Full Monty
Monty wonders what effect our fickle British weather has on gardening style
The harsh reality of extreme weather would crush the soul of our British eccentricity
At the beginning of December, I went to bed on a Saturday night with the garden greenish, brownish and not particularly cold and woke the next morning with it undulating white under a foot of snow. The snow kept falling all day, so by Monday morning there were drifts across paths and great, white cumulus clouds of snow on all the hedges, and every branch etched with a thick, white line. There was some damage, almost entirely through the sheer volume and weight of the snow – a weeping pear split in two, a hawthorn brought down and two buddleias uprooted. When the temperature dropped below -13ºC, the greenhouse doors froze solid and, under their deep blanket of snow, the cold frames were sealed tight. All the pipes froze in the potting shed – two subsequently burst – and I am still waiting see how happy the tree ferns are after that exposure. But there was a simplicity, a purity about this kind of weather that stripped away all the convolutions and complications of gardening. It made me realise how fickle, variable and fine-tuned our weather is compared to most places in the world. I spent a lot of last year visiting very hot and arid places for my BBC2 series, Paradise Gardens, and that had the same effect as snow – simplifying and distilling the garden right down to a few bare essentials. The essentials were water, shade and greenery with fragrance replacing colour, and fruit being far more viable than vegetables. I felt a sense of hunkering down beneath the power of the weather, rather than the way that we British gardeners play it – complaining about it being a bit too cold, a bit too hot and bit too wet and, occasionally (chance would be a fine thing here), a bit too dry. If the weather is brutally predictable, it does focus the mind, though gardening may be stripped of some of its finesse. This is all brought home to me by the many letters I get, asking about plant health and care. These often suggest that there are levels of control that a ‘master’ gardener has access to and that if only the letter writer could also acquire this knowledge then all their plant problems would be solved. But in my experience gardening is really not like that at all. Almost everything that plants do happens perfectly well without – and often despite – us gardeners. To imagine that we can shape and control nature, to the extent that our gardens will be free of every perceived pest and disease, is mad. Our British weather is so benign, so gentle that we can get away with almost anything. If we had snow and temperatures settling below -10ºC for three months, blazing sun for another three and a brief, but glorious, spring and autumn, then we might be less inclined to think we had so much control. We would stick the plants in where we thought they’d look good, enjoy them while they lasted and accept that our mistakes would, by and large, be rewarded with the death of said plants. We wouldn’t try and grow half the things that we do – the risks would be too great. Our palette would be refined to those things that can cope with real weather, rather than the milksop version that British gardeners have to contend with. But then our gardens would only be half as interesting, and our national passion for growing a huge variety of plants would wither, blasted by snow, ice and desiccating sun. While I like the harsh reality of extreme weather and rejoice in the rigour it imposes, it would crush the soul of our lovely British eccentricity, and the quirkiness of backstreet gardens and allotments filled with the rare, unusual and downright odd. It may well be that climate change will impose these new extremes as the norm, rather than the exception. It may be that we gardeners really need to take this seriously and start acting – with urgency. But that, for