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The beginner gardener
Alex Preston hurls himself into horticulture
It’s hard to say when a mere hobby grew into an obsession. It was, perhaps, in the darkest days that my love bloomed. Winter is a test of a gardener’ s devotion, a battle between hope and despair, a trial of the puritan spirit that says mulch, rake, plant, when all else is curling up and dying. on a squally afternoon in November, I got through four bulb dibbers while planting 200 tulips; sweat and rain blinding me, my gloves sodden, fingers numb. In February, waist-deep in the pond, one of my waders sprung a leak, an icy ingress of water, and I longed for the green-grey swamp to swallow me. the first year of my gardening life has been a catalogue of disasters and disappointment s, mist a ke s heaped upon mist a kes. I’ve found numerous ways of killing plants; a horticultural tarantino movie. the distance between vision and reality is vast, but despite it all, I love it.
a year and a half ago, we moved, with a swiftness that surprised us, from London to the country, a few miles north of rye. We landed in a rather unlovely 1920s rectory, left half-finished after an overambitious building project, the house islanded in a two-acre waste land of rubble and mud. the old roses that had garlanded the house had been torn off, the flowerbeds filled in, the pond overgrown and silted up. It was January, and that first morning in our new home, when the kids came into our room, we looked out on the garden in the grey winter’ s dawn and it was like something from Passchendaele. I thought of Wilfred owen: ‘the g round was not mud, not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking clay, three, four, and five feet deep, relieved only by craters full of water…’
slowly the year shucked off its coat. spring came, and with it the familiar hopefulness. the cherry tree outside my daughter’s window exploded into blossom, a ruddy bullfinch hopping about in the froth. I learnt that one of the rectory’ s previous inhabitants–a Fat her Green – had been t he nature correspondent for the Wealden Times. I found a book of his–Notes from a Country Rectory Window – in a secondhand bookshop. In it he writes of fishing in the pond amid the yellow water iris es, of apples from the orchard, of
the fervid spring time life around the house. He’s dead now, but traces of him began to appear in the garden like little hieratic ghosts: cyclamen under the old yews; foxgloves up the drive; shrubs– he be, fuchsia and ma ho ni a–that had survived the developers’ cull. I didn’t know the names of these things then, but they stirred something in me. I too wanted to leave behind such beauty.
Summer came and we began to understand that we, who knew nothing about gardening, had moved to a horticultural hotbed, caught in the net that spins itself between Christopher Lloyd’s Great Dixter, Vita Sackville-West’ s
The cider I made exploded all over the pantry, but the sight of a wheelbarrow buckling under the weight of the harvest gave me a deep thrill
Sissinghurst and Sarah Raven’s Perch Hill. You might beat a path from Dixter to Sis sing hurst, from Perch Hill to Knole, from Smallhythe Place to Great Maytham Hall, walking only through beautiful gardens. These great stately grounds have seeded themselves in the landscape that surrounds them, so that every pond has a Dixter gunnera, every cottage is clad with Smallhythe roses, and every quiet village street hides a mini-sis sing hurst ofp leached lime trees and white pergolas.
The bluff and sprightly Rod and his motley gang of sunburnt boys arrived to do what the experts call hard landscaping, and within weeks there was a terrace around the house, flower beds, a lawn upon which Rod and his lads danced a strange gavotte (to firm down the seed). Summer flashed by, and soon I was picking apples from our orchard – 52 trees moored in a sea of wild flowers. The cider I made exploded all over the pantry, but the sight of a wheelbarrow buckling under the weight of the harvest gave me a deep and ancient-feeling thrill. As autumn descended, I could feel the gardening bug biting.
My mother-in-law, Annabelle, who’d built a beautiful Shropshire garden out of a field 40 years earlier, came to visit, and talked to us like the idiots we were, patiently explaining the difference between annuals and perennials. ‘You learn by making mistakes,’ she told us. ‘It’s how I lea r nt.’ We were coming from nowhere, knowledge-wise, couldn’t with confidence have told a foxglove from a hollyhock prior to our move. We learnt about plants with the leaping, ravenous hunger of autodidacts, and the more we knew, the more we loved our garden. Bulbs began to arrive in the post. We subscribed to gardening magazines. We learnt the names, the pronunciations, the Latin taxonomy. My wife and I were furious when Gardener’s World took its winter break. We spent that fallow time plotting, planning, listening to RHS podcasts and reading gardening books.
As we made Kent ish friends, we gravitated towards gardeners. Among the earliest and best were the painter Alice Instone and her husband, Hugh. They live on the other side of Great Dixter, theg rounds that surround their farmhouse an inspiration to us as we sought to transform our more modest, suburban-looking plot. Alice, too, had come from London, knowing nothing, but she was four years ahead of us on her gardening journey, and had an artist’s visionary eye. During our second spring in Kent, Alice would often come over for coffee. Each time, she’d arrive with a pot of something wonderful – a cardoon, sea kale, succulents – t hen we’d walk around the garden, which was dank and still felt faintly post-apocalyptic. Alice would pull out a sketchbook, spend a few moments drawing, then show it to us. Our world was laid out on those pages. We still have Alice’s sketch of our rugosa rose beds pinned up on the fridge, a reminder of where it all star ted. ‘It’s just an idea,’ she said. We followed her plans to the letter.
