Kenneth Cox on Plant Hunting

There’s an awful lot of garden literature, full of fantastic factual and practical information, but most of it is rather dry and boring. Every generation essentially regurgitates the same information. As Alys Fowler, one of the new presenters on Gardeners’ World, recently commented, there’s little new to be said in gardening, it’s the same old information, just repackaged.

A bit like cookery literature – there’s nothing new under the sun?

A bit, although in cooking you have the potential to liven things up by doing fusion cooking between various continents. With plants, you can’t just take a bunch of tropical plants and shove them in the ground – it won’t work.

The books I’ve chosen are examples of great writing which happens to be about gardening. And all of them have original things to say.

So tell me about The Well-Tempered Garden, by Christopher Lloyd.

Christopher Lloyd was a life-long gentleman gardener, who wrote a column for The Observer. He was a flamboyant agent provocateur. Not only was he incredibly knowledgeable, he enjoyed winding people up and he knew exactly what he was doing. His garden at Great Dixter was a monument to his gardening skills and sometimes outrageous ideas. Any time someone said, ‘You should colour-coordinate,’ he would do the opposite: ‘I’m going to put orange with purple.’ The title of his book is slightly ironic, I think – The Well-Tempered Garden – because he was rather more interested in making bold and daring statements. He also had the courage to say, ‘This plant is a waste of space.’ I don’t always agree with him but I like the way he says it.

So what’s Great Dixter like?

It’s one of the great gardens of Britain. Lloyd’s style was gardening as theatre. For example, one day he decided to rip out the rose garden at Great Dixter which had been there for 60 years – ‘Roses are so last year, darling’ – which upset all the rose people. He could have done it quietly, but no, he loved the grand statement. He had a greenhouse full of plots of outrageous tropical plants, which he would put in his borders. But that was in later life. The Well-Tempered Garden, written in the 1970s, is a practical, very well-written book about his philosophy of gardening. It has remained in print ever since and is constantly being quoted. It’s a book any non-gardener could pick up and read and not be bored.

The next one is Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges by Frank Kingdon Ward, edited by yourself.

This is one of a fairly tall pile of plant-hunting literature which came out from about 1850 to 1950. Frank Kingdon Ward wrote at least 20 books. The book covers his 1924-5 expedition to Southeast Tibet. It was probably his most daring and exciting trip and it contains the best descriptions of plants growing in the wild I can think of. It was out of print for about 60 years and if you were lucky enough to get your hands on a copy it was changing hands for £500. I and a couple of Americans spent 1995-1999 in this area retracing Kingdon Ward’s footsteps and going further. We republished this book illustrating everything that was in it in colour – the original only had a handful of black-and-white photos. Kingdon Ward died in the 1950s, but his second wife Jean Rasmussen is still alive and she attended the launch with his daughter and grandson.

When you went to Tibet, could you actually retrace his footsteps?

Yes, you could camp in the same campsites, take the same pictures, see the same trees – the book was that detailed and precise. We took some comparative photos and you could see the glaciers had retreated, but if you went to a particular spot in the campsite and Kingdon Ward said you’d find a particular plant there, you did find it. It’s probably the greatest plant-hunting book ever written. Most of the stuff he was finding was completely new. This is the book, for example, in which the blue poppy, Meconopsis betonicifolia, was discovered.

I have to say that the significance of that discovery had largely passed me by.

It’s a popular garden plant which has been written about copiously since then.

The third book is The Morville Hours, by Katherine Swift. This is the most recent book of the list, it was published in 2008. It is quite the most ambitious book about gardening I’ve ever read. It’s in part a story of how Katherine Swift restored her National Trust property garden in Shropshire, which was the site of a medieval monastery. But it’s also a meditation about gardening and how the landscape of Shropshire became what it is over the last 2,000-3,000 years. And because she’s a medieval historian specialising in manuscripts it has the structure of the medieval services. It also runs through the seasons. It’s incredibly dense, full of the most treacly sentences and at times it feels a little bit like swimming in a vat of syrup. But it’s worth it. The book is quite melancholic – it’s the autobiography of a family running through three or four generations and she’s had quite a sad life, suffering from bouts of depression and estranged from her family. The book is clearly an act of catharsis and it pushes gardening literature in a direction I don’t remember it going before.

Which is?

A melange of history, meditation, self-exploration, philosophy, autobiography and geology.