The Bad Tempered Gardener

by Wareham, Anne; Hawes, Charles

• ISBN13: 9780711231504
• ISBN10: 0711231508
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-05-01
• Publisher: Frances Lincoln

Summary

Seeing gardening as a serious and even outrageous art form has placed Anne Wareham well outside of what usually passes for discussion of gardens. Impatient with received ideas, eager to provoke, The Bad-Tempered Gardener is the story of her development as a thinking gardener and the creation with her husband, Charles Hawes, of their acclaimed garden in the Welsh borders, the Veddw. From the strange (plant obsessives, a bizarre debut as a television presenter) to the everyday (deadheading, sharing a garden), with frequent paeans to favourite plants and thoughtful pieces on show gardens and status, this is an intelligent, pugnacious and engaging book. It also unflinchingly conveys the challenges, the hard work, triumphs and failures behind the creation and development of a substantial contemporary garden.

Author Biography

Anne Wareham has been living and gardening in the Welsh borders with her husband Charles Hawes for over thirty years. She has written occasional pieces for the Financial Times on gardens since 1998 and accompanying articles to Charles Hawes' photographs in magazines such as The English Garden and Gardens Illustrated. She contributed a chapter to the Frances Lincoln book Vista and is a founder member of thinkingardens, set up with the support of the RHS to encourage and develop a broader, more enquiring attitude to gardens. Charles Hawes' photographs of gardens regularly appear in the best gardening magazines. He has won several prizes in the annual RHS open photography competition, and was an exhibiting finalist in the 2008 International Garden Photographer of the Year Competition. He supplied all the photographs in Stephen Anderton's recent book Discovering Welsh Gardens, shortlisted for a 2009 Garden Media Guild award.

Excerpts

Gardening is talked-up housework that you have to do outside. It has everything in common with housework, even some of the tools. I have a vacuum cleaner that I use indoors and out since it sucks up wet as happily as dry. Gardening has a great deal of the same objective as housework and is mostly depressingly judged on the same criteria - is it neatandtidy and is it weed-free, alongside is it neatandtidy and is it dust-free?

Gardening is boring. It is repetitious, repetitive and mind-blowing boring, just like housework. All of it - sowing seeds, mowing, cutting hedges, potting up, propagating - is boring, and all of it requires doing over and over again. If there are enjoyable jobs they're mostly enjoyable for the result not the process.

There is no actual intellectual content to the task itself, even if there may be in the planning and designing. So, if there is something wrong in my world, if an editor has snubbed me or a call centre driven me round the bend, I find myself obsessing. I think we are supposed to be delighting in being out in the open air, communing with nature, but me, I'll be obsessing, writing rude letters in my head. Wishing I was sitting comfortably indoors writing rude letters.