Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    In the Garden: Essays on nature and growing
    In the Garden: Essays on nature and growing
    In the Garden: Essays on nature and growing
    Ebook132 pages2 hours

    In the Garden: Essays on nature and growing

    By Daunt Books

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    'Gardening, then, is a practice of sustained noticing . . .'
    Outdoor space is something everyone should have access to. But you don't need a garden to become a gardener.
    Growing plants and vegetables forces us to pause, pay attention and look more closely. From the vantage point of even the smallest windowsill garden we can observe the passing of time through the shifting of the seasons, as well as the environmental changes the planet is undergoing.
    In this collection of essays, fourteen writers go beyond simply considering a plot of soil to explore how gardening is a shared language, an opportunity for connection, something that is always evolving. Penelope Lively trains her gardening eye on her gardens past and present; Paul Mendez reflects on the image of the paradisal garden; Jon Day asks whether an urban community garden can be a radical place; and Victoria Adukwei Bulley considers the power of herbs and why there is no such thing as a weed.
    A collection about gardening unlike any other, In the Garden brings together fourteen brilliant writers to interrogate what is most important and pressing about growing today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDaunt Books
    Release dateMar 25, 2021
    ISBN9781911547938
    In the Garden: Essays on nature and growing

    Related to In the Garden

    Related ebooks

    Gardening For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Bookshelf

      Aug 3, 2020

      Bookshelf
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Bryan Washington

      Dec 3, 2018

      1. This year, I read a lot on my phone. That’s a habit I’ve picked up from working gigs where you stand a bunch (watching kids on a swingset, watching adult children park their cars). Some folks don’t vibe with that, but those folks don’t pay my bill

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: T Kira Madden

      Dec 13, 2019

      I let go of any book that lacked sincerity in 2019; I plan to maintain that rule. Still, I’ve never in my life felt more grateful to return to words at the beginning or end of my days. The post A Year in Reading: T Kira Madden appeared first on The M

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Lonely Castle In The Mirror

      Apr 21, 2021

      RELEASED 22 APRIL 357 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Mizuki Tsujimura Publisher Doubleday This Japanese bestseller is the story of Kokoro, a girl who has been traumatised by run-ins with her classmates and now refuses to leave her house. Then her bed

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Plants Make A Garden

      Oct 4, 2023

      Plants Make A Garden
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      She Wanted A Garden

      Jul 10, 2024

      She Wanted A Garden
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Picture PERFECT

      Apr 17, 2024

      Picture PERFECT
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Wild About Dandelions

      Feb 10, 2021

      Wild About Dandelions
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Native Versus Non-native

      Nov 1, 2022

      I HAD a very interesting question, following a talk to Monmouthshire’s Hardy Plant Society, or HPS. This friendly bunch are always welcoming and, if you’re not a member of the HPS, do think about joining. I joined in the early 1980s as a hard-up youn

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      POTTY For Plants

      Oct 11, 2020

      I was astonished – and a little saddened – to read of the theft of a rare plant from Christchurch’s Botanic Gardens. You may have heard about it too – it was a variegated monstera, one of the world’s most popular houseplants. For the uninitiated, lik

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Helping Hands

      Feb 28, 2024

      Helping Hands
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Slowly Does It

      May 10, 2023

      Slowly Does It
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Learning To Let Go

      Apr 2, 2024

      Learning To Let Go
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Front Herb Garden

      Jun 18, 2024

      The Front Herb Garden
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      What I Learned At Dixter

      Sep 6, 2023

      What I Learned At Dixter
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Nature’s Remedy

      Aug 12, 2020

      Nature’s Remedy
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Welcome Site

      Feb 8, 2022

      A Welcome Site
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      John Grimshaw

      Oct 19, 2023

      John Grimshaw
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Gardens Of The World

      Jul 15, 2024

      Gardens Of The World
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Jungle Green

      Nov 27, 2017

      WORDS LOUISE GELDERBLOM I MOVE INTO MY CURRENT HOME ABOUT FOUR YEARS AGO. IT'S ON A BUSY ROAD IN THE CAPE TOWN CITY CENTRE, PERCHED ON THE SLOPE OF LION'S HEAD AND LOOKING ONTO TABLE MOUNTAIN. It was on the market for a long time, probably due to th

