Book Review – Charlton and Blackheath Amateur Horticultural Society

Book review: We Made a Garden

We Made a Garden, by Margery Fish - book cover

I can’t remember how many years ago I picked up Margery Fish’s first book, the tale of how she and her husband Walter bought a house in Somerset just before World War Two and created a garden on its two acres of land. It’s an easy and enjoyable read, and I loved it. Her barely-veiled criticism of Walter’s martinet tendencies made me laugh, and her joy and enthusiasm for plants and gardening informed and excited me. On every re-reading (there have been many!) I learn more, and get new ideas, though as time goes on I think I like Walter less and less.

Each area of the garden gets a name: the Lido, the Ditch, the Herb Garden, etc – and each short chapter has a pithy title such as ‘Rock gardening’, ‘Gardening with a Knife’ and ‘We Made Mistakes’. Although the Fishes were of a class that would have been used to staff, the times meant that they did most of the work themselves, with just an occasional ‘garden boy’, so the descriptions are very hands-on. They did, however, still dress for dinner, and the image of Margery clambering up a rockery to water precious new plantings in the top of a wall whilst still in her satin finery is vivid in my mind.

Mrs Fish was in her forties when they bought East Lambrook Manor, and hadn’t really gardened before. She only really got into her stride after Walter died in her fifties (he was 18 years older), and wrote this, her first book, in her sixties, at which point she became known as a gardener and wrote several more books. All are lightly written and informative, but the combination of memoir, wry humour and discovery in ‘We Made a Garden’ makes it the most successful, in my opinion – a gardening classic.

As you can imagine, it has been a long-held ambition to visit East Lambrook Manor, now a Grade 1 listed garden, and I finally managed to get there in April 2024 …

Ali H

If you read a book that would be of interest to our members, please think about writing a review and sending it to garden@cabahs.com and it could become a post like this.

Book Review: Sissinghurst – an Unfinished History

Adam Nicolson, Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History - book cover

If you are a history buff, this book will engross you from start to finish. Adam Nicolson’s extensive research reveals that a Sissinghurst dwelling was recorded on the site in AD 843. The Kentish inhabitants’ lives of hard work, industry and hardship over the centuries are brought to life by descriptions of everyday life. The expansion of a smaller house into a Manor House in the sixteenth century by a local lad made good, to the sad demise of the dwelling and its appalling conditions during the housing of the French prisoners in the 18th century is vividly told.

Book Review: An Almost Impossible Thing

Fiona Davison, An Almost Impossible thing - book cover

Professional gardening has long been a man’s world. The title of Fiona Davison’s book comes from a letter written by the retiring Director of Kew Gardens, Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1906. His unambiguous advice to Miss Symonds who fancied a job tending plants was to forget it. Yet women did enter the world of horticulture in the early decades of the twentieth century and Davison follows six of them as they make inroads into this male bastion.

Philosophical Gardening

Beginning 2021 on a philosophical note – Voltaire said that it is necessary to cultivate your garden. Andrew Marvell said that green thoughts come from any green shade. More recently, Marc Hamer in his latest book ‘Seed to Dust’ uses his cultivation of someone else’s garden as a catalyst for a range of philosophical meditations. His chapters begin with a gardening task but lead onto thoughts about life itself and his part in it.

I was reminded of ‘Plot 29’, Allan Jenkins’ book about the healing power of gardening, in which he gives an often heartbreaking portrayal of the violence and neglect of children, growing into an adult who seeks solace in tending a London allotment.

In their book ‘The Meaning of Gardens’ , Mark Francis and Randolph Hester argue that gardens have meanings and go on to explore six categories of meaning: faith, power, ordering, cultural expression, personal expression and healing, each of which can operate at a social or an individual level. Jane Brown’s wonderful book ‘The Pursuit of Paradise’ aptly sums up the meaning of gardens for many of us: the desire to create something which may be not only useful, but a pleasure to be in.

Eric Ravilious: The Tortoise in the Kitchen garden

Vija

Eat your Christmas tree!

One of my presents this Christmas was a fun book called “How to eat your Christmas Tree” by Julia Georgallis. As you would expect for a book with such a title, there are some bonkers ideas in it – but there is a serious message behind it and some quite intriguing recipes too.

