Rhapsody in Green
RHAPSODY IN GREEN
The Garden Wit and Wisdom of Beverley Nichols
Edited by
Roy C. Dicks
Drawings by William McLaren
Compilation copyright © 2009 by Timber Press.
Introductions and index copyright © 2009 by Roy C. Dicks.
All extracts copyright © the estate of Beverley Nichols.
Published in 2009 by Timber Press, Inc.
The Haseltine Building
133 S.W. Second Avenue, Suite 450
Portland, Oregon 97204-3527
www.timberpress.com
2 The Quadrant
135 Salusbury Road
London NW6 6RJ
www.timberpress.co.uk
Design by Dick Malt
Set in Monotype Baskerville
Printed in United States of America
Third printing 2009
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rhapsody in green: the garden wit and wisdom of Beverley Nichols / edited by Roy C. Dicks. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-88192-948-5
1. Nichols, Beverley, 1898-1983. 2. Gardening--Anecdotes. I. Dicks, Roy C. II. Nichols, Beverley, 1898-1983. III. Title: Wit and wisdom of Beverley Nichols.
SB455.G3625 2009
635.9--dc22
2008021744
A catalogue record for this book is also available from the British Library.
To the memory of J. C. Raulston, who started me on
my Nichols journey, and of Bryan Connon, who freely
shared his Nichols memories and memorabilia; and to
Bobby J. Ward for everything else.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Works Cited
In the Beginning
Earthly Delights
Enemies within the Gates
Broadening the Field
A Cultivated Climate
Secrets of Success
The Fine Art of Gardening
Domestic Affairs
Who Does Your Garden Grow?
Seasoned Reflections
Index
INTRODUCTION
I first became acquainted with the garden writing of British author Beverley Nichols in 1992 when a friend lent me a copy of Down the Garden Path. That 1932 chronicle of a novice gardener’s mistakes and discoveries was addictively funny and heartfelt, with wonderful quips like “I would rather be bankrupt by a bulb merchant than a chorus girl” and delightful descriptions such as “a cyclamen that looks like a flight of butterflies, frozen for a single, exquisite moment in the white heart of Time.” I was fascinated by these literary musings that could as easily bring a tear as a smile.
I immediately wanted more, but found that Nichols’s gardening books, except for Down the Garden Path, had long been out of print. In those pre-Internet days, it took some effort (and financial outlay) to collect his twelve gardening titles. I obsessively devoured each book, marking dozens of hilarious and vivid passages and reading them out to friends, delighting in their enthusiastic reactions.
My book-collecting roused my curiosity about Nichols’s life. Research revealed that he was a prolific author, playwright, composer, public speaker and media personality for the majority of his eighty-five years. His works were bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic for half a century, yet after his death in 1983 they had been all but forgotten. After collecting all sixty of his books, I saw that much of his writing centered around issues of the day that are now of limited interest. But Nichols’s garden writing had clearly stood the test of time.
I began a one-man crusade to reintroduce Nichols’s gardening works to the public. I approached Timber Press in 1994 about reprints, a project that took a while to get past various hurdles. In the meantime, I started giving Nichols lectures and readings to horticultural organizations across the country to drum up interest. Responses such as, “It was remarkable to see an audience held in rapt attention for an hour” and “Nichols’s writings inspired me to work on my own garden with renewed determination” confirmed that there was a large audience ready for a Nichols comeback.
In 1998, Timber Press published the first reprint, and a decade later it had ten in publication. The books cover Nichols’s first garden and Tudor cottage in the village of Glatton during the early 1930s (Down the Garden Path and two sequels), his city garden in London right before the Second World War (Green Grows the City), his Georgian manor house and grounds in Ashtead during the 1950s (Merry Hall and two sequels), and his cottage and garden in Richmond, on the outskirts of London, during the 1960s (Garden Open Today and a sequel).
