Tag Archives: 1930s gardening book

Down the Garden Path by Beverley Nichols

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This is the first book which I’ve read by Beverley Nichols and I did enjoy it, but then it’s about how he bought his country cottage, actually three small cottages knocked into one, and how he planned and planted the surrounding garden and woodland. There are a few lists of plants and trees which he bought for the garden and there are verbal spats between him and Mrs M, his neighbour and gardening rival.

The book is wittily sarcastic and catty, and speaking of cats, he has also written books about them, he was obviously a cat lover. That’s quite an unusual combination, gardeners are often plagued by the neighbourhood cats who can be quite destructive and have a habit of lying all over your seedlings, and I’ll not mention the unmentionables which they leave behind!

By the time Nichols wrote this he was in his mid 30s and enjoying a successful career as a playwright, novelist and he even dabbled with music, writing for the opera singer Nellie Melba. Melba is mentioned in Down the Garden Path, in fact he does quite a lot of name dropping but he obviously mixed with people such as Melba, Somerset Maugham, Ramsay MacDonald and Rebecca West. He throws in some local peasants for extra colour – you can’t get the servants you know!

The book was first published in 1932 and my copy is a 1933 edition, a fourtenth impression, so I think I can safely say that this was a very popular book in its day. It’s illustrated by Rex Whistler.

Ages ago I saw someone remarking that they remembered seeing Beverley Nichols on TV shows years ago, I think this must have been before my time as I don’t recall seeing him. Apparently he was a sort of upper class, madly camp pain in the neck and total snob. I can quite imagine it but going by this book his writing is entertaining, so I’ll be reading the sequel, A Thatched Cottage, which I already have.

Four Hedges by Clare Leighton

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Four Hedges

I really bought this book because I love the illustrations by Clare Leighton, having just seen some of her work for the first time a few days before, obviously having been ripped out of books, I was amazed to stumble across the original book in an antiques/bric a brac shop.

What a find, not only are the illustrations lovely, wood block engravings, but the writing is beautiful too. Well, if you like gardens, plants and birds as I do, then this book is a treat.

It was first published in 1935 but my copy is a reprint from 1970 although I think there has been a more recent printing.

It’s an account of the writer’s experiences of making a garden from scratch in meadowland on a slope of the Chiltern Hills. It’s hard chalky ground and colder than any of the gardens in the sheltered villages, but the extra care and nurturing that the plants need just make each surviving plant all the more special for the owners.

Each chapter is one whole month, starting from April and it’s a plethora of plant names as they plan what they are going to have in the garden. A love of gardens and plants goes hand in hand with a love of wildlife as far as I’m concerned so it’s natural that the nesting birds feature almost as much as the plants do. I say ‘they’ because Noel is her companion and it was their garden, the book is dedicated To My Companion within the Four Hedges. Noel Rooke was also her teacher and he taught wood engraving to lots of people who went on to become illustrators.

One thing that is sad though is that details of all the many trees which they planted, especially the elms, make you wonder how many of them are still standing today. People always plant trees for future generations but there seem to be so many tree diseases going around the world now, it’s maybe just as well that they couldn’t look into the future. I wonder if anyone knows exactly where that garden was/is situated. I suppose it would be entirely different now anyway, it’s quite scary the way gardens revert to nature almost the minute they are left to its own devices, no matter how much love and care has been poured into them.

Anyway, I’m going to be looking for some more books by the author as she had a talent for garden writing as well as illustrating. Clare Leighton was the sister of Roland Leighton of Vera Brittain fame, they were supposedly engaged to be married before he was killed in the First World War. Clare Leighton moved to America in the late 1930s and became a citizen in 1945, her ashes are buried in Connecticut.

You can see some of her engravings here.