My kind of gardening book
I am not a great one for reading gardening books and magazines. In my rather bookish life, this is one area where I prefer to do rather than to read about it.
I subscribe to the more popular gardening magazines, have a soft spot for Peter Cundall, take a clutch of other magazines out of the lending library every now and again, and rather like delving into a compilation of Vita Sackville-West’s gardening columns which sits on my study bookshelf. She was much more organised than me, but then again, she had gardeners, and money.
But last week I read a gardening book that really spoke to me. It is a book about life, as reflected in tales of a suburban backyard. The book’s title is “Back Yard - A Gardening Life” by John Griffin - an Adelaide-based school teacher and author.
His book begins with a description of how the garden has changed over the years, as his family grew up. The garden furniture, far from the statues and well-placed fountains of Vita Sackville-West, progressed from paddling pools and bicycles with trainer wheels to trampolines and swings to body building equipment, with fruit trees planted out on the lawn once so essential for cricket.
There are poems in this book, and articles on enhancing the sex-life of marrows and a list of 19 things the author has learned about carrots (including “it is possible to grow carrots successfully, and to eat them almost every day of the year, and still not like them”) and articles about willow trees and tomatoes and chillis.
This wonderful collection of zestful bits and pieces is dedicated to Giovanni Gervasi, the author’s father in law and a central character in the growth of the family and the garden.
There are sentiments that make me want to stand up and say “Yes!”, such as “As I have turned myself into a gardener, I have increasingly internalised the flow of the seasons, and I sometimes feel a sense of sadness as the end of summer comes.”
And “As a topic of conversation, the tomato rivals the weather. How often do you find yoursefl discussing with a casual acquaintance whether or not it has been a good season for tomatoes. And how very often it has been a bad season for the person you are talking to!”
This is my sort of gardening book - one that recognises the chaos of life, the essentially imperfect, mucky yet deeply rewarding life of the backyard horticulturalist. The sort of book that makes you understand Scarlett O’Hara - not the fourteen inch waste, but the scene when she stands outlined against the sky after grubbing up a potato, and says: “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again. Not me, nor any of my family.” Or words to that effect.
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