The appeal of these books comes from a sense that Nichols is speaking to all gardeners, from armchair to professional, as he boldly sets down his gross failures, extreme infatuations, opinionated dislikes, and abiding eccentricities. He seems to be expressing what most gardeners would not say aloud or admit to others about themselves.
Although Nichols’s gardening books are somewhat novelistic, with memorable characters and amusing anecdotes, their cores are Nichols’s poetic contemplations, witty epigrams and penetrating observations. Nichols’s knowledge and perception come shining through the elegant turns of phrase. Unfortunately, Nichols is not held in high esteem by the literary establishment and often is dismissed by gardening professionals as a dilettante. But true gardeners should find Nichols a most kindred spirit in his passionate responses to plants and nature.
The popularity of the reprints led to this present compilation, drawn from all of Nichols’s gardening books (for a complete list of works cited, see pages 12 and 13). Having supplied research and indexing for the Timber reprints, as well as introductions for half of them, I felt privileged to be tasked with making these selections as well. I have grouped quotations by category, such as the weather and favorite flowers, with each excerpt accompanied by its source and page number—and an index at the end of the book will help you to locate quotes by key word or plant name. Nichols generally used the common names of plants, some of which were spelled differently then (“wistaria,” “paeony”), and he wasn’t overly concerned with conventions of nomenclature (sometimes leaving the E in Erica carnea uncapitalized, and even omitting single quotes around cultivar names). However, I have left Nichols’s words largely intact so his original voice can come through—errors and all.
Much credit is due Timber Press acquisitions editor Neal Maillet (now Timber Press publisher), whose perseverance resulted in that first Nichols reprint and those that came after it. My work on this volume has been greatly facilitated by the support of commissioning editor Anna Mumford and copy editor Erica Gordon-Mallin.
If you have read dutifully this far, it’s time to turn the page and enter the special world that Beverley Nichols so uniquely creates. I envy the first-time reader’s initial reactions but I also anticipate the joy of the returning enthusiast.
Roy C. Dicks
WORKS CITED
Below are titles of the home and gardening books by Beverley Nichols from which the excerpts in this volume have been drawn, listed in order of their original publication. In parentheses after each title are the first British publishers and dates, followed by the Timber Press reprint publication date where applicable. A title abbreviation with page number is appended to the end of each excerpt in this volume. The page numbers are drawn from the Timber reprints, or from the original British publications where no reprint exists. (Most American editions of these books have different paginations.) For more information on the life of Beverley Nichols and a complete list of his writings, please refer to www.timberpress.com/beverleynichols.
DTGP—Down the Garden Path (Jonathan Cape 1932) Timber Press 2005
ATR—A Thatched Roof (Jonathan Cape 1933) Timber Press 2005
AVIAV—A Village in a Valley (Jonathan Cape 1934) Timber Press 2005
HDYGG—How Does Your Garden Grow? (George Allen & Unwin Ltd 1935)
GGTC—Green Grows the City (Jonathan Cape 1939) Timber Press 2006
MH—Merry Hall (Jonathan Cape 1951) Timber Press 1998
LOTS—Laughter on the Stairs (Jonathan Cape 1953) Timber Press 1998
SOTL—Sunlight on the Lawn (Jonathan Cape 1956) Timber Press 1999
CABC—Beverley Nichols’ Cats’ A. B. C. (Jonathan Cape 1960) Timber Press 2003
CXYZ—Beverley Nichols’ Cats’ X. Y. Z. (Jonathan Cape 1961) Timber Press 2003
GOTD—Garden Open Today (Jonathan Cape 1963) Timber Press 2002
FFF—Forty Favourite Flowers (Studio Vista 1964)
TAOFA—The Art of Flower Arrangement (Collins 1967)
GOTM—Garden Open Tomorrow (Heinemann 1968) Timber Press 2002
DTKS—Down the Kitchen Sink (W. H. Allen 1974) Timber Press 2006
Chapter 1
IN THE BEGINNING
Nichols was a true novice in 1928 when he started on his first garden at the Glatton cottage in Cambridgeshire, England, and in some ways he remained one. With each new home and garden, he maintained his childlike enthusiasm, his willingness to make mistakes—and his extravagant horticultural expenditures.
