Begonias are SO last season — and common as muck!
On May 31, 1920, Virginia Woolf experienced ‘the first pure joy’ of her new cottage garden in rural Sussex.
The 38- year- old novelist and her husband, Leonard, bought the dilapidated 17th-century house in 1919, seduced by the ‘fertility and wildness’ of its three-quarter-acre garden, complete with mature orchard.
During that first spring, Virginia felt the stirrings of a ‘queer enthusiasm’ after a full day of weeding. ‘We were out till nine at night,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘with chocolate earth in our nails.’
Suffering her first nervous breakdown aged just 13 (following the death of her mother), Virginia Woolf struggled with mental health issues throughout her life.
Yet, for two decades before she died, one of the few places Woolf found some respite was in the sensory delights and soothing toil of her country garden.
In recent years, scientists have confirmed the health benefits of gardening. It’s exercise you don’t notice you’re doing, while soaking up vitamin D and boosting the immune system by getting your hands in the soil.
One study suggests that even a short daily potter reduces the older gardener’s risk of stroke and heart attack by 27 per cent. And in 2015, a government health adviser called on GPs to prescribe gardening to prevent the onset of dementia. now in her mid-80s, novelist Dame Penelope Lively is one of those older gardeners. Her new book finds memories of her own gardens scrambling like roses through insights into the history of gardening and the artists — including Woolf, Monet and P. G. Wodehouse — who have been inspired by their gardens.
A firm believer that ‘gardening is genetic . . . and runs down the female line’, she took notes from her mother and grandmother when it came to the gardens she planted with her husband, Jack.
First, a modest suburban plot, then the ‘lush acre or so of Oxfordshire’ she was tending when she won the Carnegie Medal for British children’s books for The Ghost Of Thomas Kempe in 1973 and the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger in 1987.
She’s not the first to suggest that ‘the difference between men and women is that men are interested in cutting grass and women are not’. Her late husband
NATURE LIFE IN THE GARDEN by Penelope Lively (Penguin Fig Tree £14.99)
aimed for pristine stripes, while she enjoyed a sprinkle of daisies.
Addicted to fuchsias and bulb catalogues, she’s engaging on her own passions and those of others: in 2015, one snowdrop bulb ( Galanthus plicatus ‘ Golden Fleece’) sold for £1,390.
Fashions in British gardening can be traced back to the Roman occupation. In Roman culture, the rose was a symbol for discretion, so they painted the flowers on the ceilings of their dining rooms to remind guests that anything said there, while drinking, should remain ‘ sub rosa’.
Later periods saw gardeners getting snobby about certain plants or gardening styles. Lively quotes Jane Austen poking fun at the 18thcentury vogue for the picturesque, and Vita Sackville-West turning her nose up at gaudy Victorian colour in favour of the white garden.
Lively has swayed with the trends of the 20th century and ‘hunted down dwarf conifers, then ripped them out a few years later; I have junked gladioli and substituted crocosmia, preferably Crocosmia “Lucifer” ’. But she continues to plant trailing begonias, even though — like scarlet geraniums and red hot pokers — they are disdained by the middle classes as ‘common’.
Today, she cultivates just a few square metres in North London. But the practice continues to sustain her.
Unlike so many activities in later life, she says, gardening continues to focus us on the future. Old hands, immersed in Woolf ’s chocolate earth, ‘escape winter by swinging forward into spring and summer’.