The Day Job by Mark Wallington

Well, I said in my last post that I had wanted easy reading, and this book certainly met that requirement. The Day Job is the story of a year in the author's life before he and his partner managed to sell a script idea to Not the Nine O' Clock News. Since then he's written quite a few things I've never seen, though I note that he adapted one of my favourite travel memoirs for the BBC (Terry Darlington's Narrow Dog to Carcassonne - review coming up sometime soon, since I am about to start re-reading it). Unfortunately, I can't see any sign of the film having been finished - rats.

Anyway, back to The Day Job. Unable to sell his scripts, Mark Wallington decided that the best way to earn a modest living while keeping enough time available for writing would be to take up gardening. He didn't seem to know a great deal about it, but was fortunate in his first client, who needed help because her arthritis had become too sever for her to manage her large garden alone. Under her guidance, Wallington seems to have managed to wing it, doing mostly maintenance work during the summer, gaining clients by word of mouth and being lucky enough to find Mr Gold, owner of an extensive string of properties let to non-gardening tenants. Mild excitement is provided by his rivalry with Powergardeners and by the author's lack of any real knowledge about gardening - will he be unmasked as an imposter?

I was kept reading by the fact that there is nothing to object to - Wallington and his friends are an amiable bunch, and his adventures mildly amusing. The writing is chatty and eveything moves along at a fairly rollicking pace, summer reading if ever I saw it.

Mark Wallington has written a better known book, 500 Mile Walkies, about a journey along the Pennine Way with a dog. It has, I see, 2 sequels, so perhaps he has found his niche as a writer (and explains his interest in the Narrow Dog book). I think I might give the first one a try...

Thinking vegetables

Choosing a gardening book is a very personal thing, I think. My mother quite often gives me books she thinks I will like, and I now have several very attractive books that lurk, unconsulted, in dark corners. She got it right last birthday, tracking down a copy of Roger Phillips' Roses, which delighted me. The odd thing is, I can't find it, and am now beginning to think I imagined the whole thing! My current favourites, though, focus on vegetables, so it's not surprising that they are both within easy reach at this time of year, as I plan how to amuse the pigeons and deer for another season.

Joy Larkcom's Creative Vegetable Gardening is a visual delight. A large format paperback that will almost lie flat while you browse through it, and written in a chatty tone of voice, it take its inspiration from gardens all over the world to create pretty vegetable gardens and potagers. There is a brief (I want to say, potted) history of growing for the kitchen, before moving on the Elements of Design, with guidance on how to plan your potager, and Dramatic Effects - how to make it even more beautiful. There is a whole chapter on fruit, which is followed by a useful one on Management, with good advice on improving soil fertility and watering. Even this chapter makes me itch to get outside, with its picture of the feathery green manure, phacelia tanacetifolia, glorious in its own right, or a potager bed with brick paths, covered in rich manure for the winter. There are an excellent sections on container gardening and small potagers, making this a book for those with limited space, full of ideas about how to cram in the most you possibly can, while creating interest with texture and colour, contrasting plants with dramatic supports and edgings, or choosing between hedges and fences. Photographs are sumptuous and inspiring. The final section is where I spend most time, especially at this time of year - the A-Z of vegetables, fruit, herbs and edible flowers. This is just as wonderfully illustrated as the rest, with an eye always to looks as well as taste - vegetables as objects of desire.

Kitchen Essays by Agnes Jekyll

A syren’s tea-party of two

Clarify 1 lb. butter. When cold beat to a cream, add 12 oz. sugar, 1 lb. potato flour (sieved), 4 whole eggs and the yolks of two, the zest of 1 lemon. Beat the whole mass for 1 hour, when it should form bubbles. Bake in a buttered and finely bread-crumbed mould in a moderate oven. Halve these quantities for a small cake.

[M]ight be served with honey-dew and the milk of Paradise when procurable.

I should think that if I beat a cake by hand for an hour, I would form bubbles.

Lady Jekyll’s charming and amusing book of essays offers all sorts of culinary advice, from preparing shooting lunches to managing without your cook (goodness, unthinkable – but it is she who would beat the Venus Torte for an hour, not the lady of the house). First published in 1922 (and reprinted by the redoubtable Persephone Books), the essays combine humour with practical information, thereby ensuring our lady housewife’s dining table will be a pleasure to all comers, young and old. Should you need to provide a light supper for artists and performers, Lady Jekyll will be your guide:

Mrs Gladstone’s practice of sending her husband into battle on an egg-flip, cleverly produced at the psychological moment, can be imitated with this Frothed Wine Soup, good for a prima donna or pianist soon going into action, and can be made simply by anybody who can whisk an egg.

I have informed OH that, should I be ill, a better recovery will be aided by regular small and tempting meals. For lunch, Lady Jekyll advises a “nicely cut and fried bread canapé, on which may be placed partridge breasts resting on softly-mashed potato and “some mushrooms buttered, grilled and added piping hot”. OH reassured me that he will do his best, and added that he hoped for my sake I would be stricken soon.

I am determined that, over Christmas, we shall dine en famille in grace and elegance; recommended for a first dinner party, for example, is a “very small Selle de Pré Sâle (Saddle of Welsh Mutton) in winter”. The recipe begins “For a saddle weighing about 8 lb. . . .”. We might start with home-made foiegras, perhaps, and finish with Cold Lemon Soufflé accompanied by some delicate Cat’s Tongue Biscuits. Now, if you will excuse me, I am just going to telephone The Lady to place within its pages an advertisement for a good, plain cook.