FIRST BLOSSOMING
MEN COME TO gardens by many roads and learn to be gardeners by many chances. (GOTM, 79)
·
THE GREATEST SERVICE of the amateur in the art of gardening—or indeed in any of the arts—is that he does things wrong, either from courage, obstinacy or sheer stupidity. He breaks rules right and left, planting things in the wrong soil at the wrong time of the year in the wrong aspect. And usually, we must admit, the result is disastrous. But not always. (GOTD, 185)
AUTHORS SO SELDOM confess to their failures. As a result, their gardens do not really come to life; they have an almost dream-like quality in which the lawns are like softly-lit stages and the flowers dance in the borders like a well-drilled chorus. (GOTD, 77)
·
JUST AS THE best school stories are written by boys who have only just left school, so, I feel, the best gardening books should be written by those who still have to search their brains for the honeysuckle’s languid Latin name, who still feel the awe at the miracle which follows the setting of a geranium cutting in its appropriate loam. (DTGP, 9)
·
I HOPE THAT from time to time [gardeners] may be tempted to smile, not unkindly, at the recollection of their own early follies. And I hope that there may come to them, once more, a faint tremor of that first ecstasy which shook them when they learnt that a garden is the only mistress who never fails, who never fades. (DTGP, 10)
·
IT WAS NOT till I experimented with seeds plucked straight from a growing plant that I had my first success—the first thrill of creation—the first taste of blood. This, surely, must be akin to the pride of paternity. (DTGP, 48)
·
I HAD NEVER ‘taken a cutting’ before…. Do you not realize that the whole thing is miraculous? It is exactly as though you were to cut off your wife’s leg, stick it in the lawn, and be greeted on the following day by an entirely new woman, sprung from the leg, advancing across the lawn to meet you. (DTGP, 147–148)
·
GRADUALLY MY IMPATIENT desire for immediate results, which is the besetting sin of all beginners, died down. I began to take a joy in the work for its own sake. Until you actually own a garden, you cannot know this joy. (DTGP, 35)
A GARDEN OF ONE’S OWN
TO DIG ONE’S own spade into one’s own earth! Has life anything better to offer than this? (DTGP, 37)
·
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN a plant in a pot and a plant in the soil is the difference between a man in an hotel and a man in his own home. (GGTC, 176)
·
IT IS RIDICULOUS to rent things if you are a gardener; it fidgets you. Even a very long lease is upsetting. I once owned a house with a 999 years lease, and it gave me an unbearable sense of being a sort of week-end guest; it hardly seemed worth while planting the hyacinths. (MH, 19)
SURELY, IF YOU are privileged to own a plot of earth, it is your duty, both to God and man, to make it beautiful. (MH, 114–115)
·
IT IS ALWAYS ‘next year’ when you have a garden. (ATR, 165)
NURSERY TALES
THOUGH IT MAY sound frivolous, you should have a couple of cocktails before making your tour of the nursery garden, because a slight drunkenness clears the eye and frees the spirit…. If you have one or two excellent dry martinis, well iced, your visit will be far more satisfactory, not only to yourself but to the proprietor of the nursery…. You will swerve, instinctively, towards the lovely coloured gracious things and you will order them without stint. The after effects are terrible of course, but it pays. (DTGP, 185–186)
LONG EXPERIENCE HAS taught me that there never is anybody in buildings at nurseries; one trudges about for twenty minutes before discovering a youth who tells one that one wants to see Mr Wilkins, which is all too true, one wants to see anybody at all—but how? Mr Wilkins was last seen, apparently, in the conifer section, so off one trudges for at least a mile, only to be told that he has taken refuge in the cold greenhouses. (GOTD, 72)
·
ONE DOESN’T READ gardening advertisements in moments of cooler judgment. One reads them in an ecstasy of unquestioning faith. That is why everybody should buy shares in seed firms. (GGTC, 61)
