GARDENING - Deborah Kellaway

 

AN OCTOGENARIAN subscriber to The Oldie has sent me her first gardening book. She hoped I might have time to glance through it'. With a doubting heart, I began to turn the glossy pages, and I was hooked. Whenever I decided to put it aside, subheadings or close-up shots of my own favourite plants drew me on: camellias, tree peonies, Romneya coulteri, Eucryphia cordifolia, Hoheria. 'Glory of Amlwch', parrotia, Lilium auratum, meconopsis, trillium, dodecatheon, Rosa banksiae... This is just scratching the surface. For every plant I grow, or wish I grew, this book deals with at least three I've never heard of.

 

Christian Lamb is a self-confessed plantaholic. Her garden is a third of an acre of good acid soil in Cornwall, and it is tight-packed with her Must Have plants. She is so short of space that, when something grows too big, she digs it up and gives it to someone who has more room, thus freeing the site for more planting. If she falls for a plant, she hunts it down, and has mastered the Internet for this purpose. She tells us where she's planted it, how it's doing, how it got its name and which plant collector found it first. If it does not thrive, she moves it to her 'hospital' and buys another specimen which may do better. Her tender plants are covered in winter with special fleeces and shelters, and when she decided she Must Have the 'king of climbers'- Lapageria rosea, the Chilean bellflower -she built a special south-facing green-house in which to raise its seedlings. Now she hoses its leaves fiercely in imitation of a tropical rainstorm, which encourages it to produce new shoots (the slugs' 'three star gourmet choice'); she fights mealy bug by washing every leaf in soapy water, and is rewarded by 'exquisite late summer festoons and garlands of flowers, almost too beautiful to be real.'

This is a quirky, off-beat book, very funny but also learned. It has an impromptu air, like a free-ranging conversation that moves from one enthusiasm to another. In the end, it is the indefatigable author's intelligent, amused but passionately interested voice, which holds the reader. She enjoys researching her plants as much as she enjoys growing them. She quotes extensively from the letters, journals and notes of the botanists and travellers who discovered her plants. She tells us, self-mockingly, that when financing her garden became a problem, she 'invented' a lecture on Sir Joseph Banks and craftily proposed herself as a willing lecturer to the American universities and botanic gardens who had recently bought costly prints from Banks's Florilegium. Thus she reached North America. But she has also got herself to China and Chile and Australia in the footsteps of famous plantaholics of the past. Hence her title, From the Ends of the Earth. She could have called her book The Plant Finder if the title wasn't already taken.

And as it's my Christmas column, I recommend both these books as possible gifts for plantaholics. Christian Lamb's book. From the Ends of the Earth, is published by Bene Factum Publishing Ltd. at £I7.99 - a modest price when you consider that there are colour photographs (mostly taken by the author herself) on almost every page.