A book that’s worth a thousand pictures

By LADYBUG

A gardening book with no pictures is rare. There are many by gardeners on their lives and reflections on gardening, etc., also with no pictures but one on active gardening, one that describes gardens across time and space with no pictures is rare.

Life in the Garden is that rare book that needs no pictures.

Penelope Lively is an award-winning novelist and author of children’s books who received the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger. She is also an avid gardener – one who planted hydrangea paniculata Limelight at the age of 83. It “will outlast me, in all probability, but I am requiring it to perform while I can still enjoy it,” she writes.

“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 backward and forward...”. Again, later in the book, “To garden is to elide past, present and future; it is a defiance of time.”

She paints pictures with her words and also describes the gardens of artists – for Monet and Matisse had to have been gardeners, she writes.

She shares experiences from her garden and she quotes other gardeners. Virginia Woolf, Daphne du Maurier and Frances Hodgson Burnett – though she is not among the millions who have loved The Secret Garden, finding it “too heavily and obviously loaded with meaning and sentimental with patches of whimsey”.

From one of the most well-known opening lines, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” and the description of the garden run to seed in Rebecca, she concludes du Maurier had a keen knowledge of plants and exactly what happens to them when we neglect basic weeding and cleaning up in the garden.

Lively doesn’t shy away from commenting on the gardening preferences of these famous authors.

On Woolf’s choice of annuals, for instance: A nice mix except for the calceolaria, which fills me with horror, a nasty bulbous yellow spotty thing which would have offended the palette of otherwise pinks and blues. I do hope it failed to resurrect.

Delving into the history of gardens, she writes that primroses and mallows, etc. that thrive in our gardens today were mostly brought in from the fields by early gardeners.

Early gardens, she writes, included gifts from friends and neighbours.

And that lupin my neighbour down the road gave me a clump of, and the blue sweet pea from the seeds my mother sent, and my aunt’s Michaelmas daisy, and Mrs Smith’s iris... random, opportunistic, comfortingly referential – the personal element that a garden had before we acquired everything from the garden centre and the catalog.

She is dismissive of the “Victorian incursion of carpet bedding – blocks of vibrant colour, reds, blues, yellows, penned into meticulously shaped beds, a fashion at its last gasp today in some moribund areas of municipal gardening”.

I love her observations on the plants in her garden:

Nothing more fiendish to control than the delphinium, set on falling over as soon as you turn your back.

And when I read that New Dawn rose  – one of my favourites – is one she has developed a personal relationship with, I know I have found a kindred.