SITTING IN THE SHADE: A DECADE OF MY GARDEN DIARY

by Hugh Johnson

Mitchell Beazley, £17.99 ISBN 978-1784727079

Trad has been sharing his thoughts with gardeners since 1975 – perceptive, opinionated, witty and wise. We couldn’t wish for better company.

Reviewer Ambra Edwards is an author and garden historian.

How can you not warm to a man who names his goldfish Diogenes? (A loner in a tub, geddit?) Equally, he can turn the fall of a leaf into a poetic meditation. This is a book to be sipped and savoured, to roll luxuriously around the tongue, relishing its nuance, its craftsmanship, its deliciously idiosyncratic flavour. But so entirely moreish is it, that it’s hard to resist shameless bingeing.

Trad is the alter ego of celebrated wine writer Hugh Johnson – a persona he slips into as donning ‘an old tweed jacket, cuffs fraying and elbows patched’. If this characterisation suggests fogeydom, think again. There is a freshness and verve in these diaries that make the most familiar things seem suddenly astonishing and newly minted: the smell of rain, petals floating on water, the astounding efficiency of roots.

It is a privileged life Trad recounts, certainly. He flits urbanely between France and Italy, Kyoto and Beijing, California and New York (at least before Covid strikes). He plants hydrangeas on the Solent, and woodlands in rural Wales. When Trad downsizes, as he does in June 2013, it is not to a plastic-windowed retirement flat, but a Kensington townhouse.

‘Our new garden is precisely one 536th the size of the old one,’ he observes.

It is perhaps hard, for a man with a passion for trees, that it should be dominated by an outsized sycamore. But it is a challenge to which he rises with his customary curiosity and intelligence. ‘Town gardening,’ he decides, ‘is like putting on reading glasses’, and he adjusts his focus accordingly.

Naturally enough, he draws a parallel between wine and gardens: both offer ‘sensual pleasures with a strong tincture of the intellectual’. There could be no better summation of these elegant, erudite and endlessly entertaining observations.