ARE YOU A MARTHA OR A MARY?

By LADYBUG

With a name like Robin Lane Fox, the man was born to garden, and Thoughtful Gardening marks the fortieth year of Fox’s weekly columns on gardening in the Financial Times.

Taking readers on a varied and highly enjoyable journey through each season of the gardening year, it draws on his many years of practical gardening and reflects on his experience as a Garden Master of New College at Oxford, as well as his own vast Cotswold garden.

Unabashedly about flower gardening, the book is a great way to gather tips from someone who doesn’t hesitate to voice his opinions on the latest trends.

This delightful quote from Vita Sackville-West, the doyenne of gardening, sets the landscape:

The practising gardener is always a Martha; it is Mary who sits back in admiration, saying how pretty that looks! Mary thinks it has just happened, as a gift from heaven; Mary is a dreamer, overlooking the practical pains and trouble that have gone to the making of the effect Mary admires. Martha, if she can spare the time for it, can and must sit and think.

In his preface, Lane Fox admits to a widening range of plants he has “known, grown and killed personally” adding a little later that none of his dianthus even waited to become elderly. I read that and feel a tad less bad about the number of dianthus plants I have purchased over the years and make a note to take cuttings from the surviving one following his helpful tips.

His New Year’s resolve could be mine. “I will remember to feed everything in pots, even in the middle of their growing season. I will not leave flower bulbs unplanted in their brown paper bags. I will try to stake in time, not on the morning after a collapse... I will not throw stones at squirrels.”

His frequent outbursts against creatures that treat our gardens as their stomping grounds could be mine.

A gang of beasts had run straight through my Michaelmas daisies and had relieved themselves on my favourite Cistus x laxus Snow White. Are our gardens threatened in this way every night while gardeners are peacefully asleep? These tracks make a nonsense of the Royal Horticultural Society’s promotion of the garden as a ‘haven’ for wildlife. I want plants in my garden and not bloody-minded badgers, and I do not see how a haven is the right description for a space in which wildlife rips its fellow members to bits.

His sister, he writes, has watched squirrels dig up individual bulbs, “roll them away for uncertain purposes and replace them with a peanut, impudently pinched from a bird table, which they drop into each empty hole”.

He recommends his favourite plants and lists the attributes of a real gardener, devoting essays to his favourite lovers of plants: It is certainly not soppiness about badgers. Is it patience or a strong back? Is it firmness of touch, precision and an even temper? An acceptance of the year’s rhythms is important, as is a capacity for solitude at short notice. There are many elements but I think they should include a fondness for dogs and an amazing taste in hats.

“Brutal minimalists and eco-planters” may be dismissive of roses but the flowers find a special place in his gardens and his heart. He makes a case for the ones he likes the most and provides details of how to take care of them. He also loves old-fashioned plants like delphiniums and blue flax. He extols the virtues of deadheading everything from geraniums and cosmos to phlox and penstemon.

Deadheading is the one profoundly rewarding war. It tidies away signs of death and encourages yet another show of flowers.

Like all other English gardeners, he evokes serious envy in those of us who garden in northern climes. It’s difficult not to grunt when one reads that he is out sowing seeds in February.

But every gardener I know will recognize themselves in the reflections below:

There are memories in us all: memories of flowers seen long ago or ideal gardens from a childhood which we can never revisit.

And, I cannot fully express what gardening has added to my life, ever-present in my mind, and increasingly in my muscles, and always adding more to what I notice in the daily course of living.