In the Country by Kenneth Allsop

First published in 1972, this book is a collection of essays originally published by Kenneth Allsop in The Daily Mail. Well-known in the UK as a broadcaster, he died a year after the book was published, and is buried in the village he wrote about, Powerstock in Dorset. Throughout the book, for reasons, at the time, of privacy, he uses the names of Hardy’s Wessex (so Dorchester becomes Casterbridge, for instance), a conceit which sits very nicely for bookish readers, who may enjoy the sense of continuation it offers to the Wessex novels.

The book follows the calendar year, from darkest January to Christmas, finishing on a joyous note, and each month is broken up into shorter essays on a variety of subjects. We learn a good deal about Allsop’s ancient restored mill home, the trout in the millrace, the ungrateful doves who only drop in to eat all the corn, and the changing landscape around it. Changing both with the advance of the year, but also with proximity to the 21st century. Yet while Allsop was an ardent conservationist, and a campaigner until his death, his concern is worn lightly in these pages, which convince without haranguing. His love of birds is ever present, as is his passion for the countryside, and no tiny detail is beneath his notice.

This book is about the pleasure and the occasional affectionately-tolerated inconveniences of country life (he suggests that within 25 years it would be possible to rebuild Wessex entirely of corrugated iron), the daily communion with the furred and feathered inhabitants of his home. His joy is shared with the reader through the immediacy of his writing, his detailed description:

The bees aren’t yet fully operational. The sun had prodded an arousing finger down the shrew’s tunnel or through the eiderdown of moss where each had dozed through the frosts [. . .] Above the powdery red cliff which the thrust of the current has gouged into a crescent (and where there is an old kingfisher’s nesting hole – unused, now, for even down here kingfishers are scarce) the bees burnished the air with golden pencillings [. . .] How frail is the thread which sustains them: the few comatose queens nurturing the seed of their kind within their bodies for the long blank months of danger.

Allsop’s troubled life and his uneasy relationship with another of our great nature writers, Henry Williamson – an equally troubled man - are absent from these short pieces, although I think Williamson’s influence shows through the nature writing. And in that sense, this is a slight work, purely an elegy to life in the country, rather than a portrait of its author. But I think I am rather comforted to know that, despite great pain and unhappiness, he found a love of the countryside to be sustaining and a bringer of at least occasional joy. I recommend it as a pleasurable read and an interesting piece of recent country history.

A minor personal sadness is that with this recent re-reading, my 34-year-old paperback copy has fallen apart, and will not be accompanying me on my next trip to the West Country.

Back to the Roots by Richard Mabey and Francesca Greenoak

This little book has been rather overtaken in this age of the worldwide web. Written to accompany a Channel Four series in 1983, it is divided into chapters on herbs, flowers, vegetables, fruit and trees. Each chapter is followed by a directory with bibliography, list of suppliers and other information such as places to see plants, courses etc. Much of the directory information is, of course, hopelessly out of date (even telephone numbers have changed in the interim) but, with the advent of search engines, anyone with a little application will be able to discover what listings are still valid and will quickly find contact details for nurseries, gardens and suppliers.

The rest of the book is selective but interesting. My personal favourite is a section entitled The sloth's vegetable garden, which offers suggestions for creating a perennial vegetable patch! The emphasis throughout is on traditional and forgotten varieties, and it would provide an excellent starting place for establishing a historically-themed garden. Brief cultivation details are given for each type of plant, and even pruning instructions for fruit are included. The back-and-white illustrations are clear and come from an entertaining variety of sources.

Long out of print, it is nonetheless readily, and cheaply, available from the various second-hand book sites. Primarily intended to encourage a growing interest in cultivated plants which are threatened by new regulations, this is a book which still meets its purpose and would make a good introduction for any new gardener who would rather spend their money on seeds than on glossy coffee-table books.

In future posts I shall consider some more books on country living, natural history, gardening and related subjects (including fiction) which still have virtue and interest despite their age.

Deal of watering to do...

The Diary of a Victorian Gardener: William Cresswell and Audley End is, in part, exactly what it says: the diary kept by Victorian gardener William Cresswell between February 1873 and December 1875 (the last few entries are rather sparse). The, usually short, diary entries have been transcribed but otherwise edited very little, and many will look familiar to any gardener. A typical entry reads thus:

Wednesday 13 [May 1874]: Wind N.E. in morning & all day, changing in evening to S. dull all day but mild. Fruit trees on walls disbudded. French Beans raised in boxes, planted out & covered at night with mats to protect from frost. Potatoes are now black from frost, late fruit also injured.

William Cresswell worked at Audley End House in Essex for quite a brief time: March 1874 until he was given a month's notice at the end of August that year. Nonetheless his diary provided a valuable record of gardening practice and plant varieties when the garden was restored by English Heritage in 1999. The book contains a brief record of the restoration, as well as an introduction on Cresswell's life and work (he was later to work at the Botanic Gardens in Cambridge), a commentary on the diary, and a list of the plants mentioned.

Not all of the entries relate solely to gardening; there are hints of Cresswell's courtship - "sent book to E.A.C. for birthday present on 21st" and his regular church attendance: "Went in E.[vening] to St. Saviour's church, Brockley, heard a nice funeral sermon.", and occasionally to notable events. The overall picture is of a strong-minded young man, hard-working and conscientious, whose ideas occasionally get him into trouble.

The book is nicely illustrated, with some attractive drawings in the diary section and photographs of places and people mentioned. It's a book for browsing rather than reading straight through and would make an excellent present for anyone interested in the history of gardening.