|
 |
| Extracts From The Current Issue |
|
|
From the Editor’s introduction to
HORTUS 150, Summer 2024
|
|
|
‘One of the incidental pleasures of reading E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels is in the way someone is always doing a little gardening.’ This was John Francis penning the first in a long series about gardens in fiction in HORTUS 1, Spring 1987 – thirty-seven and a half years ago. He and numerous other contributors went on to fork over horti snippets from such a celebrated medley of writers as Henry James, Flaubert, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Colette, Molly Keane, Dickens, Chaucer, Beatrix Potter, Nancy Mitford, Wilkie Collins and many more. I mention this merely to prove that from the very beginning HORTUS was no run-of-the-mill gardening periodical. As Roy Strong noted in By Pen & By Spade (a 1990 anthology from our first four issues), ‘It didn’t resemble any gardening journal that I knew. There were no articles telling me what to do with my growbag tomatoes, or how to make a plant container from an old wellington boot.’
|
|
|
|
|
from
‘Tradescant’s Diary’
by Hugh Johnson
|
|
|
1 March 2024: My distant memory of the OTC at school (we were, of course, training to be officers) is all about stripping down Bren guns. It began with Naming of Parts. There were lots (extractor, trigger, balance spring . . .) to be disassembled and reassembled in a strict order. Now I find naming of parts is also a good way of learning about plants. Flowers, for a start. Peduncle, receptacle, anther, sepal, petal, ovary, carpel, style, pistil, stigma, perianth tube, pollen . . . different arrangements in different flowers. It’s not so easy to disassemble them, but a straight cut down the middle with a razor blade can give you the layout – and a heightened appreciation of the creator’s ingenuity.
|
|
|
|
|
from
‘Our Garden Birds: The Cuckoo’
by Adam Ford
|
|
|
The unexpected hint of a delicate scent can suddenly transport us back to some early childhood experience; arrested, we are left wondering; where and when? Hearing the first distant call of a cuckoo, after winter, has a similar effect on me. It evokes a mixture of memory and longing, a feeling I try to catch. I stop in my tracks, and silently focus, waiting to hear the familiar two-tone call again. There is a seat in my garden, against an east-facing wall where I sit in May, drinking a cup of morning coffee, hoping to hear this new arrival from Africa, calling now from somewhere across the Cuckmere valley. It still happens every year – but not so often. Changing climate, the loss of habitat and food sources in sub-Saharan Africa, shortage of caterpillars in spring in Britain, and the reduction of hedgerows, have all taken their toll.
|
|
|
|
|
from
‘A Swirling Scoop:
A Four-Decade Backwards Glance at British Gardening’
by Stephen Lacey
|
|
|
It was just a year or two before the first issue of HORTUS that I decided to have a stab at turning my hobby into a career. The gardening industry was about to boom. Was this a happy coincidence or was I an early victim of the zeitgeist? I am not sure. But either way, the timing was good. Garden centres were popping up all over the country. Newspapers and television would soon be expanding their gardening coverage, and gardening books with a new quality of photography and production would be hitting the shelves. Garden visiting was rising in popularity – a Good Gardens Guide was published in 1990, and the thickness of the NGS ‘Yellow Book’ was increasing exponentially (it was two hundred pages in 1987 when I opened my garden; by the year 2000 it was twice as fat).
|
|
|
|
|
from
‘Looking Back’
by Anna Pavord
|
|
|
I first met David Wheeler, proprietor, publisher and editor of HORTUS, when he came to our place to be interviewed. That was in February 1987, when he had just brought out the first issue of his new magazine. David has suggested that I write a ‘reflective’ piece on how my gardening and professional life has changed over the thirty-seven years since that meeting. The changes are to a great extent logged in the weekly gardening column that for thirty years I wrote in the Independent newspaper. That had launched in October 1986, just before HORTUS, and rather to my surprise, a trusting features editor had asked me to be the paper’s gardening correspondent.
|
|
|
|
|
from
‘Gardening Through the HORTUS Years’
by Ben Probert
|
|
|
I’ve reached that point in my life when I struggle to recognise myself in photographs from my school days. That young man seems an eternity away from the person who stares back at me in my mirror each morning. I was different back then, younger and looking to take my place in the great big world. I also had a lot more hair. I was just three years old when the first edition of this most venerable publication was circulated. I feel an affinity towards my neat little copy of the very first HORTUS; we were both making our way in the world at the same time. Would I have cared about Beth Chatto’s article about Sir Cedric Morris, or Arthur Hellyer’s account of changing fashions in hellebores, from that first journal? No, I had a bright red wooden steam engine that I could pull around my father’s garden with a length of string instead.
|
|
|
|
|
from
‘Year of the Rabbit’
by Rod Madocks
|
|
|
1987 was the Chinese year of the rabbit. I’m not sure if I knew that at the time but it would have seemed appropriate, given that I was then waging an unrelenting war on the creatures. A big kitchen garden out in the Nottinghamshire countryside lay under my sole care in those days and legions of bunnies kept finding breaches in the crumbling Victorian boundary walls. I held down an old-fashioned gardening job requiring a basket of vegetables and flowers to be delivered to the big house each working day and those bun-buns put a serious dent into that demanding schedule. On winter days, I’d arrive for work in my battered green minivan, often blasting out a cassette of the Pet Shop Boys to help get me warmed up.
