The gift of gardening

In this pre-Christmas column, I want to refute a stereotype about gardening. It is not confined to leisured, moneyed people. Like music, it is a gift which breaks out anywhere and unites those blessed with a love of it. Flower gardening is not confined to financially stable members of the middle and upper class, whereas vegetable gardening is not just for those who have to struggle for every penny. I will explore these claims through three case studies, each the subject of books newly published in 2023. The third of them involves my garden of the year.

The first case is the painter Monet. Indeed he was born into the middle classes and had an aunt with money who helped his studies. From the 1880s onwards he lavished money on his paradise of a garden at Giverny, site of the lily pond, wisteria bridge and nasturtium avenue which have become globally famous through his paintings. In her fine new biography of him, Jackie Wullschläger, art critic for the Financial Times, pays credit to the garden, Monet’s true mistress. Proust, she tells us, realised that it was a “real transposition of art, rather than a model for a painting”, but she concentrates on Monet’s art as a painter only.

Readers whose particular interest is Monet the gardener will find even more about his horticultural art in Vivian Russell’s excellent book Monet’s Garden, republished in 2016. Even more than Wullschläger, she cites letters and plantings that trace Monet’s progress towards the Giverny garden’s maturity, itself a restless vision. “I learnt gardening in my youth,” Monet recalled some 70 years later, “when I was unhappy”, probably in the late 1850s in or near Le Havre.

In 1872-73 he was working at Argenteuil in a garden full of dahlias and gladioli, which he then began to paint. He was desperately poor, earning little from his art. In summer 1881, his finances were about to improve but first he painted two superb pictures of the terrace and flowers in his garden at Vétheuil. What blossomed so lavishly at Giverny had begun to form in his years of poverty.

What blossomed so lavishly at Giverny had begun to form in Monet’s years of poverty

Monet was born, bred and rooted in France. Can gardening flourish with a migrant from one climate to a very different one, from the Caribbean, say, to wet and chilly Britain? In an interesting essay in 2013, the novelist Zadie Smith expressed her sense that the English garden rests implicitly on power and money, making her uneasy. In the past four years, in Somerset, Marchelle Farrell, born in Trinidad and Tobago, has been giving a new twist to the subject of the English garden: she has been gardening in Somerset, “a Black woman”, she remarks, “in the green of the White English countryside”

Her book Uprooting spans a year’s seasons and unashamedly projects emotion and instinct, with consequent inconsistency, on to her garden and its plants. “What is a garden,” she asks, “but a womb, a space fecund with potential?” Surely not. She describes how she circles her autumn garden “thinking about cycles of hurt and trauma caused by Imperialism” and concluding that today’s English gardens and landscape are “colonial products”: they are not. Neither their styles, cultivation, nor the plants we grow in them can rightly be called “colonial”. Nor was it “because they were expert gardeners” that her “type of people” had their “bodies stolen and shipped across the seas,” presumably to the Caribbean from Africa.

Botanical gardens are another colonial imposition, Farrell considers, but she relates lovingly to a scented Daphne odora which reminds her of the winter birth month she shares with her Caribbean grandmother. The daphne arrived in Britain in 1771, coming from China to Kew Gardens: Kew increased it and distributed it, enabling gardeners like her and me to grow it with such pleasure.

She relates delightedly to Crocosmia Lucifer, as I do, but calls it “tropical”. It was bred in East Anglia in 1966 by Alan Bloom, the great Norfolk nurseryman. Its ancestry goes back to crocosmias which are mostly native to dry South Africa. When she reflects on roses, she pans the notion of an “English rose”, stating that the rose “is an immigrant who has been loved and naturalised”. In fact there are about 14 species of rose native to Britain.

She delights in growing her first vegetables, and she places herself socially in the middle class. She recalls her Oxbridge education and her long training as a psychiatric doctor, a career she gave up by moving to this garden. She interweaves anger with joy, Caribbean memories with mulching in Somerset, but is at her best when she sets aside her own preoccupations and throws a gracious bouquet to her fellow villagers. She regards them as “family”, whose generosity and kindness are so different to the slurs and hostility of teachers, students and patients about 20 years ago. “When I offer my love to the garden, the garden loves me back.” If only.

Monet was a penniless artist, Farrell is an uprooted migrant: both are taken over by gardening but it is my third case study, the hero in Larisa Brown’s The Gardener of Lashkar Gah, who best proves my point. Her subject is the treatment of Afghans who helped British and US forces but were then abandoned to the merciless Taliban when those armies withdrew in 2021. As a frontline journalist, she has been one of those who have influenced changes to the way British administrators tried to regulate the aftermath. The tales of loyalty, of those left to suffer in Afghanistan, are harrowing but her hero is inspiring, Shaista Gul, son of a gardener and a gardener himself.

Pashtun by birth, from 2007 onwards Shaista made a garden in the most unpromising site, the dusty interior of the British army camp in the Helmand valley. Armed Taliban opponents threatened outside, but Shaista diverted water to his flowers and vegetables, sowing marigolds and other annuals, spinach, spring onions and okra. The work fascinated him, detaining him until 8pm each night, to the wonder of the onlooking soldiers. His wife Razagulla began to love gardening too. When the British troops left, a tearful Shaista persisted, gardening round his bungalow, home to a family which had grown to 12 children.

The earnings enabled him to have his son Jamal taught English and employed as a military interpreter. Brown’s fascinating book follows the story with twists I will not spoil, but it ends with Jamal being flown to Britain and Shaista finally joining him with Razagulla and those of their children whom the vengeful Taliban have failed to kill. His responses to this harrowing chain of events are a lesson to us all.

Her brilliant book ends with Shaista “gardening again”, this time at the council house he now occupies in Scotland. So I contacted her for more details. Through his son Jamal, she has sent us the picture we print of Shaista’s new garden. His bedding plants are better than mine. Begonias, busy lizzies and stiff salvias are not my personal favourites, but when grown with such skill and love they triumph, mounded up like the bedding I saw in Quetta, Pakistan, this very spring. I can think of no better Christmas image, the ultimate proof of gardening’s appeal across social boundaries and obstacles. Gardens become art through love.              

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