In an interview on Horticultural Inspiration

When did you start to move beyond shrubs and trees?

I’d always stuck things in between shrubs but often it was more for ground cover, to stop the weeds coming up. When I first met Christopher Lloyd and read him – he wrote so extraordinarily well and he was so knowledgeable – his work, and The Well-Tempered Garden in particular, had a profound impact on me.

Why was that?

How he organised his garden in terms of herbaceous plants and bulbs was a revelation. He was ahead of a lot of people in doing things – to take just one example, he experimented with wild gardening in grass. But as he got older, he got more extreme and I stopped being a total acolyte. Those terrible pinks and yellows he put together I didn’t think were a huge success. But then he thought I rather lost my way too!

In an interview 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.

In an interview on Gardening

Next up is Christopher Lloyd’s The Well-Tempered Garden, which has been around for 30 years but is still regarded as one of the key gardening books. Why?

I was just glancing at this book again this afternoon, and what I like about it is that it is full of information and no waffle. I know for a fact that he used to be holding the thing that he was describing in his hands. It could be a flower, leaf or fruit, and he would be describing it just as he saw it, rather than looking it up anywhere else.

When I started garden writing myself, I was looking up everything, and if someone described something as pink, I thought, “Right, it is pink”. But if someone else had a different idea, I went with that, so I ended up getting thoroughly muddled. What is so excellent about Christopher Lloyd and Robin Lane Fox is that they know all this information. They get it for themselves, rather than relying on reading about it elsewhere. I also think that Graham Stuart Thomas, who wrote that wonderful book on perennials, Perennial Garden Plants, is excellent as well. In fact, I think he does the best ever plant descriptions. I try very hard not to look at them when I am doing my own, otherwise I will just copy them word for word because they are so good.

Tell me a bit more about Christopher Lloyd.

He was a very famous British gardener who won the Victoria Medal of Honour, the highest award of the Royal Horticultural Society, which was given to him for the work he did to promote gardening. A particularly memorable moment for me was one of the last interviews he ever gave, which was really very moving in retrospect. He sat there in his wheel chair, looking like the cuddliest old man you ever saw. His hands were in little mittens, he had his head down, with a scarf around his neck, and his eyes seemed to be closing. But I don’t think he liked the interviewer, who was from some arts programme. When he was asked a question he didn’t like, he looked up, and there were these brilliant, piercing, sharp, intelligent blue eyes staring out of what looked like a cuddly toy sitting in a chair.

In fact he was terrifying, because he would go for the jugular straight away. It was what he loved doing most, and then he might smile about it afterwards. You had to stand up to him. If you were, “Hail, oh most wonderful old gardening person!”, he absolutely hated it. It made him feel quite ill I think.