NATURE
A Year in a Lifetime’s Quest
The Company of Trees: A Year in a Lifetime’s Quest Thomas Pakenham; Paradise and Plenty: A Rothschild Family Garden Mary Keen
Thomas Pakenham (Weidenfeld, 224pp, £30, Oldie price £25) ‘NO ONE can have envied Thomas Pakenham when, in 1961, he unexpectedly inherited Tullynally Castle in County Westmeath in central Ireland, with its 1,500-acre “demesne” — a third of it park and garden,’ observed Ursula Buchan in the Spectator. Pakenham, brother of Antonia Fraser, was heavily burdened with death duties and it ‘took nearly 30 years to pay off the debts before he could begin to concentrate on the delight of his heart, which is planting, caring for and observing the ways of trees as well as travelling the world to look at them’.
Pakenham, now 81, has already published three books on trees — trees that were outstanding for their height, girth, longevity or picturesque history. Meetings with Remarkable Trees, published in 1996, is the best known. His new book ‘chronicles a year in Pakenham’s life of planning, planting and travelling in pursuit of the great plant-hunters, Joseph Hooker, George Forrest and Ernest Wilson, who scoured the world for 19th-century garden-builders like the Williamses at the Cornish castle of Caerhays, and the Holfords of Westonbirt in Gloucestershire,’ explained Hilary Spurling in the Guardian. She relished Pakenham’s adventures — how he explored the ‘high Andes where the monkey puzzles grow on top of a Patagonian cliff structured in a series of vertical folds the shape and colour of a bundle of cigars’. And his expeditions to ‘Sikkim and to the mountains of Tibet, edging along fallen tree trunks across ravines with roaring rivers far below, dodging bears, snow leopards and Chinese government restrictions, returning each time with prodigious quantities of seed to be reared in the greenhouses and finally let loose on the grounds of Tullynally’.
‘The privilege of having the means to follow a passion will not be lost on readers,’ said Valerie Shanley in the Irish
Mail on Sunday; ‘but good-humoured revelations of triumphs that sometimes end in failure contribute to an engaging openness. For example, when Pakenham’s own giant Campbell’s Magnolia first burst into long-awaited blooms “the size of soup plates” on the estate years previously, the said flowers were not the desired snowy-white but a shade he describes with disgust as “knicker-pink”.’