Of spade and pen
Noel Kingsbury has written some of the most revolutionary gardening books of the last thirty years. He takes us through the highs and lows, and gives us a glimpse of the future of horticultural publishing.
"I garden, and therefore I write".
In few fields of endeavour is the urge to write so strong. We are lucky that so many great gardeners and plantspeople have been keen to put their thoughts, opinions, discoveries and passions down in print. Is it because we feel the need to explain ourselves to those for whom sinking a trowel in the ground or pruning a rose are alien activities? Gardeners are often met with comments from friends and colleagues like "I'd love to do more with our garden but I don't know where to start", or "I'm a novice, I don't know the names of anything".
Gardening is complicated, much more so than cooking (sorry, Nigella Lawson, Yotam Ottolenghi et al.). Even the simplest gardening enterprise involves many variables, to say nothing of time and weather, which can so easily put paid to the joys of initial success. The bottom line is that there is a lot of knowledge to pass on.
Gardening involves a lot of manual work, whose procedures, once understood, can become quite easy to repeat, so the brain can get on with all its subconscious processing and idea generating. I suspect that this is another reason why we are such prolific writers. Our hands and minds somehow work in concert, allowing the digesting of ideas and experiences essential to the writing process.