·
DISTRUST CATALOGUES. I would not say this about flowers, but I say it most emphatically about trees. The average tree catalogue shows you, as an example of a tulip tree, a specimen that was planted by Queen Anne in Kew Gardens in 1708, and has been deluged with liquid manure ever since. If you order a tulip tree on the strength of that illustration, you will be bitterly disappointed by the slumlike stalk which is eventually delivered to you, by a sulky carman, wrapped in sacking. (DTGP, 185)
·
PAY A VISIT to the nurseries. Every conifer has a definite personality of its own and which proclaims itself from its earliest youth, and to buy a tree, even a baby, from a catalogue is as foolish as to adopt a child by parcel post. (GOTD, 121)
PAYING THE PIPER
I SHALL PROBABLY go bankrupt, with my tastes. But I would rather be made bankrupt by a bulb merchant than by a chorus girl. (DTGP, 79)
·
THERE IS OFTEN a somewhat malicious satisfaction in looking into the windows of flower-shops, if one has a garden, and seeing how much one does not have to pay for very inferior specimens of one’s own flowers. (LOTS, 243)
·
THE ONLY REAL expense lies in the upkeep—(a generalization which applies not only to plants but to people, to friends and to lovers). (MH, 227)
·
THERE IS THE day-dream when I am a millionaire, able to employ innumerable slaves in creating the perfect garden, waving a hand and saying: ‘Let there be balustrades and terraces and fountains, and kindly cover the entire slopes of that hill over with daffodils—at once.’ (There have been several occasions in the past, when I have forgotten that this was a day-dream, and have begun to put the idea into practice, which is the reason why I shall probably end up in an old gentlemen’s home.) (CABC, 119–121)
OH, THOSE CHELSEA Shows, and the tortures to which they subject the owners of small gardens! One wanders round in a state of mounting palpitation, ordering dozens of this and hundreds of that, to the great satisfaction of the bronzed young men behind the ropes. Then one goes home, and looks around, and there is nowhere, but nowhere, to put them. When they arrive, one has to give them away, which may be pleasant, but is extremely expensive. (GOTD, 174–175)
·
ANYTHING FOR A little green. It is the spirit which makes men bankrupt t
hemselves over a pent-house, expending more care and anxiety on a few vines and a tiny bed of bulbs than on the physical and mental welfare of their wives. (GGTC, 17)
·
TO ACHIEVE AN elegant informality in the garden always costs the earth. (GOTM, 218)
Chapter 2
EARTHLY DELIGHTS
In describing favorite plants Nichols is at his most poetic, employing just the right images to communicate a plant’s beauty, aura, and impact. His unabashedly emotional reactions give us all permission to indulge in similar responses.
VINES
IF I HAD to confine my choice of creepers to a single family—what a hideous thought!—I should probably choose the family of clematis. And if I were limited to a single member of this family, I should probably choose a tangutica. I say ‘probably’ because these hypothetical decisions are so very painful. (FFF, 16)
·
OH, THAT CLEMATIS! It is like a silver fountain that springs from a dark green bowl, and hangs on the summer air with a mist of stars. (DTGP, 252)
THE WILD CLEMATIS —Old Man’s Beard—the billowing smoke of Nature’s annual conflagration. (LOTS, 121)
‘THERE IS ONE thing to remember about clematis…. If they like you, leave them alone.’ An axiom which, I feel dimly, might also have some application to one’s dealings with one’s fellow man. (GOTD, 187)
·
PERIWINKLE SWIFTLY SPREADS a thick carpet under which absolutely no weed can survive, and yet, for some mysterious reason, it does not seem to throttle any bulbs that are planted beneath it. Moreover, it has an exceptional virtue in that it is a carpet that you can cut as easily as you can cut linoleum; if you see it encroaching too closely on some shrub … all you have to do is to take a spade and cut a square round the shrub…. I earnestly suggest that you become a periwinklist, without delay. (MH, 113)
Rhapsody in Green Page 1
