The devil's own job - warnings from a dead gardener

Blossom on my Bramley in spring
Practical Gardening and Food Production in Pictures by Richard Sudell was first published in 1940 and reprinted for at least 15 years. It is the one gardening book I have nearby all the time. It's old fashioned, some of its advice has probably been superceded but it has a list that made an impression.

It's the 18 varieties of eating apples most commonly grown in the UK that you can harvest from the end of July to the end of October. Some will keep until March or May the following year, so you could have apples to eat for 10 months. For the other two, you could have them bottled or dried.

Then it lists the cookers: Bramleys, Early Victoria, Golden Noble, Lane's Prince Albert, Lord Derby and Newton Wonder, and continues with varieties of pears, plums, damsons, cherries, berries and currants. All this information is in the Fruit Garden section, which includes how to cordon trees and lay out an orchard.

When I asked Facebook friends for poems about apples they came thick and fast. It's all for a project I've been asked to do at Wisley RHS Gardens in association with Daisyfest, a Surrey arts organisation. I'm stepping in at the last minute, delighted to be asked, delighted to be thinking about apples and orchards. Of course writers love apples for their symbolism, their names, their history - there are more than 7,500 cultivated varieties - for the myths about youth, fertility, life, their persuasive power, temptation, knowledge, sin. Then, the apple's relationship with bees, bee-hives and honey...Apples are like languages but who would have known that commercially most are grown in China? (Ah, the apple's ancestor came from the mountains of central Asia.)

When, after suggesting lines by Sappho, poet Sheenagh Pugh pointed out the word orchard was withdrawn from a junior dictionary (not relevant to youth) I looked again at Practical Gardening and searched Sudell. He was also a famous landscape architect and issued his own warnings about class and big money 80 years ago.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Sudell said: "it is our job to see that the new Britain arises on better lines than the old." (to Geoffrey Jellicoe, 21 March 1941, Landscape Institute membership files).

"The present ruling class will never radically change Britain," he wrote, adding that at the end of the WW2  "all the vested interests will drop back into their old positions of power and prestige and we shall have the devil's own job to get things done." (31 March 1941, ibid.).

Sudell also designed the roof garden in Dolphin Square, London, that has recently focused attention on the ongoing battle between the vested interests he mentions and those who still want a new Britain. 







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