Why is it that gardening in the public prints is so often treated as a fluffy subject for fluffy people? Writing that a plant is ‘incredibly beautiful’ or that everyone is ‘really passionate’ about their allotment/community garden/windowbox doesn’t seem to me to be an adequate substitute for telling thoughtful gardeners something they didn’t know already. The trouble is that there is a shortage of trained gardeners and horticultural scientists who both have something interesting to say and can write engagingly, and of these only one can make me laugh out loud. His name is Ken Thompson, and he was for many years a lecturer in the Plant and Animal Sciences faculty at the University of Sheffield. These days he writes popular science books, including Do We Need Pandas? (on bio-diversity), Where Do Camels Belong? (about ‘alien’ plants and animals) and, just published, The Sceptical Gardener.
This is a compilation of articles which have appeared over the past five years in the Saturday gardening section of the Daily Telegraph. Congratulations to the editor, Joanna Fortnam, for giving space to articles so determinedly rigorous and decidedly unfluffy. Thompson’s mission, as far as I can see, is to read every botany and ecology journal you’ve never heard of, examine critically the evidence presented on subjects to do with gardens, gardening and garden wildlife, and translate it into something comprehensible that both amuses and informs the general reader. These journals include Urban Eco-
systems, Global Change Biology, Functional Ecology and Arthropod-Plant Interactions. I began to think he had made that last title up, until he revealed that two or three new scientific journals are founded every day. Every day! Crikey, no wonder we need some help.
These are some of the things I’ve learned from this book: you don’t need to buy native bumblebees for your garden; the presence of garden birds may positively affect the price of your house; putting crocks into plant pots is a waste of time and good terracotta pots; reintroducing the lynx would help northern gardeners; and you are very unlikely to burn plant leaves by watering them in sunny weather. I am also glad that I now know — even if the information isn’t immediately useful to me — that the ‘skunk cabbage’ generates more heat, relatively, than almost anything else on earth and that the Swiss cheese plant needs those holes.
Thompson plainly enjoys confounding expectations and exploding myths. But it is not just that he takes many a hoary old shibboleth and examines it carefully from all angles, it is also the way that he does it. That’s where the humour comes in. For example, when discussing the fact that Ginkgo biloba is increasingly wrongly spelled on websites, he writes: ‘That’s what I love about the internet — its ability to prove that all your worst fears were justified.’ His conclusion on forest gardening is that it ‘is unlikely to feed many people beyond those who write books about it’.
Occasionally he strays from his core mission to tell us about what music gardeners choose on Desert Island Discs, or that gardeners in literature are usually portrayed as dummies (think Mr Collins or Sir Leicester Kroesig, or Widmerpool’s father, who supplies liquid manure to the gentry). His completely justified tilt at Gardeners’ Question Timeis a delight. For all these reasons, or even if you have simply had enough of people refusing to take gardening seriously, I suggest you buy The Sceptical Gardener.