Gardening
GIFTS THAT KEEP 0N GROWING
Asked recently what I’d like for Christmas, I hastily replied, ‘A full-time gardener on a ten-year contract’.
I spoke too soon. On reflection, I’d like two full-time gardeners, please, and to make the contract renewable. We are, after all, gardening eight acres.
However, it’s not difficult to choose more realistic presents for gardeners. The trade burgeons with multifarious manual and mechanical paraphernalia.
Still, some old codgers (myself not included) might be reluctant to surrender a venerable and much-loved fork or spade for a shiny new replacement needing a 20-year run-in.
Gardeners can’t have enough heavyduty gloves, durable secateurs and sharp pruning saws. We physically feeble but determined ones also need long-handled trowels and a kneeling stool, sturdy enough to sit on to admire our industrious handiwork.
There are some handsome plantlabelling kits on the market and, if in doubt, there are always (sometimes much-preferred) gift vouchers. A basket of fragrant flowering daffodils would illuminate Christmas morning – and the bulbs can be popped into the garden when the trumpets have faded.
Even at this low point in the year, garden centres remain crammed with coveted plants, many of which can be transplanted straight into beds and borders in a mild spell when the ground isn’t frozen.
Shops offer a lavish choice of armchair garden reading for those days when it’s just too miserable to work outside.
This year, I’ll be giving The Well Gardened Mind (£20) by Sue StuartSmith and handsome uniform volumes of the thoroughly enjoyable singlespecies botanicals published by Reaktion Books. Selling for around £16 each, there are now more than 30 titles available, including those devoted to roses, oaks, palms, chrysanthemums, lilies, geraniums and bamboos.
I’ve been fascinated by Catherine Horwood’s Potted History: How Houseplants Took Over Our Homes (£9.99), a revised paperback edition of her bestselling 2007 original. She has added a fascinating new chapter on the seemingly unlikely revival of the houseplant business, especially among millennials, who yearn for something green to nurture but have no garden in which to do so. That’s the grandchildren sorted.
Tree-lovers will welcome the new ninth edition of The Hillier Manual of Trees and Shrubs (£20), fully updated by our leading arborist, octogenarian Roy Lancaster, listing brief commentaries on some 14,000 woody plants, many associated with milder regions to suit our changing climate.
I’m lucky to live within less than an hour’s drive of the small ‘book town’ of Hay-on-wye on the English/welsh border in Brecknockshire. Many of its 11 (there used to be many more) second-hand bookshops have good gardening selections, enlivened recently by a horde of superfluous book-plated tomes discarded by Sir Roy Strong following his recent move from The Laskett to a smaller house in Ledbury.
And should you wish your seasonal munificence to be evoked frequently throughout the coming year, there’s no better way than gifting a magazine subscription – to The Oldie, natch, or, if I’m permitted a plug, to my own gardening quarterly, Hortus, now well settled into its third decade. Other periodicals are available.
I’ll end where I began. Assistance is invaluable to older, debilitated or disabled gardeners. The services of a paid co-worker, however occasional, would surely be highly esteemed by all seniors in need of a few hours of obliging muscle to help maintain their verdant creations.
Happy Christmas.
David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal