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The Garden
January 2001
Viewpoint - The Good Life
Is our desire for discipline within the garden spoiling our enjoyment? Andi Clevely rebelled against his own tyranny and reaped many rewards
If you ignore a childhood delight in peeling Chinese lanterns in my parents' border, my real passion for gardening started as escapism, a skive from the responsibilities of a so-called mature student. Studying for an English Literature degree may be a wonderful opportunity to bury yourself in a book, but revising for finals had less appeal, especially when pitted against the irresistible lure of our first garden.
Already married with a young family, we lived off-campus in a farm cottage, ours in exchange for a little housework and tractor-driving out of termtime. With the cottage went a quarter of an acre of meadow, in which we tentatively hacked a few beds and buried bagfuls of pig-manure from the farm midden.
Our first taste of home-grown 'Amateur' tomatoes and 'Streamline' runner beans coincided with a new television show The Good Life, and we were seduced. Long-cherished dreams of teaching English and writing unintelligible poetry in a bohemian Paris garret yielded to the ideals of the life of honest plod.
By the following (final exam) year, I was firmly in love with Felicity Kendal and planning our future as self-sufficient pioneers. Man cannot live by books alone, I decided, revising for exams was bourgeois, and the early spuds needed planting. A little later, armed with an undeservedly respectable but irrelevant degree, I started training as a gardener in Yorkshire.
I have been gardening ever since, always in two, quite different gardens. One is the place where I work, the other our own, the plot that accompanies whichever tied cottage we happen to live in. These have ranged from a small raised bed created on a hard parking area and enclosed by concrete kerbstones (a remarkably congenial home for difficult alpines), to an enchanted chunk of woodland and wilderness, where we befriended nuthatches, grass snakes, owls and toads.
Each garden was unique, but all had one feature in common. Although I look forward to my work every morning, as a professional tending someone else's garden I am expected to produce results according to a specification. On my own patch I can be an amateur, gardening only for love, exploring unknown plants, experimenting with methods, always probing the mysteries of this ancient occupation that seems to have a different meaning for every gardener, from pleasant pastime to profound obsession.
For me, the meaning has changed as I have evolved as a gardener. At first, bare earth was an arena for my crusade to wrestle subsistence from the soil. Every plant was destined for the table (no room for flowers) and had to stand in line with military precision. The calendar was annotated with sowing, transplanting and harvesting dates and entertainment consisted of shelling haricot beans in front of a blazing fire, fed with home-coppiced logs and hidden behind racks of drying apple rings. I was most earnest about it all.
Then, one summer, an elderly Hungarian relative from a bleak backstreet in Budapest came to stay.
'You might be bored,' I warned, but Dr Szuszan just smiled. I found her next day, squatting on a cushion in a less ruthlessly disciplined part of the garden, singing to herself and surrounded by little piles of weeds. 'I am happy,' she sighed. 'I veed, and then I pray, then I veed some more. It is the good life.'
Andi Clevely is an established writer and broadcaster, and manages a large Warwickshire estate
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