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      People to Meet

      May 19, 2020

      People to Meet
      1 min read

    Reviews for In the Garden

    4/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      In the Garden - Daunt Books

      The Garden Remembered

      The Gardening Eye

      PENELOPE LIVELY

      The urge – the compulsion – to garden is genetic, so far as I am concerned, and runs down the female line. My grandmother was a skilled gardener and created a large garden in West Somerset, its landscaping and content much influenced by William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll. My mother, her daughter, made an English garden in Egypt, complete with topiary, lily pond with weeping willow, a pergola walk. I have gardened more humbly but with equal enthusiasm, and my own daughter made herself long ago more knowledgeable than any of us by acquiring Royal Horticultural Society qualifications. And now one of her daughters is showing significant interest in her window box.

      I grew up in that garden in Egypt – literally, because much of life was lived out of doors in the North African climate. I communed with a eucalyptus tree, sat reading in a lantana bush hideaway, swung from the aerial roots of the banyan. The structure of that garden, its sights and sounds, are sunk deep into my psyche and have a lot to do with my own life in the garden, I am sure. This began way back when I was first married, and we found ourselves the proud possessors of a small suburban back garden. Neither my husband nor I had ever laid hands on spade or trowel before; we were in blissful ignorance of what to do, but we set to and cleared out a bed in which to plant the little bright green rosettes of some plant we saw coming up all over the place. My grandmother visited, and eyed our creation with amazement: ‘Why on earth have you planted out all that willowherb?’

      Well, that’s how you learn, and learn we did, over time. Our gardens got progressively larger as we moved from one place to another, and ended up with an Oxfordshire garden that had two streams running through it and a vegetable area that had been a farmyard for four hundred years – the soil was so rich that we grew vegetables in industrial quantities. But for both my husband and myself gardening was the treasured subsidiary occupation that we got to when we had spare moments; if I had my time again I would do as my daughter did and get some horticultural qualifications, do some professional learning and be more knowledgeable.

      We made plenty of mistakes. Not that that is a disaster. In gardening, like anything else, you learn your own taste, you discover what you like and do not like, by way of trial and error. We learned that we liked profusion, variety, clematis climbing up old apple trees, snowdrops and leucojums, roses, roses all the way … And much, much else. It occurs to me that discovery of gardening taste has a parallel with discovery of reading taste: as you read, growing up, in adult life, you discover the sort of writing you want, and as you garden you find the plants you want, the way you want them to look, the image of the garden you are trying to create. I have moved from garden to garden, the two streams and the prolific vegetable growing are decades ago now, and I have ended up with a small paved London back garden. Which means that a new garden taste has to be identified and developed. No daisy-sprinkled lawns, no yew hedges – I am a pot specialist now. Fuchsias, heuchera, hostas, plenty of geraniums in the summer, tulips and various narcissi in the spring. Hydrangeas – I have become adept at finding which hydrangeas will do nicely in a large pot. And with limited bed space roses have to be very carefully chosen – two David Austin climbers up the wall, low-growing ground-cover roses at their feet. Snowdrops and grape hyacinths and ‘Tête-à-Tête’ daffodils in front, and a select corner for hellebores. The climbing hydrangea up the back wall, and Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’ tucked into the corner bed. And anything that takes my fancy in pots that can be moved around, so that the garden changes week by week, month by month. The smallest of gardens can be made to perform, to mutate from season to season. I miss the long-gone days of digging a trench for the potatoes, pruning a bed of roses, dividing the irises, but there is immense satisfaction in the intimacy of a restricted area, where no space can be wasted, everything has to be considered, cherished, made to do its best.

