Pearson Natural Selection

a year in the garden
Main
ISBN: 978-1-78335-119-0
Verlag: Guardian Faber Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 448 Seiten

'When it sings, a garden will have the power to transport and to lead you to a place that is magical. It is an oasis for creation, available to anyone with a little space and the compunction to get their hands dirty.' In Natural Selection, Dan Pearson draws on ten years of his Observer columns to explore the rhythms and pleasures of a year in the garden. Travelling between his city-bound plot in Peckham and twenty acres of rolling hillside in Somerset, he celebrates the beautiful skeletons of the winter garden, the joyous passage into spring, the heady smell of summer's bud break and the flaring of colour in autumn. Pearson's irresistible enthusiasm and wealth of knowledge overflow in a book teeming with tips to inspire your own space, be it a city window box or country field. Bringing you a newfound appreciation of nature, both wild and tamed, reading Natural Selection is a deeply restorative experience.

An award-winning British landscape and garden designer, plantsman, writer and journalist, Dan Pearson's love of all things gardening stemmed from a young age. At ten years old, while his classmates were reading Enid Blyton and Alan Garner, he was devouring garden catalogues in his spare time. Encouraged by his green-fingered neighbour, Geraldine, Dan Pearson went on to become one of the most celebrated gardeners of our time. Following in the footsteps of the legendary Vita Sackville-West, he was a weekly columnist for the Observer for over a decade. He writes regularly for publications including The Times, Daily Telegraph and Gardens Illustrated. www.digdelve.com @thedanpearson

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pearson, Dan

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

It has been interesting to look back over the best part of ten years of writing for the Observer and see my gardening time mapped in words. In that decade my evolution as a gardener has been transformed by a move from London, where for fifteen years I had a long, fenced-in garden in Peckham, to Hillside, an eight-hectare smallholding in Somerset. In London I created a world which provided me with a haven in the hubbub. Here at Hillside my boundaries are distant and the eye can travel. The move was perhaps the greatest change of my life, in gardening terms, but one that was necessary and inevitable. I needed to feel smaller and less in control of my environment and to develop a new way of gardening that allowed me to be closer to the land and its rhythms. The move – the need for which was best explained by a friend who equated my London life to being pot-bound – was also part of a process that every gardener embarks upon when they make the commitment to garden. You cannot help but evolve, for a garden is never static and inspires you to keep pace and develop.

Writing has helped to pull my gardening journey into focus. While the articles in this collection have been selected from a decade of observations and a variety of locations, they have been chosen to cover the twelve months of the year, so that the shifts in the seasons – and in place – are mapped in thoughts and activities. One of the great joys of the gardening year is the fact that the garden forces you to pay attention to the here and now. Every week is different from the next, but there is also reassurance in the repetition; the inevitability of spring blossom, and the flare of the berries at the other end of the growing season. A single year’s experience is like the growth that accompanies it. It builds and layers and enriches.

My own path as a gardener was set at about five years old when my father and I made a pond in the orchard. It was a rectangle of just a couple of metres, but in planting it and watching its evolution through a watery lens, I discovered the alchemy of tending living things and the reward that comes from that process of nurturing. Some describe this as having ‘green fingers’, but to me gardening is a unified combination of skills that is actually not remotely mysterious. It is an ability to observe and to notice the needs of a plant (or combination of plants) and then to respond to those needs. As time goes on and the process continues, we become wiser as gardeners and more confident. We learn that it is possible to break the rules and, indeed, to make up our own. We evolve, we get wilder or neater or more accepting about the nature of weeds.

I feel I had a head start in learning to garden so young, and I was luckier than most because I grew up amongst people who were fascinated by gardens and had an enthusiasm for growing things. My mother, who was brought up in vicarages and whose father had grown produce to eat during the war, tended our kitchen garden. My father grew the flowers and, although I wouldn’t describe Dad as an instinctive gardener, he had a great eye. He also had a way with colour; he was never afraid of it, and we used to spend hours comparing notes while working on a pair of borders on either side of a path, one of which was mine, the other his. It was safer that way, for even then I had an insatiable appetite for plants and was hungry for more ground, and would have happily taken his border too.