The statistics are quite sobering: the author calculates that if we DIDN’T cut down one years worth of Christmas trees, the carbon emissions saved would be the equivalent of banning all global air travel traffic for a year, or taking all the cars in the United Kingdom off the road for the next five years.

On a much lighter note, here are a couple of her recipes:

Christmas Tree Tea!

Apparently pine, fir and spruce contain a lot of vitamin C, although pine produces quite a weak tea. If you have a go, make sure you wash all the needles thoroughly. (And never use Yew, obviously.)

Ingredients: A handful of pine, fir or spruce needles / Juice of a lemon / 30ml (1fl oz or 2 Tbsp) Honey

Method: Brew the needles in a teapot for 6 minutes. Add a dash of lemon juice and 2 teaspoons of honey to each cup. Pour over the brewed tree tea and serve.

Christmas Tree Cordial

This tastes a bit like grapefruit juice according to the author!

Ingredients: Juice of 10 lemons, zest of 4 / 2 litres water / 700g caster sugar / 400g spruce and/or fir needles (you can also use some of the branches for flavour)

Method: Sterilise a 2l glass bottle. Bring the ingredients to the boil over medium-high heat, turn down low and simmer for 2 hours. Strain through a fine mesh strainer, a few times, to make sure no needles are left and pour into the sterilised bottle. Keeps for 2 weeks in the fridge.

Christmas Tree Mimosa

Ingredients: 70 ml Christmas tree cordial (above)/ 140 ml prosecco / Ice cubes and lemon

Method: Combine in a cocktail shaker, pour into a cold glass and serve!

How to eat your Christmas Tree by Julia Georgallis

Kathy

Jane Loudon (Part II)

Title page, Jane Webb Loudon's Practical Instruction in Gardening for Ladies, Armstrong Brown Libraries

As she sought to improve her horticultural knowledge, Jane Loudon had found the gardening manuals of the day were targeted at those who already had a solid level of horticultural understanding – there were no entry-level manuals, for which she saw a need and potential interest and so began to write them herself. She set to writing them as she herself learned: Instructions in Gardening for Ladies; The Ladies’ Flower Garden; The Ladies’ Companion to the Flower Garden; Botany for Ladies; The Lady’s Magazine of Gardening. These became standard books of reference, and attained a large circulation, making gardening an accessible pastime for women, who were often excluded from planting practices.

Like Mary Wollstonecraft, another keen reformer, Jane Loudon was acutely aware of her position. Mary Poovey’s book, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984) and Alexis Easeley’s First Person Anonymous (2004) explore the challenges female authors faced in a late eighteenth and early nineteenth century society which emphasised the proprieties of the Proper Lady and the accommodations which women writers made. They also point out why many prominent female writers chose to publish anonymously, as it provided effective cover for exploring a variety of conventionally ‘masculine’ issues’.

Despite its associations with virtuous endeavour and the home, the garden also provided opportunities for women to negotiate between domestic space and the larger world. Jane Loudon was not alone in publishing for women, although most focused on botany – a far less ‘practical’ activity than gardening. And it is clear on reading Jane Loudon’s work, that she is actually encouraging women to get outside in the garden and to engage in some gardening activity – the reader is advised on how best to dig, the most suitable types of implement, as well as on soil quality, compost and plants themselves. Her work is encyclopaedic. Not quite advocating the throwing away of dresses, she treads a careful line between decorum, education and reform. For many years she has languished in the shadow of her husband, but her work deserves to be read on its own merits and for the contribution it makes to the study of the history of women in the garden.

For anyone interested in reading a little more about Jane Loudon, Bea Howe’s book, ‘Lady With Green Fingers’ is a very readable account of her life. Bea Howe herself ( a ‘fringe ‘member of the Bloomsbury Group) was born in Chislehurst.

Bea Howe, painted by Duncan Grant, 1925 — *Vija*

Suburbian writers and Jane Loudon

I have recently finished reading Sarah Bilston’s book ‘The Promise of the Suburbs’. This is a very readable study of the history and development of the suburbs and their representation in literature. Rather than being the incredibly boring places often demonised in popular culture and variously vilified as boring, conventional and unimaginative (Bilston’s introductory chapter is titled ‘The “Horror” of Suburbia’) Bilston shows how they provided opportunities for female professionalism and new ideas about modernity.

