Katherine Swift

The garden historian and writer reveals why she feels she’s living a double life, her need for silence, space and solitude, and her surprising love of classic motor cycles

IWORDS CAMILLA SWIFT

PORTRAIT CHARLIE HOPKINSON ’m Persephone,” says Katherine Swift, the gardener, writer, columnist and author of the acclaimed The Morville Hours. By way of explanation she describes her life as defined by darkness and light. Six months outside in the garden; six months inside, writing. I catch this wisp swamped by a jumper made for two, in determined writing mode, her mind feverishly knitting together the strands of her latest book. Strands are important in Katherine’s life.

She has three rooms where she writes by electric light, with heavily lined curtains tightly drawn, so she cannot tell whether it’s summer or winter, day or night, and won’t be distracted by the garden. She loves writing but finds it hard. “But then, of course, if it wasn’t hard everyone would do it,” she says. She can spend an afternoon putting a comma in then taking it out again. By April, the start of time outside, she’s desperate not to stop. So many loose strands, so much still to say.

Books and gardening in equal measure. She spent an isolated, bookish and silent childhood with a distant elder brother and disappointed parents in a difficult relationship. They moved constantly, houses crammed with books, Katherine’s father always planting a garden. “Like tent pegs hammered into the ground it anchored us.” For Katherine, being grown up was defined by having a garden full of fruit and veg – beauty, utility and fruitfulness – and all these remain principal elements of her gardening ethos.

Another is garden history. After studying philosophy and English at Keele University she worked (for 20 years) as a rare book librarian at Oxford University and Trinity College Dublin, embarking in 1979 on a doctorate on 17th- and 18th-century library collections. People creating big aristocratic libraries, she discovered, were also making wonderful gardens. Determined to create a historical garden of her own, she moved, in August 1988, to Morville Hall in Shropshire with her then husband, “two removal vans of books, two carloads of plants, three cats” and, originally, a 20-year lease. She needed to convince her landlord – the National Trust – she knew what she was doing. Useless at planting plans, worse still at 3D visuals, she wrote her imaginary garden. The first guidebook written for a garden not yet started.

Now a sequence of garden rooms, including, of course, a formal fruit and vegetable garden, reflecting the different ages in Morville’s rich history, the people who lived and worked there, has evolved gradually from a formal garden in a wild setting to a wild garden in a formal setting. And the visitors pour in.

Katherine works here, from dawn until after dark, all year, every day in all weathers and seasons – “often with only the church clock and an occasional cat for company”. Fortunately, solitude is her idea of bliss. She loves the silence of gardening. “Absence of words, space for the thoughts to come. A silence that allows you to listen,” she says.

Early on she developed ME. Unable to garden she began writing instead, in pencil, tentatively on the backs of envelopes and odd scraps of paper; starting in the middle so she could pretend she wasn’t really writing at all. The result, 14 years later, was the acclaimed Morville Hours. Within a framework of a medieval book of hours, is interwoven, like strands of brightly coloured silks, the days and seasons of the gardening year, with Shropshire history, tales of Morville village and occupants past and present, her own life, the lives of her parents, and a dusting of melancholy. Not the magnificent melancholy of Venice at Christmas but wistful, kindly.

Unsurprisingly, her favourite season is winter, with the garden stripped down, transparent. For her it’s a beginning as well as an end, “when the frost gets to work in the garden to purge it of disease and decay”. But there ought, she says, to be a law against August. “When the garden begins to run out of steam. So do I.”

Her latest book, A Rose for Morville, a mere five years in the writing, rattles on apace. Starting where the Morville Hours ends, it’s based around a walk she made between Good Friday and Ascension Day, taking in, en route, the five wild roses of Shropshire, geology, several churches, bell ringers, a hermit, medieval romance, her mother and the liturgy, which she describes as “a wonderful aesthetic object”.

More strands. Her editor, she fears, is beginning to pale. And the most unlikely strand of all? Her passion for old motorbikes, a principally aesthetic pleasure fulfilled by an accommodating neighbour who once allowed her to ride his collection of pre-war bikes around his orchard. She was herself, until recently, the proud owner of a Harley Davidson Custom Cruiser. No full-on black leather “only the jacket” and no speed freak either, she just loved gliding slowly and noiselessly, while gazing at the countryside. I’m marginally relieved never to have met her on a narrow country lane. But it’s another good reminder that gardening and gardeners are, as Katherine puts it, about “so much more than just gardens”. USEFUL INFORMATION Morville Hall, Morville, nr Bridgnorth, Shropshire WV16 5NB. Tel 01746 780838, nationaltrust.org.uk. See website for garden opening times. A Rose for Morville will be published by Bloomsbury in 2018.

NEXT MONTH Garden writer and designer, Stephen Lacey.