‘Sometimes we try to be a bit too clever in this world. Take the poor old gardener who’s plagued by blackfly. He’ll spend a small fortune on sprays and things when all he need do is take a little soil from the bottom of the plant and sprinkle it like powder all over those blessed blackfly. That’ll finish them off…it gets in their teeth you know!’
Category: Gardening and Gardeners: historical snapshots
‘Greenfly, it’s difficult to see
Why God, who made the rose, made thee.’
A.P. Herbert (1890-1971)
Look Back and Laugh
‘Of composts shall the Muse descend to sing,
Nor soil her heavenly plumes? The sacred Muse
Nought sordid deems, but what is base; nought fair
Unless true Virtue stamp it with her seal.
Then, planter, wouldst thou double thine estate;
Never, ah never, be asham’d to tread
Thy dung heaps, where the refuse of thy mills,
With all the ashes, all thy coppers yield,
With weeds, mould, dung, and stale, a compost form,
Of force to fertilise the poorest soil.’
James Grainger 1721-66
‘The mowing was of course done by a stout little pony in leather boots and the soothing hum of the mowing machine was one of the pleasures of summer, instead of the noisy, smelly mowers which one now has to endure.’
Audrey Holland- Hibbert Hortus
Old School Gardener
‘If well managed, nothing is more beautiful than the kitchen garden: the earliest blossoms come there: we shall in vain seek for flowering shrubs in March, and early April, to equal the peaches, nectarines, apricots, and plums; late in April, we shall find nothing to equal the pear and the cherry; and, in May, the dwarf, or espalier, apple trees, are just so many immense garlands of carnations. The walks are unshaded: they are not greasy or covered with moss, in the spring of the year, like those in the shrubberies: to watch the progress of crops is by no means unentertaining to any rational creature; and the kitchen- garden gives you all this long before the ornamental part of the garden affords you anything worth looking at.’
William Cobbett: The English Gardener 1829
Old School Gardener
- Bitton church, South Gloucestershire
‘A country parson without some knowledge of plants is surely as incomplete as a country parsonage without a garden.’
Canon Ellacombe; ‘In a Gloucestershire Garden’ 1895
Old School Gardener
Picture: digging done at the Lost Gardens of Heligan
‘Come my spade. There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers and grave-makers; they hold up Adam’s profession.’
William Shakespeare – Hamlet
‘The true gardener, like a true artist, is never satisfied.’
H.E. Bates
‘The Young Gardener’- George Dunlop Leslie1889
‘Gardeners are good. Such vices as they have
Are like the warts and bosses in the wood
Of an old oak. They’re patient, stubborn folk,
As needs must be whose busyness it is
To tutor wildness, making war on weeds.’
Gerald Bullett
- Young Gardener, by Orest Kiprensky, 1817
‘Honour the gardener! that patient man
Who from his school days follows up his calling,
Starting so modestly, a little boy
Red-nosed, red-fingered, doing what he’s told,
Not knowing what he does or why he does it,
Having no concept of the larger plan,
But gradually, (if the love be there,
Irrational as any passion, strong,)
Enlarging vision slowly turns the key
And swings the door wide open on the long
Vistas of true significance.’
Vita Sackville-West, The Garden, 1946
Old School Gardener
Old School Garden 