The Grove

A Nature Odyssey in 19 ½ Front Gardens

by Ben Dark

Book review

On the surface this is simply a book about the front gardens on a single street in Southeast London, however that is a humble formula for a far more complex exploration.

In this book Ben Dark writes about gardens as a way of exploring and reflecting upon human histories and passions and how intertwined they are with particular places. 

With humour and candour, he writes about his own experiences at horticultural college followed by working as a gardener on the ladder to his current role as a Head Gardener.  Alongside this (more than) full-time job he is negotiating the shocks and challenges of early parenthood and writing this, his first book, no less.   

Gardening has prepared me for the worries of parenthood: I’ve had years of jolting awake, convinced I’d killed something precious; that I’ve left the greenhouse open or sprayed herbicide in place of fertilizer.

I could relate to his excitement in his description of learning about plants at horticultural college: ‘Each week the dozen milk bottles and their twigs waited’.  He describes how learning the Latin botanical names revealed a whole new language and a way of seeing his surroundings in a new way, also inspiring a new direction in his career.

I had not been unaware of nature.  I knew an ash tree and a horse chestnut and I had a recipe for sloe gin.  But I was plant-blind […]

Since discovering that gardeners tread a richer path than other folk, I have searched for more meaning in the plants I pass.  I returned to the poems of my adolescence and reread them with unclouded eyes.  I went back to university to study the history of gardens and took a further pay cut to spend my Thursdays looking through documents at the British Library and the Natural History Museum.

At times ,the writing verges on poetry in the vividness of its description.  Take this passage for example, describing red valerian:

Its buds open cough-drop bright and fade to raspberry on a long spire like a thyrse of lilac stretched thin by pulling.  It is technically a subshrub, but if cut back in November, it will spend winter as a neat rosette of salad greens.

I love the way the description soars toward poetry and then is immediately brought back down to earth with some very practical gardening advice.

There are no unusual or obscure plants here, he devotes individual chapters to Wisteria, Privet, Buddleja, Hollyhock, Red Valerian, Box, Apple and many more common plants.  With considerable research and literary and horticultural knowledge Dark reveals fascinating historical, horticultural and literary connections through writing about each of these everyday plants. 

He exposes the common wealth that we share through plants and how through gardening we are deeply connected to place and to each other through layers of history and the legacies of the gardeners and garden writers who went before us.  One example is his analysis of the writing of Reginald Farrer (1880-1920) who wrote The English Rock-Garden in 1919. Farrer is now largely forgotten but Dark resurrects his writing as ‘the father of modern horticultural journalism’.

I greatly enjoyed his analysis of Vita Sackville-West; ‘a woman of true genius and our greatest-ever writer of Sunday gardening columns’… but also, he bluntly states: ‘The creator of Sissinghurst Castle Garden was a snob.’ The Grove shows how class structure is deeply embedded in the history of gardens and how the relationship between Head Gardener and Client is still a very tricky and at times uncomfortable one.  Class history, privilege, proprietorial attitudes to land, and using gardens and plants as status symbols are never far away.

However, despite this more depressing undercurrent, Ben Dark takes an unerringly positive approach to plants and how we can learn so much from both their vulnerability and resilience.  The humble and unassuming privet hedge at No. 102 turns out to be one of the oldest on the street.

For years I had been walking the suburban streets trying to guess the age of spreading magnolias and twisted wisteria, without knowing that the oldest and likely original plantings were those that I had commonly overlooked, the plain privet hedges.

It is revealing these histories, hidden in plain sight and overlooked by most passers-by that Dark adds such depth and intrigue to this book.  Considering the destruction of various nearby London streets in the second world war he writes:

The Grove feels so permanent, but it could so easily have gone.  It is something I think about to bring a little perspective, when I am being chastised again, for letting goose grass into the rockery.

The illustrations by Skevoulla Gordon echo the honesty and sincerity of the writing.  They are simple line drawings, beautifully observed and with a delicious rhythm in the line. Their paired down black and white simplicity complement her joyfully colourful depiction of The Grove in pencils and pastels on the front-cover.

I shall treasure this lemon yellow hardback for years to come.