A Very Good Gardening Book From The Charity Shop.

Here is the book I mentioned the other day.    It only cost one Euro and I am loving it nay devouring the compendium of female garden writing.  

Here's two or three snippets to whet your appetite:

May I assure the gentleman who writes to me (quite often) from a Priory in Sussex that I am not the armchair, library-fireside gardener he evidently suspects, 'never having performed any act of gardening' myself, and that for the last forty years of my life I have broken my back, my finger- nails, and sometimes my heart, in the practical pursuit of my occupation?

                                                            Vita Sackville-West , 1958.

Has anybody visited Sissinghurst?  Is it worth visiting?  I going to Kent soon.  

Gertrude Jekyll (Robert Louis Stephenson was friendly with her family and used their surname) great plantswoman and garden designer wrote:

For planting ground is painting a landscape with living things and I hold that good gardening takes rank within the bounds of the fine arts, so I hold that to plant well needs an artist of no mean capacity.  (Wood and Garden).

I have often said on here that I view gardens and allotments to be works of art.  The gardener and Mother Nature paint the picture and the soil is the easel.

Deborah Kellaway the Editor of The Virago Book Of Women Gardeners asks the question:

And what about the really poor?   They had no gardens, but they  had always gardened.  In the early middle ages they were there with their baskets, working in other people's flower-beds for a few pence a year.  In the seventeenth century Celia Fiennes marvelled at an effigy of one of them in the gardens of Woburn Abbey.  They were still there in the nineteenth century, and Mrs Ewing describes a certain woman in a hood, remembered from her childhood: 'She is not very old but she looks so, because she has lost her teeth, and is bent near double'.  She was bent double because she spent her working life stooped over the soil.  She was, simply, a 'weeder woman'.

What a great find of a book.  It mentions Weeders and Diggers, Advisers and Designers, Plantswomen, Colourists, Countrywomen, Townswomen, Visitors and Travellers, Kitchen Gardeners (walled gardens are my favourite!), Flower Arrangers and Visionaries.  It's a great book!

What's your favourite Estate garden to visit?  In England for me it would be Cholmondley Castle in Cheshire and The Lost Gardens Of Heligan in Cornwall.  I love the walled kitchen garden.  Did I tell you I love walled kitchen gardens?