New ELLE issue; great garden book
News
The Jan-Feb issue of ELLE Australia is out and it’s lovely. I interviewed Marita Cheng, founder of Robogals, which encourages women to study STEM subjects, and also of Aubot, a robotics company. It’s always such a privilege to talk to people who are really making changes in the world as part of my work.
We also printed an extract from Leslie Jamison’s new book of essays, Make It Scream, Make It Burn. She is just an extraordinary writer and this book covers the gamut of topics, from the loneliest whale in the world to how pregnancy changed her attitude to her (former) eating disorder. It’s brilliant.
What I’m reading
I’m a very new gardener - the first time I ever put a plant in the ground was in November, and even then I looked back to discover my boyfriend was following along behind me, patiently removing and repositioning each of the little green shoots I’d crammed haphazardly into the ground. So forgive me if all this is very obvious to the more experienced plant people among you. But this week I read beloved British gardener Monty Don’s book A French Garden Journey: the Road to Le Tholonet, and I was captivated by all the ideas a garden can hold.
This is rather more than just the book that accompanies the TV series, French Gardens, which Don presented - it’s a deep dive into various idiosyncratically selected gardens that incorporates a hefty tranche of memoir (delightful) and history (relayed with a light touch - I painlessly learnt a surprising amount about Louis XIV).
Don concentrates on the grander gardens, those of chateaux and fancy private houses, but mixes it up with visits to allotments in the sketchy Paris banlieue of Aubervilliers, Karl Lagerfeld’s gold medal-winning Chanel garden at Chelsea Flower Show and the garden on the roof of the Hermès shop in Paris. He’s surprisingly critical of the gardens he dislikes, but thoughtful and even lyrical about the ones he does like.
The French, he explains, differ from the British (I don’t know about the Australians!) in their love of formal gardens, and of gardens that involve philosophy. This is where my garden naiveté comes in: I had no idea gardens could have philosophies. But blimey, these do - and it’s fascinating.
Renowned garden designer Gilles Clément’s garden in the countryside south of Paris is organic, but so much more than that: he espouses a kind of natural gardening that takes the idea of working with, rather than against, nature to its extreme. He is an anti-gardener: “He tries to exercise as little control as he possibly can over how his plants grow, believing that what happens is always interesting, regardless of the direct cause”, Don explains, and doesn’t even believe in weeds or indigenous plants: “Across the millennia plants have moved freely around the globe and then become isolated and ‘local’ but that, he says, is a very human-centric view of things. His view is that if a plant will grow happily, then it belongs in that place, regardless of whether it has been planted there deliberately, been transported as seed by a bird or in the hem of a skirt, arrived yesterday or 100,000 years ago. In the greater scheme of things man is no more a significant agent in the dispersal of plants than birds, weather or insects.”
One of the absolute joys of reading is that it can introduce you to totally new ideas - and this was one, for me. Clément sees ecology as fluid movement, and believes the solution to all horticultural problems lies in accepting that things are forever in flux. This is such an appealing idea and one I’ll need to sit with for a while: doesn’t it rather contravene most ideas around conservation? Research needed! (I did find a thoughtful long read on Australian indigenous plants over on The Planthunter that explores some of the complexities involved in the clash between nature and culture that is cultivating a garden.)
Be warned: this book will send you down a rabbit hole of internet image searches: I absolutely had to find out what La Vallée actually looks like, or see “the perfect template for the ordering of nature” at Vaux le Vicomte, or the overstuffed, tourist-cluttered Giverny that so inspired Monet. But there are worse ways to spend a rainy afternoon.
Hoping for rain where you are (if that’s what you need),
Hannah x