BEST BOOKS ON... GARDENING

OUR roses are blossoming. I do think June is often the prettiest time of year in Britain, when the days are at their longest and most promising, and the grass is exuberantly green and not parched as in high summer.

Many a thesis has been written on what gardens and gardening represent in literature — be it escape, therapy, imprisonment, colonisation or, as for Eve, the site of an awakening. Dangers can lurk beyond a ha-ha, down a forking path or with the plucking of a rose.

A recent literary discovery for me is the Thirties-set The Garden Of The Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani, an Italian Jew who survived the World War II by going underground.

Fascist race laws bring his novel’s middle-class narrator into the highwalled sanctum of the ‘garden, or to be more precise, the vast parkland’ of the Finzi-Continis, his community’s grandest family.

He is invited to play tennis there, after Jews are banned from the city’s clubs. This sun- dappled coming-of-age story is always overshadowed by the prologue’s revelation that the family ‘were all deported to Germany in the autumn of 1943, and no one knows whether they have any grave at all’.

Mary Wesley’s The Camomile Lawn starts in the summer of 1939, with an extended family gathering in Cornwall. A lifetime later, the cousins reunite there for a funeral party. For them, war also changed everything, but that garden, leading down to the cliff-edge, connects them with their former selves.

The title of John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener alludes to its protagonist Justin Quayle, a diplomat in Kenya. He learns in the opening pages of his young wife’s brutal murder upcountry. Quayle is characterised by his colleagues as ‘a sweet chap’, diffident, perhaps a little dull (‘loves nothing better than toiling in the flowerbeds’). But committed gardeners have other qualities, such as patience and doggedness. In digging for the truth, Quayle leaves nothing unturned.

If you’re feeling trammelled, then take some gardening leave with these now.