Liv i ng where we do, we’re surrounded by nurseries, and I began to
buy plants and seeds indiscriminately, with no real thought as to where they’d go, of the space I had to propagate. There was a particular thrill in buying plants from great and storied gardens, as if I might import some of their glamour into my own patch. So we have climbing quinces from Sis sing hurst, ac hill ea from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Great May t ham Hall (where she wrote The Secret Garden ), alliums from Dixter, raspberries from the gorgeous Walled Nursery on Hawkhurst, with its acres of Victorian glasshouses. I fought with a grown man over a mulberry tree at the legendary Hopes Grove Nursery sale. My mother-in-law dug up Alchemilla
mo ll is from her garden and drove it down to us just as her own mother had brought the same plant north to Shropshire decades earlier. I love t he link these plants give us to gardeners of other generations, the sense I get
My wife and I were furious when Gardener’s World took its winter break. We spent that fallow time plotting, planning…
sometimes listening to Gardeners’ Ques
tion Time (or on it s lovely Facebook page) – that gardening is a communal effort, all our gardens actually one big plot of land, all our beauties one great miracle of flowers, foliage and light.
I still wanted to know more, though. I booked myself into a beginner’s cutflower course with Sarah Raven. It was a perfect spring day when I drove over the lark-blown Weald, the only man in the class, all of us showing a certain giddiness around Sarah, who was breezily inspiring, confidentially pally. When the day had finished, and I’d filled the car with plants and seeds (despite my already crippling financial addiction to t he Sarah Raven website), Sarah and I had a cup of tea in her garden, bees buzzing merrily around us. At one point her husband, Adam Nicolson, st rode past, lustily swinging an axe.
I told Sarah about the few triumphs and many defeats of my gardening life so far. Told her of all the plants that had wilted( Portuguese laurel ), dr owned (so much lavender), been accident ly mown over (£46 worth of hellebores), over enthusiastic ally pruned to death (two apple trees and a rhododendron). I told her about the spindly and etiolated seedlings on ever y windowsill. I practically sobbed. ‘I was exactly like you 20 years ago,’ Sarah told me. ‘I was a doctor and my relaxation was growing veg and a few flowers in my London garden, and I’d endlessly put these things on a window ledge and they’d end up tall and leggy. We were hopeless. For my 28th birthday, Adam
gave me a tiny little lean-to greenhouse and then suddenly it was just like “wow”. And that’s why I say, try to get a cold frame, that’s all you need.’
I asked Sarah about the most common mistakes that novice gardeners made. ‘We plant things far too close together,’ she said. Tick, I thought. ‘Knowing about your soil is important, and knowing that shade plants like shade and sunny plants like sun. Really fundamental stuff. Also remember that all veg are annuals, apart from rhubarb and a few others, and therefore require full sun and good drainage. You can’ t whack your veg under a hedge and expect not to be disappointed.’ Tick, tick, tick.
Before I drove off into the gently glowing evening, I asked Sarah why she thought this particular patch of the country, with its clagg y Wealden soil, its cool spring winds and baking summers, was so full of beautiful gardens. ‘I think the thing about Kent and Sussex is that, compared to Surrey, Wiltshire and Hampshire, they’re quite untrendy, they’re not particularly smart,’ she told me. ‘Also, in this particular part, which extends from here [Brightling] over to No rt hi am, there isn’ t the historical thing of very, very big landowners with huge estates. That’s what attracted us to it. It’s a very different gardening style to the grand er places. It’s not exactly cottage gardening, but it’s not vistas and wisteria and great rose walks.’
There’s one final stop in this record of my early gardening education. I was invited to lunch at Great Dixter by Aaron Bertelsen, author of the beautiful The Great Dixter Cookbook. We sat in the kitchen–such history, such atmosphere – eating quiche and a zingy salad. I asked Aaron what I should plant in my new raised vegetable beds. ‘Whether it’s cut-and-come-again salads, or tomatoes, you’ve got to go with what you actually like eating,’ he said. ‘When you sow tomato seeds, you start thinking about tomato tarts. If you don’t love eating, it’s very hard to be a great vegetable gardener. The food is a celebration of your hard work.’ I told him about my one, tragically blight-ravaged attempt to grow tomatoes in London, the four sour fruits I managed to harvest before the whole plant shrivelled and died. ‘You know you have to embrace your failures,’ Aaron told me. ‘Crops do die and run to seed. It’s an up hill battle, gardening, it’s far from straightforward. Luckily, as humans, we forget that misery because we see the fantastic result.’
After lunch, we walked out past the long border and through a menagerie of topiary to the vegetable beds. ‘I want my garden to look like this now,’ I said, slightly surprised to have uttered it out loud. ‘This rhubarb has been here since 1912,’ he said with a laugh. ‘And, you know, people are over-adventurous when they start out. They want it to look like D ix te rafter a year .’ Oh yes, I thought, oh yes.
When I got home, I looked at my garden with a caustic eye, embarrassed at how small everything was, how green, how un aristocratic. I found myself wishing the months by, and the years, picturing the rectory a year hence, a decade hence, once again bedecked with roses, the beds high with wellestablished flowers, the pond clear and newt-filled. I remembered Rod turning to me early on as he helped me plant a yew hedge at the bottom of the orchard .‘ This’ ll look all right in 25 years,’ he’d said, and my heart sank.
Now though, I’ve learnt to embrace the perspective gardening gives us, the way it skews our relationship to time. We feel the seasons more keenly down here in the country, are more aware of the weather and the riffling of the calendar. We pray for rain and May, while slugs slither and white fly flutter through our darkest dreams. We’ve got a long way to go as gardeners, my wife and I, but we know that this is what we’ll be doing for the second half of our lives–t ending this garden, making mistakes, learning, all the time loving this small patch in the great Wealden quilt of glorious gardens. As King fishers Catch Fire, by Alex Preston and Neil Gower, is published by Little Brown (£25)
‘This’ll look all right in 25 years,’ he said, and my heart sank