Vol. 26 No. 4 · 19 February 2004
pages 27-29 | 3392 words
Imparadised
Colin Burrow
- Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens by Rebecca Bushnell
Cornell, 198 pp, £18.95, August 2003, ISBN 0 8014 4143 9
Gardening today labours to be classless. TV programmes and books try to persuade us that we, whoever we are, can make over scrubby lawns, erect decking, build pergolas, plumb in water features, and construct a little Blenheim in a rectangle of twenty by thirty feet. Everyone knows this notion of classlessness is false, since nothing stimulates petty snobberies more immediately than a garden. If you have the wrong sort of paving, or if you put swathes of purple and orange together in the misguided belief that you are the new Gertrude Jekyll, you can be sure your friends will snigger about it on the way home. And if you see a garden which has nothing in it but an abandoned car and knee-high grass, you know to quicken your step. Gardens are full of class, and we can read them like books.
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Letters
Vol. 26 No. 5 · 4 March 2004
From Malcolm Thick
Colin Burrow dismisses 'the notorious Hugh Platt' as a 'quick fit artist' who wrote 'quack books' on gardening (LRB, 19 February). Sir Hugh Plat (as he spelled his surname) produced one complete book on gardening, Floreas Paradise, in 1608 but mentioned the subject in several other works. A further volume was published posthumously in 1660. The lack of organisation of the short sections of advice in Floreas Paradise may have influenced Burrow's impression of the work, but this was down to haste because of Plat's approaching death, as he explains in the preface: 'not knowing the length of my dayes, nay assuredly knowing that they are drawing to their periode'.
Plat had hands-on experience in the garden at his home in Bethnal Green (where, for instance, he sowed artichokes and herbs). More significantly, he collected gardening advice from gardeners to the gentry such as Mr Fowle, the queen's gardener and a melon expert; Lord Burghley's gardeners; and nurserymen, most notably Vincent Pointer, a tree specialist of Twickenham. Mr Andrews, 'the greate saltmaker of Ireland', told Plat how caterpillars might be killed and spring onions raised the year round in pots; and Sir Edward Denny, adventurer at sea, soldier in Ireland and MP, told Plat that he had, in Ireland, raised liquorice in 'such grownde as by Nature is stony or rocky underneath the earth'. Some of Plat's most innovative ideas were provided by Master Jacob, a London glass-maker, who piped surplus heat from his factory to hothouses where he grew carnations in the winter.
Some of this advice was false and some falsehoods were included in Plat's published works, but there is much good material mixed with the dross.
Malcolm Thick
Harwell, Oxfordshire
