It’s rare to get a gardening book that’s both educational and a joy to read but Mary Keen’s Diary of a Keen Gardener is just that. It’s been occupying me while the weather’s been too bad to garden and has proved the perfect alternative.
(Review copy given. Not paid for review.)
It follows a year in garden designer Mary Keen’s Cotswold garden but is much more than just a diary of seeds sown and plants cultivated. Rather it is a wide-ranging insight into her thoughts on plants and gardens, written in a very engaging style.
Sitting alongside advice on which pears to plant in a small garden and suggestions for roses are snippets about life in the village where she relocated to six years ago, downsizing from a large garden to one “roughly the size of two tennis courts, end on end” and taking on an allotment for extra space.
We hear of a flat tyre saga, the huge fire that took out the village shop – and how it was reborn in another premises – and community efforts to maintain the churchyard. Further afield, we join her garden-making in Corfu.
Yet, it’s not just the present that occupies the pages of Diary of a Keen Gardener and there are memories of a dawn exploration of the out of bounds garden at her boarding school, her childhood garden where her mother gathered armfuls of daffodils, and advice from her mother-in-law on what to plant.
She admits to preferring “gauzy and wild” in her own garden, somewhere that she tends daily, be it full on planting or merely deadheading.
“It’s the daily watchfulness, the constant commitment, that creates a garden.”
There are numerous observations on plants and gardening methods and the book is worth buying just for the summary of plants she grows – my ‘must buy’ list has grown considerably!
As someone who has written and lectured on gardens for decades and created them across the world, Mary is, understandably, on first name terms with many notable names in horticulture. We hear of lunch with designer Dan Pearson, picnicking with Tom Stuart-Smith at his Hertfordshire garden, and being invited to stay at Sissinghurst by Sarah Raven where Mary, unable to sleep, “prowled the garden in a nightie”.
Her yearning for plants that aren’t suitable for her Cotswold soil, such as the winter flowering Edgeworthia chrysantha, leads to experiments with growing them in pots.
Indeed, Mary is constantly curious about new gardening ideas. She tries watering paperwhite narcissi with a slug of vodka – it’s supposed to stop them flopping – learns about growing in pure sand, and discusses no dig, regenerative growing and the rewilding versus gardening debate.
It has, she tells us “been a year of learning about new ways of gardening, because I want to understand how we can adapt to changing times and extreme weather patterns”.
Given this week’s weather, the thought is timely.
Diary of a Keen Gardener is published by John Murray with an RRP of £20. #Ad You can buy it here for £17.59. (If you buy via this link, I receive a small commission. The price you pay is not affected.) Alternatively, you may wish to buy from an independent bookseller here. All prices correct at time of publication of this post.
You can read more of my gardening and garden-related book reviews here.
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