Endangered species
Ursula Buchan
Among the serially misused words of our time — celebrity, passion, caring, genius — we must surely count ‘plantsman’. Thirty years ago, it was a term given only to exceptionally knowledgeable, enthusiastic and botanically inclined amateur or professional gardeners, as well as to particularly experienced and thoughtful nurserymen. However, in recent years, ‘plantsman’ or ‘plantswoman’ has come to mean anyone who knows the difference between Amaryllis and Hippeastrum, or who puts a plant in the garden where they think it will be happy, rather than consciously associating it in colour and season with others.
Plantsmen knew the names, provenances and, where necessary, complex cultural requirements of all their plants. They nurtured chance seedlings in their gardens or consciously bred new hybrids, which they named, and then put up for awards at the RHS ‘Fortnightly’ Shows in London. They would contribute money to plant-hunting expeditions, spend their spare time visiting co-religionists, swap plants which were not always available from nurseries, and botanise in the Dolomites or Greece in their holidays. They often did no paid work, either because they were retired or because they had private means but, even when they did work, somehow there was time for hour upon hour of proper gardening. Their gardens were laid out much less for overall effect than to satisfy the wants of individual plants, Despite that, they were often very attractive.
These paragons really did exist. I know because I had a true plantswoman friend, Valerie Finnis, who knew many of them. I got to know their names when helping her file her many photographic transparencies of plants and people in the 1970s. E.B. Anderson, Clarence Elliott, Margery Fish, Norman Hadden, ‘Cherry’ Ingram, Sir Cedric Morris, the Hon. Lewis Palmer, Jimmy Platt, David Shackleton, Netta Statham, Graham Stuart Thomas, Lord Talbot de Malahide, Dick Trotter, Primrose Warburg, and the nurserymen Jack Drake, Will Ingwersen and Sir Harold Hillier became familiar faces. They wore mackintoshes or tweeds, and were almost always accompanied in their gardens by at least one dog, often a shaggy terrier. And Valerie would introduce me to some of these people at Chelsea or the other London shows. This could be a nerve-wracking experience for a student gardener, since they were sometimes quite severe. They were, perhaps surprisingly, an egalitarian bunch: if you knew your plants, how you spoke or where you came from mattered not at all to them.
The hijacking of the word ‘plantsman’ is therefore mildly irritating, since debasing the semantic coinage means that those people who really are plantsmen these days are not sufficiently distinguished from the rest of us, who only grow a few unusual snowdrops or sometimes visit rare plant sales. There are still people with the range of knowledge and degree of enthusiasm of those earlier plantsmen, but how can they be distinguished from the vast number of keen gardeners? Gardening magazines or garden gazetteers are not infallible guides, believe me.
One pointer is whether a gardener reads, enjoys and understands the appropriately named The Plantsman, published by the Royal Horticultural Society, and aimed at the experienced gardener with a collector’s instinct. This illustrated, quarterly publication is not quite as highbrow as it was five years ago, but it still challenges gardeners, especially in the matters of botanical nomenclature and description. The Plantsman has a bedfellow in The Orchid Review, which has been around for more than 100 years, and which is highly regarded by orchid nuts the world over. The RHS has begun publishing a succession of excellent illustrated and inexpensive bulletins, detailing the results of the Society’s plant trials, so that it is possible to discover which plants have received awards, and read accurate descriptions and useful cultivation notes.
The times are out of joint for the true plantsman, however. Work is too hard and long for most of us, and there are too many competing claims on our leisure time. In the 1950s, people like Valerie Finnis would spend their annual fortnight’s holiday visiting nurseries and private gardens, usually in the company of the owners, so that almost every plant in the garden, frameyard and glasshouse was minutely examined. It is said that a tour with Margery Fish of her garden at East Lambrook Manor could take five hours. Plants would be ceremoniously given and received, and a correspondence might well ensue over the finer points of throat spotting in Tricyrtis or the conditions suitable for growing Chinese acers. Learned articles were willingly written without payment for the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, until it became The Garden in 1975.
The times are not worse for gardening now,
but they are certainly different.
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