The massive expansion of the suburbs during the Victorian period enabled an increasing role for the middle class people who were to occupy them. Central to this were ideas of taste. Visions of landscape gardens and spacious country home interiors were not appropriate to these smaller scale domestic environments and a new market developed for advice texts. With the removal of the paper tax, the end of the 18^th century and the beginning of the 19^th century saw a burgeoning of journals of all kinds and many of these were written and contributed to by women. This was the period of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot and Jane Austen when middle class women were finding a voice and journals provided an opportunity to share ideas, in many cases anonymously if these were particularly controversial. [1] Bilston includes a chapter on Jane Loudon (b. 1807, d.1858), a name which, until fairly recently, I was unfamiliar with. More popular than Mrs. Beeton in her day and writing at the same time, selling huge numbers of books in print, as a female gardener writing for people in the suburbs, she didn’t stand a chance and, for the most part, has disappeared from view, receiving scant attention in the scholarly discussions of horticulture.

Jane Wells Webb Loudon was born on 19 August 1807 and died on 13 July 1858. After the death of her mother in 1819, she travelled in Europe for a year with her father, clearly a far-sighted man with regard to a suitable education for girls, but who lost his business to excessive speculation. He died penniless in 1824, when Jane Webb was only 17, forcing her into a position where she had to financially support herself. Already quite a prolific writer, she wrote ‘The Mummy; Or a Tale of the Twenty-second Century’ which was published anonymously in 1827 and has been seen as an early forerunner of science fiction. (Mary Shelley had written Frankenstein in 1818, but The Mummy is a very different narrative).

Through this she came to the attention of John Claudius Loudon, who, on meeting, was surprised to find that she was a woman.

Although much older than she (he was 47) and well established with a reputation in horticulture, the two were married seven months later. Jane Loudon makes it clear in her diaries that, knowing nothing whatsoever about plants, she was determined to make up her knowledge deficit. She studied botany (at the time this was considered a suitable subject for girls and women ) under John Lindley and worked closely alongside her husband. By the 1840s she was publishing horticultural journals and books in her own right, supporting her husband’s work and his family (his sisters lived next door) and continued to do so for the rest of her life – John Claudius died in 1843, leaving her to bring up and to financially support their 10 year old daughter single-handedly. She died age 50 in the family home in Bayswater.

Vija

[1] See work such as ‘The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer’ by Mary Poovey and Alexis Easely’s ‘First Person Anonymous’.

Pressed flower art

I was recently given a book on the “Art of Pressed Flowers and leaves” by Jennie Ashmore, which aims to re-energise and re-imagine this very traditional craft. It might be a very good time to have a go at this fascinating hobby!

Pressed Flowers Book People have collected and pressed plants from the earliest times, when explorers returned from faraway places laden with Botanical specimens. During the Victorian era, pressing became a genteel art and pressed plants were used to create pictures and decorate all manner of objects.

Jennie’s art uses every sort of leaf as a background, to set off the more delicate pressed flowers. This one uses Sycamore leaves (at last, a use for Sycamores!) and Fennel:

Pressed Sycamore and fennel

This hobby is refreshingly low cost – Jennie uses old telephone directories for her pressing, with a brick weight on top. Inexpensive photocopying paper can be used, or blotting paper if you can get hold of it. All material is pressed for a month or two, depending on how thick the leaves are. Check after a month to see.

Jennie suggests experimenting, but says she always cuts off the woody and the fleshy parts of plants for best results. Most shiny leaves (Laurel, rhododendron) are not suitable. You should cut the fleshy middle out of Hosta leaves, otherwise they go mouldy, but they make wonderful colours.

Jennie’s leafworks are mounted on paper or thin card, and she uses Copydex or a rubber-based adhesive that can be easily removed if there is excess. Don’t use much – a dot on a matchstick works – especially when sticking delicate petals. Make a template and use a cutting knife to make backgrounds:

Pressed cut outs

Here’s what you can end up with:

Pressed flowers

I love this idea too – this is a picture of a walk, and then the pressed picture that Jennie made using material collected on the walk. What a great idea for your daily exercise walk! Have fun.

Kathy A