Nicola Shulman
A Rage for Rock Gardening:
The story of Reginald Farrer.
David R. Godine, 128 pages, $20
Reviewers of books do not normally begin by praising the publisher, but in this case David R. Godine’s commitment to bringing out a line of garden books no longer in print and new volumes about the near-forgotten greats of garden writing should be applauded. Serious garden literature occupies that small corner of the bookshelf not taken up by practical books on gardening, which have in recent years enjoyed a market boom analogous to that of cookbooks. Godine’s list is aimed at the reader who is interested in the lives and works of gardeners and garden writers of the past, particularly those of an original bent and lively prose style. Books by and about them are engaging to read, whether or not one is oneself a gardener.
This publisher’s latest offering, Nicola Shulman’s A Rage for Rock Gardening, is a short and fascinating biography of Reginald Farrer, a near-forgotten gardener, writer, and plant collector who transformed the alpine garden from Victorian trophy status to something akin to Gertrude Jekyll’s simple yet sophisticated version of the English cottage garden. In Farrer’s case, the objective was not garden design as a seemingly artless art form but rather the selection and cultivation of alpine plants in a naturalistic manner.
This was not easy. It demanded a keen knowledge and ability to reproduce to the extent possible the conditions of these delicate, finicky plants’ original mountain habitat, something the talented amateur botanist Farrer was singularly well equipped to do. His family’s estate, Ingleborough in north Yorkshire, boasted a limestone cliff overlooking a lake, a fissured karst formation with underground streams and caverns. It offered as close an approximation as any geologic situation in England of conditions conducive for growing alpine plants. From childhood, when he had precociously mastered a great deal of botanical science, this was his laboratory.
But science was for Farrer a means not an end. Like his relative George Sitwell, the author of On the Making of Gardens (recently republished by Godine), he was an Edwardian aesthete. With no small degree of snobbery, he praised the beauty of certain plants with unabashed ardor. This style of garden writing, at once discriminating and romantic, had a powerful influence on Farrer’s contemporaries and followers in this literary genre, and to prove the point Shulman provides a brief selection of their writings in an appendix. According to her, “Up until now, serious garden writers delivered their advice in tones of omniscient authority, remote and unassailable. Farrer wrote as a personality, full of prejudice and indefensible opinions.”
His literary voice, at once confident and confidential, is lushly vivid in its descriptive powers. For instance, a wild Mouton tree peony “carried at the top, elegantly balancing, that single enormous blossom, waved and crimped into the boldest grace of line, of absolutely pure white, with featherings of deepest maroon radiating at the base of the petals from the boss of golden fluff at the flower’s heart.” This observation was made from his vantage point on a hillside in Kandu Province in northwestern China.
The son of a remote and overbearing father who kept him on a tight financial leash, Farrer was short, disfigured by a harelip, and vocally handicapped by a cleft palate. An acolyte of Jane Austen (he carried a complete set of her novels on his expeditions into the Himalayas), he was a failed novelist whose plots revolved around thinly disguised hostility toward his family. If the Englishmen of Farrer’s generation did not seek distinction in Parliament or the diplomatic corps, as had their Victorian ancestors, they nevertheless sought it in artistic accomplishment and in bold adventure. No one was more fiercely competitive in this regard than Farrer, who was determined to distinguish himself both as a writer and an intrepid collector of alpine plants.
Even though his purse was constrained by paternal oversight and he was unable to get official or commercial support, he nevertheless managed to finance his Himalayan plant-collecting expeditions. For these he needed a botanically knowledgeable, diplomatic, underpaid colleague who could manage travel logistics in dangerous parts and native workers who could collect seeds and dig plants, which he could then press, mount, and label on sheets to be later placed in herbaria for scientific study. Thus equipped, and in spite of his characteristic egoism, unfeeling regard for others, and whiskey-fueled bullying abusiveness, which prompted laborers to quit and even the most tolerant and submissive assistant to lose enthusiasm for the project, he pursued his passion with reckless skill and obsessive persistence.
Shulman’s perceptive view of the character and psychology of her subject, whose one great (unrequited) love, besides his plants, was his Balliol classmate Aubrey Herbert, makes Farrer’s story poignant as well as interesting. It is fascinating, too, because it gives us a window on one of the most interesting chapters in garden history: that of the intrepid explorers, most of whom, unlike Farrer, were financed by such important botanical gardens as Kew and Edinburgh as well as by the increasingly lucrative nursery trade as they set out to discover and harvest the seeds of plant species yet unknown to domestic horticulture. Farrer’s fellow collectors were a rivalrous lot, and they jealously demarcated territories within the dangerous remote places where they plant-hunted. Because he was smart and tough enough to find his own ground and skillfully play their game, several kinds of choice alpine plants found in rock gardens today bear the Latin species designation farreri.
In A Rage for Rock Gardening, Shulman puts Farrer’s achievement into historical perspective. The generation of Oxford graduates to which he belonged was poised between the high noon of Empire, the optimistic Victorian age of civic endeavor and political service, and the disillusioning nightmare of World War I. With a classical education, these scions of rich families in a still wealthy imperial nation sought their mark in the world in less obvious ways than their forebears. Farrer made his not in his spate of novels but in My Rock Garden (1907), Alpines and Bog-Plants (1908), In a Yorkshire Garden (1909), Among the Hills: A Book of Joy in High Places (1911), The Rock Garden (1912), On the Eaves of the World: A Botanical Exploration of the Borders of China and Tibet (1917), and his magisterial, encyclopedic, two-volume work, The English Rock Garden (1919). In spite of his congenital rage and outrageous behavior, this remarkable Edwardian, who died in 1920 at the age of forty in a tiny station called Nyitadi east of the Irrawaddy River in Burma, was the single individual who, more than any other, through his prolific writings created the rage that resulted in the innumerable rock gardens and backyard rockeries that we see today.
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is the director of garden history and landscape studies at the Bard Graduate Center.