Our neighbour Geraldine was also a great influence. A naturalist at heart, but a lifelong and committed gardener, her garden gate was always open to me. She gardened on the wild side, and from her I learned early on that a weed is only a plant in the wrong place. She was never discriminating on that front, and weeds were as welcome in her garden as choice plants, and they all came with fascinating stories of their provenance: the Fritillaria pyrenaica, for instance, collected on one of her travels to the Pyrenees and wrapped in damp, foreign newspaper in the boot of her car for the long journey home. In the garden she would part the weeds like curtains, to reveal her collected treasures, and then the stories would begin. Although my training at the RHS garden at Wisley was the polar opposite (and would soon teach me a very different set of rules), her influence instilled in me an openness to the blur between the world of the garden and the wild ground beyond it. In my late teens it was Geraldine’s stories that set me off travelling to see plants in the wild. Her stories were the inspiration, but it was only when I saw plants growing in their natural settings for myself that everything fell into place.

My mother, who has always been driven as much by a project as by a story, was responsible for our family’s move to a house with half a hectare of long-forgotten garden. Hill Cottage had overwhelmed the old lady who had lived there in its ruins and, by the mid-1970s, when we acquired it, the garden was several decades gone. Trees sprouted from the cottage’s chimney and akebia vine had got under the skirting boards and wound around the furniture. We moved there when I was ten and spent the next seven years, until I left home, clearing the garden and discovering the treasures that lay submerged in the undergrowth. It was there that I learned to garden with and not against nature, for we were gardening as we cleared and with only as much energy as we had to keep the wilderness from closing in behind us.

At ten I was a child with a narrow frame of focus. While classmates were reading Enid Blyton and Alan Garner, my reading consisted of plant catalogues; my entire world was the garden. I started, but never finished, creating an illustrated book about Hill Cottage and made diaries with diagrams and drawings of plants and combinations that I’d been inspired by. Beth Chatto’s catalogues were a paradise of description and anecdotes. At school I kept my secret to myself, for I knew that it was strange to be so committed to a pastime that was seen as the domain of an older generation.

Joan Wiggins, my English teacher at that point, was trying to get me to read more broadly and it is her whom I thank for showing me the connection between words, plants and the process of growing. She encouraged my writings, which, once they were on track, poured out with stories of the wilderness we lived in and the natural world that was my domain.

By the time I was thirteen she had introduced me to the books of Christopher Lloyd and I became hungry for the written word and the wider gardening world it connected me to. Christo’s words, of course, came out of a real place and from decades of experience. Later, when I visited his garden, Great Dixter, with my father, I came to love it. As I stood under the Mount Etna broom he had described so vividly, his writings and my imaginings came together and combined. I wrote to him as a teenager and he gave me a tour of his meadows. He was a man who saw the importance of sharing his experiences. Later I came to read the late Vita Sackville-West, whose garden was by then in the hands of her gardeners. Although it had become something else entirely – clipped where it was once voluminous, and chic where it had probably been shabby – the romance was still there in her writing. I never dreamed then that I would one day be writing in her shoes at the Observer.

Today my gardening time is precious and well guarded. The garden is a place in which I can lose myself as I did when I was a child, with a disregard for time that can easily see two hours turning into an afternoon or even longer. It is a sanctuary of sorts and one that allows me to combine mindfulness with the purely physical. It is a place that opens up ease of thought. In fact the juxtaposition of discovery and disappointment is often a better education than a delight easily forgotten. It is all part of an evolution, of the growing and the enrichment that comes from doing and looking. And the writing helps to pin it down.

As an adult, I have found that writing and gardening have become inextricably linked. I put aside one solitary day a week to write and the day will often start with a walk to visit my subject matter. I used to think of this as procrastination, but the hour or so lost, when I might be drawn into a task I hadn’t planned for, is all part of the ritual. It is then that my ideas come together and I get a purchase. A posy picked allows me the opportunity to really describe something in intimate detail. Making notes in a notebook is the other method I employ to get something onto the page.

The thoughts which I have when I am gardening may well be born of a repetitious task and appear to be equally weighted, but when I examine them alongside what has gone before and what is yet to come, they are layered. What I like about writing is the act of capturing the process of gardening, of distilling these experiences in words. Some thoughts draw to conclusions and are satisfying as a result, but others are equally interesting for remaining in flux. The writing might interrogate a colour, a feeling or a place. It might capture a moment that I know will only happen once, perfection existing for minutes and then passing: the experience of standing under a cherry when the very first blooms are opening, or the perfume of a solitary lily. Writing helps to keep those experiences present and alive and in the memory.

I hope that some of my thoughts are inspiring, be it to the imagination or as dirt under the nails and the growth that comes with the act of...