in my days of the Oxfordshire garden with two streams, we used to open up to the public on one day a year, under the Yellow Book listing, the gardens open in aid of charity under the National Garden Scheme. We were part of a village garden opening – four or five of the village gardens being judged worth a visit, I seem to remember. The Yellow Book openings are in aid of charity, and back then there was keen competition between Oxfordshire and Kent to be the county raising the most money. Kent had pipped Oxfordshire to the post the year before, so there was now ferocious endeavour. A Yellow Book person inspects gardens to see if they are up to Yellow Book standards; ours only just crept in, I suspect – it was described as ‘Informal cottage-type garden’, which is Yellow Book speak for ‘a bit unkempt and weedy’. Nevertheless hundreds of people trooped through, always impeccably mannered, never dropping a cigarette end or a sweetie paper. And it was then that I got talking to a Dutch couple who told me that they came to this country every year specifically to do a tour of Yellow Book openings. I assumed they were keen gardeners themselves. Well, only up to a point, they said; the real value of the tour, for them, was that it gave them such insight into how the English live, the variety of social circumstance, the range of taste and style. I knew exactly what they meant; we too were addicted to Yellow Book visiting, and I remember once finding the National Collection of auriculas in a council-house garden.

  We beat Kent, that year.

  There was an element here of competitive gardening, I suppose. But it was a worthy kind of competition in that it was all about which county gardened to such effect that it raised most money for charity. Gardeners are not by nature competitive, I think; it is more a question of mutual respect which can spill over into emulation. Half the point of garden visiting, Yellow Book or otherwise, is that you can come back with stolen ideas. In the Oxfordshire garden days, we frequently visited Hidcote, one of the National Trust’s flagship gardens, and it was the planting of the water garden there that gave me ideas of what could be done with our two streams. Ours were a mere trickle compared with Hidcote’s luxuriant stream garden, but never mind – primulas, ferns. Though we made the mistake of putting in some mimulus, the monkey flower, a yellow thug that we then spent years trying to weed out. Hidcote had known better, or had more room.

  The area where gardening does get competitive is the flower show, from small-time village effort to the big events. There is admittedly a fascination about scanning the displays: collection of onions exceeding 250g each, three runner beans, heaviest marrow. But who wants a football onion, a yard of runner bean, a marrow like a truncheon? There is a distressing culture at work here: size matters. I’m not very happy either with competing pansies, chrysanthemums and dahlias – they sit there looking stiff and uncomfortable.

  The apex of horticultural competition is of course the Chelsea Flower Show. Competition on every front: Best Show Garden, Best City Garden, Plant of the Year, medals Gold, Silver-Gilt, Silver. Gardens get medals, stands get medals, anything gets a medal. Most of the competition is commercial – nurseries vying with one another, professional garden designers fighting it out. Modest satisfaction for the Golds, brave smile if it’s a Silver-Gilt, slink off home if it’s Silver. I suppose this jacks up tension, but I suspect that the average Chelsea visitor doesn’t much care about who got what, they just want to gaze at lots of gorgeous plants and maybe get some tips for their own gardening. On the occasions that I went I used to enjoy overheard comments: ‘We had one of those, but of course your father killed it.’ The people could be as interesting as the exhibits. I am not robust enough to do Chelsea nowadays – too much walking and standing. But Jack and I went several times, way back, and for me it was always a question of prising him away from the lawnmower displays. What is it with men and lawnmowers? Here was an academic, a political theorist, whose mind should have been on higher things, lustfully scrutinizing Mountfields, Hayters, Atcos.

  Philip Larkin felt differently. A few years ago the British Library had a sumptuous exhibition called The Writer in the Garden. A central exhibit was Philip Larkin’s lawnmower, hung on a vertical panel so that you could inspect it closely: a Qualcast. But he did not give it a good press in a letter written after he had bought a 1950s house with a long garden, and was appalled at the idea of having to look after this: ‘It has a huge garden – not a lovely wilderness (though it soon will be) – a long strip between wire fences – Oh God, Oh God – I am taking on the vendors’ Qualcast (sounds like a character in Henry James) … I don’t know when I shall get in … I hope before the bloody garden starts growing …’

  But the Qualcast was to become an instrument of tragedy. Larkin got to grips with it, and then one day inadvertently killed a hedgehog with it. A poem sprang from that event.

  The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found

  A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,

  Killed. It had been in the long grass.


  I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.

  Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world

  Unmendably. Burial was no help:

  Next morning I got up and it did not.

  The first day after a death, the new absence

  Is always the same; we should be more careful

  Of each other, we should be kind

  While there is still time.

  Andrew Motion, Larkin’s biographer, sees this poem serving as an elegy for the poet’s mother. No doubt it does, but it is also about a hedgehog, and is perhaps unique as a poem about a lawnmower.

  So far as I am concerned the difference between men and women is that men are interested in cutting grass and women are not. I actually prefer a daisy-sprinkled lawn; Jack, of course, wanted meticulous stripes, and many happy hours were spent achieving these. Marital gardening is a whole subject of its own. The Nicolsons, at Sissinghurst, look like a rather efficient team, with Harold working on the hard landscaping, as we now call it, and Vita on the planting. Beth Chatto was crucially supported by her husband, Andrew, who researched the plants suitable for her plans, while Margery Fish seems to have been both impeded and frustrated by her husband’s somewhat conflicting gardening tastes. The rest of us, gardening more humbly, will be familiar with the areas of potential disagreement when gardening in tandem – division of labour, resolution of likes and dislikes. Jack and I gardened pretty harmoniously, on the whole, sharing tastes and aversions. Perhaps unusually, I did much of the vegetable gardening – he rapidly got bored with trenching for potatoes, and I rather enjoyed a good dig.

  I remember with envy. A chronic back problem means that digging has been long since out of the question; I can’t bend at all now, so my gardening of the London garden has to be restricted to watering, dead-heading, and such operations as I can manage from a folding seat. Help is needed for anything else, and a garden firm once a year to deal with rampant ivy and to high-pressure the paving. This is old-age gardening, and like all other aspects of old age, it creeps up on you, and has to be faced down and dealt with. Some of you will know about this, and empathize, familiar with the strategies and the frustration. My friend Elizabeth Jane Howard was a committed gardener. She too suffered from arthritis, and gardened through it: ‘It hurts like hell but I do it anyway,’ she would say. As well as a more formal garden area by her Suffolk home, she had a river-island wild garden, a paradise of trees, bamboo, willows, water lily pond, rambling paths fringed with bluebells. And gardens crept into her novels, of course. I used to spend a weekend with her there from time to time, and enjoy garden talk and the ritual tour of the island.