Authors across generations from Britain\u2019s great nature writer, Richard Mabey, who published The Accidental Garden last year in his eighties, to the former model and Devon gardener Poppy Okotcha, whose A Wilder Way came out this April, often reassess what these beckoning spaces can be. Gardens are a refuge, a lifeline, a return to the earth, but have also historically been, as Laing and others argue, a place of exclusion or an emblem of colonisation. As Mabey writes, pointing out the joys of immigrant plants and weeds alongside native flowers and trees in his Norfolk garden, \u201cGardens aren\u2019t quite like other human spaces. They\u2019re borderlands, possessed, designed and controlled by one species, but occupied by myriads more.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Olivia Laing wrote about bringing a garden back to life during lockdown in \u2018The Garden Against Time\u2019 \u00a9 Photographed for the FT by Sandra Mickiewicz<\/p>\n
For Okotcha, memories of her family\u2019s tiny garden as they grew up in a \u201cmouldy old bungalow\u201d in Wiltshire, surrounded by miles of monoculture farms, are powerfully regenerative: \u201cAs the garden came to life, so did we.\u201d After a brief career as a\u00a0fashion model, she stepped away from a culture that valued overconsumption to set up her own garden in Devon. In the book, and in her gardening philosophy, she draws on the cosmology of Nigerian folk tales along with old English lore. \u201cThe culture I grow my garden in may not value rest,\u201d she writes in A Wilder Way, \u201cbut the culture the garden has grown in me worships it. Rest is radical because it allows life to regenerate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reading over a score of gardening memoirs, I begin to appreciate how different writers choose to lay out their books. Okotcha offers a seasonal cycle, with its accompanying parallels for our calendars. Hortobiography, this spring\u2019s offering from Carol Klein, the beloved English horticulturist, columnist and television presenter, starts with an arresting childhood memory: \u201cI would bring in toy buckets full of soil into the kitchen and empty them on the kitchen lino, decorating the piles of soil with leaves and flowers.\u201d She interleaves quick sketches of plants \u2014 poppies, foxgloves \u2014 with a moving account of her life, health challenges, and her outsize love for all the gardens she has known since childhood.<\/p>\n
\nGardening itself has become more about inviting nature in, rewilding, than the pursuit of perfection<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
One of my favourites in this genre dates back to 1929, written by the anti-fascist Czech writer Karel \u010capek and illustrated by his equally spirited brother, Josef \u010capek. I cried my eyes out as a child when I learnt that Josef \u010capek \u2014 he and Karel together gave us the word \u201crobot\u201d \u2014 was sent to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen for his defiant cartoons, where he died some time in 1945. But they left behind the exuberant The Gardener\u2019s Year (first translated by M and R Weatherall in 1931), cheerfully sending up the diligent figure of the gardener: \u201cThere is something peculiar about the weather; it is never quite right.\u201d The \u010capeks\u2019 gardener, based on Karel\u2019s own experiences, wrestles with recalcitrant garden hoses (\u201cdangerous beast\u201d), sifts through a hundred outlandish recipes for soil improvement, contorts like a pretzel, rump up to the sky, to sow seeds and reap a harvest of weeds. But as Karel wrote: \u201cAnd yet, at the end of the day, the true gardener sighs with deep content: \u2018I have sweated to-day!\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Summer Books 2025<\/p>\n
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I return from my aunt\u2019s 25-year-old garden in the Himalayas with a wealth of gifts; an abundance of rosemary and bay leaves, pine needle bookmarks, peace in my soul, and a hitchhiking beetle who is gently released into a flower bed, no worse for the long journey to the plains. Delhi is humid and polluted, but these memoirs \u2014 questioning, inspiring \u2014 seem to point the way forward. Gardening itself has become less rigid and controlling, more about inviting nature in, rewilding, encouraging biodiversity than the pursuit of perfection \u2014 and that has created room for the stories of the humans who do the gardening.<\/p>\n
As Mabey writes in The Accidental Garden, \u201cIt would be glib to suggest that the immeasurably complex problems of a whole world are mirrored in the small confrontations and challenges of the garden. But maybe the mindset needed for both is the same: the generosity to reset the power balance between ourselves and the natural world.\u201d<\/p>\n
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