Armchair gardening
The eternal joys of gardening, by David Wheeler
Keep on planting
I’ve known countless old gardeners, huffing and puffing their way to cherished greenhouses or ambling on sticks that double as weed-worriers and seedhead decapitators. One used a litter-picker to grab miscreant seedlings and snatch the odd flowering stem to carry back to the house, triumphantly.
A love of gardening should never be abandoned. We can’t go as well or as fast as youngsters, but that’s not the point. Gardening shouldn’t be competitive – leave that to the Britain in Bloom brigade.
Others, too, find gardening competitive. Take the Chelsea Flower Show and its myriad offshoots. Certificates and medals fly around as if it’s a vegetable Crufts. Lone gardeners (they’re usually solitary souls) strive to grow the heaviest marrow, the longest runner bean, the fattest onion and the sweetest sweet peas. All good clean fun, of course.
Fortunately, I don’t possess that cut-throat gene. Hence all competitive doings – football, whist, three-legged races and fancy dress parades – pass me by.
Physical exertion and mental stimulation liken gardeners to musicians, especially pianists, whose wrists, arms, shoulders, torso, legs and feet must work as efficiently as fingers.
Many were and are long-lived: think Horowitz, aged 86 when he died. Wilhelm Kempff was 96. Irving Berlin lived to be 101. Dame Vera is still with us at 102. Robert Mayer, forever remembered for fostering a love of music in children, lived to celebrate his 105th birthday and André Previn made 90.
Viola Smith, an American drummer, recorded her 107th year, beaten cleanly by Italian composer Cecilia Seghizzi, who took delivery of birthday cards aged 111.
OK, neither Mozart, Schubert nor Chopin made old bones, but each accomplished in their short allotted
spans (36, 31 and 39, respectively) more than we could achieve in several prolonged lifetimes.
And gardeners? Yes. Harold Hillier had 85 productive years, planting trees until weeks of his death in 1985. Curmudgeonly William Robinson almost scored a century. His contemporary Gertrude Jekyll lived from 1843 to 1932.
Adorable Gussie (Edward Augustus Bowles), author of three enduring books about his Middlesex garden, clocked up a glorious innings of 89. Beth Chatto died two years ago, aged 95. And, in
November last year, I proposed a toast on behalf of 150 fellow gardeners at a lunch celebrating a very fit, able and talkative Penelope Hobhouse on the splendid occasion of her 90th.
At a mere 74, I feel positively childlike among my gardening and musical heroes.
What then is the secret? Activity! An active body and an active mind. Until struck by a mysterious bacterium that destroyed two vertebrae 18 months ago, I thought nothing of planting several trees and shrubs during my everyday rounds.
In that same year, I made 19 overseas trips, a dozen of them leading garden or garden research trips as far afield as Morocco, the Azores and New York – unwelcome news for Ms Thunberg, who might perhaps avert her fearsome gaze when she learns I’ve planted 1,500 trees in the last decade.
If spared, we might be lucky enough to reminisce in our sunset years, that interregnum between the hanging up of our garden implements and shuffling off to that Great Compost Heap in the sky.
I’d opt to dream of hours spent in my childhood Cotswolds garden, tending a productive bedsit windowbox in London, my first proper garden on a sandy Surrey slope and the two multi-acre ones I’ve made with a loving partner in the past thirty-odd years.
Armchair-bound, I’ll wander in my mind through 1970s Hidcote and Sissinghurst (no crowds then, and cheap), Mottisfont for its roses, blue Himalayan poppies in Scotland, fields of wild gladioli in Cyprus, and the gardens of friends who shared bounty and expertise.
I’ll dream myself back to an imagined Topkapı Palace (a familiar Istanbul haunt until a couple of years ago) and make my slow way through a succession of rose-perfumed enclosures.
A cool zephyr puffs from the Golden Horn. Elaborate turbans, brocades, shimmering floral kaftans and flower-imbued Iznik ceramics animate the scene. Topkapı though was also the scene of much cruelty as well as beauty: sibling princes strangled with silken cords, redundant consorts sewn into weighted sacks and launched into the Bosphorus...
But is not all beauty tinged with sadness – memento mori and all that? Forget the slamming of the final door. Instead, if you didn’t get round to planting a tree twenty years ago, plant one now.
If you don’t have a garden, chat up your local vicar or club captain – churchyards, cemeteries and golf courses make ideal alternatives.
‘At a mere 74, I feel positively childlike among my gardening heroes’