A Rage for Rock Gardening

"Shulman has written a very short biography of Reginald Farrer. He was the gardening writer of the Edwardian era, a closet gay and clearly a frustrated novelist. He more or less invented rock gardening. He was probably the first garden writer in the English language who decided that the writing was the important thing, the gardening secondary. His writing style is so affected and over-the-top, it’s ridiculous. He gilds every lily, it’s all spun sugar. During the First World War he went plant hunting and he was up against George Forrest, an Edinburgh plant hunter who wouldn’t let anyone stray on his patch, which as far as he was concerned was the whole of China. Farrer was terrified of Forrest and went off to various remote areas, mainly because he wasn’t allowed to go anywhere interesting. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In 1918 he met my grandfather in London, took a fancy to him and said: ‘Would you like to go into Burma with me on a plant-hunting expedition?’ My grandfather was looking for an excuse not to go into the family business in Scotland, so off he went. Farrer then returned to Burma for another year and caught some tropical disease and died. My grandfather became his de facto executor and biographer. It’s a wonderful read about a bygone era, with lots of quotes from Farrer’s writing. Shulman certainly gets under the skin of the situation. She laughs at Farrer’s fantastically over-rich writing style, while clearly loving it. One of the jokes was that since Farrer came across such insignificant plants on his expeditions – Forrest was nabbing all the good ones – he simply had to big them up. My last book, which was a guide to Scottish gardens, owed more to Christopher Lloyd in its writing style than anyone else. It’s slightly provocative. You owe it to your readers to not just give them information but to entertain. I fear that there aren’t going to be too many great gardening writers any more. We’re in an era where if you go on TV, you write loads of books. But being a great television presenter doesn’t mean you can write great books or have anything original to say. It’s a different skill. At the moment gardening books aren’t selling well. Grow-your-own is very trendy, so everyone is writing veg books, even people who know nothing about veg, and they’re all the same. Everyone knows that Joy Larkin’s veg book, which came out about 20 years ago and has no pictures, was the best one and they all crib it. Some journalists are trying to muscle in on the gardening territory and often their books are inaccurate. They don’t know enough about the subject, they haven’t done their homework, and that’s just annoying. Gardening writing is in a bit of a crisis, and I don’t know where it’s heading. If you want to know, practically, how to do something, you just look it up on the internet, so I think the reference books will end up on the internet."