|
|
|
|
|
from
‘Looking Back from Across the Pond’
by Sukie Amory
|
|
|
I wish I’d had the benefit of HORTUS wit and wisdom when I started gardening in 1988. In Chicago, our hands full with toddler Linzee and baby John, our horticultural aspirations ended at vinca and red tulips. Now back on my husband David’s home turf to open Amory Architects, our enthusiastic estate agent congratulated us on being the proud owners of ‘the cheapest house in Brookline’, the leafy town just west of Boston where Frederick Law Olmsted made his home and studio. But now that the 1920s bungalow was ours, its flaws were glaring – how had we ignored the rancid odour and stained oak floor left by a housebound German shepherd dog? What had been sold as a terrace under a blanket of fresh snow turned out to be a checkerboard of pink and green concrete pavers emerging from spring mud. We took a deep breath, reassured ourselves we’d stay only a year or two, and rolled up our sleeves.
|
|
|
|
|
from
‘A Taste for the New and Beautiful:
Maurice Foster at White House Farm’
by Martin Leigh
|
|
|
New and beautiful trees and shrubs, forgotten old ones – perennially that least fashionable of causes – have been Maurice Foster’s life. In Kent, for fifty-two years, he, his late wife Rosemary, and now daughter Clare have built White House Farm and Arboretum into one of the most important, beautiful, and influential British collections of trees and shrubs. It is a collection which is slowly becoming better known and which, as a result, is beginning subtly to enrich the ‘general taste’ and widen significantly the possibilities for all of us who garden.
|
|
|
|
|
from
‘Remembered and Celebrated: Alice M. Coats, 1905–78’
by Peter Parker
|
|
|
If the garden shed in which I keep most of my books about plants and horticulture were to catch fire, the volumes I would dash in to save would be those written by Alice M. Coats. Practical advice apart, they provide everything I want from a book on gardening: not only are they witty, entertaining and well written, but they contain an extraordinary wealth of information about the history, discovery, naming, growing and folklore of plants. It is of course possible to create and enjoy a garden without any of this background knowledge, but as Coats wrote in a foreword to her first book about plants, Flowers and Their Histories, published in 1956:
‘Though I would not go so far as to cultivate any plant entirely on account of its associations, I certainly think it enhances the pleasure of a garden to know something of the background of flowers in history and in tradition. Moreover, to disregard their past is to show ingratitude. Our gardens have been so liberally enriched through many centuries, and from the farthest corners of the globe; it is shameful altogether to forget the means by which these flowers have been brought together for our pleasure . . .’
|
|
|
|
|
from
‘Making Sense of the Garden: Sight
by Peter Dale
|
|
|
It seems so blindingly obvious that it’s hardly even worth saying: a garden is what you see. It’s what you see, what you photograph – that’s what these places are for. Q.E.D. Nihil obstat, et cetera. A thing of beauty is a sight for sore eyes… and not for sore feet, or sore elbows. (Still less for something as abstract as a sore conscience? Or a sore head?) Beauty engages the eye, an eye wearied perhaps by overexposure to the curriculum of the ordinary, the everyday, or blurred and damaged a bit by life’s disappointments. Beauty is something you catch sight of, it’s a quarry you’re chasing because to catch it will invest you with something good, something soothing perhaps, healing, mending.
|
|
|
|
|
from
‘Grave Business’ by Emma Inglis
|
|
|
My father lies in a pretty spot a mile or so off the busy A30 road. There are dozens of gravestones all around him in that small leafy glade, tall ones the size of a child, and smaller footstool-sized ones. There are broken ones too with fragmented names which are now moss covered, forgotten. Overall though it is a loved place and home to a wonderful collection of native and cultivated plants. There are centuries-old yew trees and self-seeded oak as well as beech, hawthorn and sycamore. There is holly, wild ivy and moss. Lichen grows on the branches of trees, ferns line the pathways and wild flowers, such as lesser celandine, ragged-robin and red campion, run riot over family plots and take root beside faded bunches of flowers and artificial white poinsettia.
|
|
|
|
|
from
‘From the Home Patch’
by Tom Petherick
|
|
|
If growing vegetables for an enjoyable diet and the preservation of health is a good idea, and a relatively simple skill to learn through trial and error and perseverance, making compost is an essential one if the vegetables are to flourish and be nutritious. Learning how to make compost well is also possible and, although it may take a little effort, it is more than worth the trouble.
Water may be the most valuable resource in the garden in a hot summer but a ready supply of well-made compost to use as both mulch and fertiliser comes a close second. Any small garden will provide most of the ingredients necessary for successful compost making in combination with food waste from the kitchen.
|
|
|
|
|
from
‘Digging with the Duchess: A Palace or Two’
by Sam Llewellyn
|
|
|
Readers of Voltaire will be familiar with the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which sent the marble quays of that fine capital tumbling into the Tagus and flattened surrounding areas. There were various effects over and above mere distruction. One was to suggest to followers of the philosopher Leibniz that all was not necessarily for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The other was to cause the rebuilding of several important palaces and their gardens adjacent to the capital. The Duchess has no truck with philosophy. She does, however, like a palace. Which is why a little earlier this year, as we sat wondering why there are not as many words for mud in English as there are reputed to be words for snow in Inuit, she agreed to come to Portugal, and specifically the town of Sintra.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Hydrangea: A Reappraisal
by Maurice Foster
reviewed by John Grimshaw
*
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
by Olivia Laing
reviewed by Barbara Segall
*
Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
by Jason Roberts
reviewed by Brent Elliott
Shirley: The Life of a Botanical Adventurer
by Shirley Sherwood with Ivan Fallon
reviewed by Rosemary Lindsay
*
Gardening Can Be Murder:
How Poisonous Poppies, Sinister Shovels, and Grim Gardens
have Inspired Mystery Writers
by Marta McDowell.
reviewed by Patricia Cleveland-Peck
|
|
|
|
|
HORTUS 151 Autumn 2024
will be published in September
|
|
|