      Most of us garden according to the dictates of the day. Garden fashion. It was ever thus. There are always gardening pundits, those whose expertise and talent will inspire everyone else. In the early part of the twentieth century William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll swept aside the Victorian passion for carpet bedding – thousands of annuals laid out in colour formation and patterns – and showed how to garden with the emphasis on structure and harmony, a natural look achieved in fact with subtle emphasis. Robinson showed how to plant drifts of narcissi and other spring bulbs in sweeps of grass. Jekyll favoured silvers and blues in her carefully constructed borders, Erigeron karvinskianus tumbling from high stone walls, marrying planting with landscaping when she teamed up with Edwin Lutyens: rill gardens – a canal lined with irises, sunken paved rose gardens with curved stone seats. We still tend to garden according to Jekyll, but the later part of the century brought other pundits, other tastes. And, crucially, the influence of television gardening programmes, which have had the nation rushing to create a water feature, install wall-to-wall decking, try to tuck a meadow into the sparse territory of a suburban semi. And garden centres. I have to admit here that I am a pushover where garden centres are concerned, unable to resist some choice new offering, loading the trolley with yet another grass, fern, or tempting plant I haven’t had before. I am more phlegmatic where the television programmes are concerned, appreciative often, but also irritated occasionally by presenter style, fashion decrees that you know will at once influence what the garden centres will stock. That said, now that I can no longer do much, if any, garden visiting of my own I do often relish that window into delights that I shall never see.

      Time was, the time of the garden with two streams, we were part of the Yellow Book garden openings – people whose gardens are open to visitors under the National Garden Scheme. We only just scraped in, I think – the Garden Scheme inspectors are steely-eyed and have high standards – but on one Sunday every summer many interested and beautifully behaved people would cruise through the garden, and by the end of the day we’d have contributed to the large sums of money that the scheme raises for charity. We did a great deal of Yellow Book garden visiting ourselves. There is no better way to discover how other people garden, to get ideas, admire, fail to admire. I can remember some revelations: the National Collection of corokias in a north London garden, an amazing assembly of auriculas in someone’s tiny backyard.

      The corokias interested me particularly because I have one myself – and my respects here to any reader who knows what a corokia is. They are shrubs or small trees, a species native to New Zealand, and attractive for their twisting grey stems and light foliage – mine has been living in a large pot in the middle of the London back garden for nearly thirty years, and I like it for its see-through quality, and, now, its longevity. It gives height in the centre, but does not block the view of the Japanese tassel ferns in two white pots at the back of the garden. Most gardeners become selective in their plant interests. You can’t like everything – indeed most of us acquire strong dislikes – and most of us have favourites. I remember my grandmother saying thoughtfully that if she ever ended up with what she called ‘a pocket handkerchief garden’ (comparing our suburban semi to her Somerset acreage) she would grow just one thing, to perfection. ‘Probably irises,’ she reflected. And I can see her point – it is that of a professionally minded gardener.

      I am addicted to fuchsias, violas, hydrangeas, Erigeron karvinskianus and so on. It is no good lusting much after roses in a small back garden, so the choice has to be frugal. I realise that I don’t much miss grass, a lawn. A passion for grass cutting and possession of a stable of lawnmowers is an entirely male condition, in my view. I miss trees. The garden with two streams had two lovely silver birches. And a quince – I am nostalgic for the smell of a bowl of ripe quinces on the kitchen table. And another Oxfordshire garden had a Quercus ilex, the holm oak, a Mediterranean tree that has bravely established itself here, with a Robinia pseudoacacia, or false acacia, next to it, another non-native, from North America this time. The dark shiny leaves of the holm oak contrasted nicely with the light, golden-green foliage of the robinia, and I rather liked the immigrant status of both trees.

      I live today on a garden square, and relish it for its trees – some rare surviving elms, a chestnut, a laburnum, lilacs, flowering cherries. London is rich in garden squares; some are those snobby ones open only to residents of the square, but mine is council property, open to all. This means of course that it is open also to abuse – we have the occasional spell of drug dealing, or illicit barbecue parties – but on the whole the space is respected, and most frequented by mothers with small children, the elderly enjoying a sit in the sun on a bench. During the coronavirus lockdown, I exercised there every day, walking circuits of the garden’s outer path, and

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1
      pFad - Phonifier reborn

      Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

      Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


      Alternative Proxies:

      Alternative Proxy

      pFad Proxy

      pFad v3 Proxy

      pFad v4 Proxy