FT924-1073
_AN-CLTALAELFT
921219
FT 19 DEC 92 / Nine phases of Arthur: Robin Lane Fox salutes gardening
writer Arthur Hellyer, who turned 90 this week
By ROBIN LANE FOX
WE ALL know about guardian angels, and even I would like to believe in them.
Gardening angels may be less familiar but, as I have just been in touch with
them, for this week you can believe in them, too.
They do promise that they are trying to do their best. They really will stop
the rain when most of the water companies stop losing quite so much of it
between the reservoir and the customer. They know that we would all like to
keep our Christmas azaleas alive for more than a month, but they do feel a
conflicting loyalty to the house-plant trade and the growers must come
first.
Just at the moment, they are feeling rather pleased with themselves. Many
years ago, they had a master plan; this week, they are seeing it enter phase
nine.
He might not realise it but the master plan concerns my colleague, Arthur
Hellyer, who reached his 90th birthday this week. When he began to write,
old age was still old age, but nowadays we are being asked to call it
chronological experience in order to be correct. So, we must all
congratulate him on his chronological experience while reminding him that
the saleroom correspondent of Country Life magazine, to which Arthur also
contributes with distinction, was still writing to the highest levels after
seven years' further experience in his 90s.
Meanwhile, if you ever wonder about retirement or the passing years, he is
the definitive evidence that the best answer is to get out into the garden
and never retire at all. If so, you ought to start as soon as possible.
Here, the gardening angels must take up the story, beginning with what they
see as their successful phase one.
In 1916, the lad Hellyer was ordered by his father to go to work on the
lawn, dig it up and grow vegetables because the Germans were threatening the
British imports with submarines (nowadays, they threaten them with a strong
currency).
Arthur passed his patriotic test and was ready for phase two: three years of
post-war farming in Jersey, which must have been good for the back muscles.
Phase three, until 1929, took in eight years at a general nursery in the
south-east. All the while, the angels knew why it was needed.
The pen, we all know, is mightier than the sword: usually, it is less of a
match for the spade. Perhaps the previous schooling at Dulwich played its
part, perhaps it was angelic direction, but Arthur now moved from the
potting shed to the printer and became an associate editor for Commercial
Horticulture, one of those titles which did not wait around for a Maxwell to
buy it.
So phase four rapidly became phase five, the backbone of the angels' plan:
the young Hellyer moved to something even more solid, Amateur Gardening,
where he was to work for the next 38 years.
From 1929 onwards, the British home-owner had a fully-trained expert,
willing to be photographed in sensible jerseys, sometimes with a reassuring
pipe in hand or mouth. Who better to tell them what they perhaps wanted to
know: how to lay a land drain, dig a bastard trench, or make their own
cabbage crop fertiliser and apply it to a rod of ground.
In 1937, it was time for phase six: commercial authorship under the Hellyer
name, beginning with Your New Garden. The angels admit the timing was rather
optimistic; but they never could stop men fighting and, during the sequel,
they could win only one small concession: the publication in 1941 of the
Amateur Gardening Pocket Guide.
This Hellyer classic would have fitted in a kitbag or suited any
soldier-gardener who found himself wondering how to cope with carrot fly
while sitting near the front. It proved the merits of angelic foresight by
going into endless editions until 1971, rivalled only by The Amateur
Gardener, the deserving favourite of Arthur's many books.
When the war ended, there was a significant conjunction in the charts. I was
born on an October day when The Times was offering chrysanthemums at one
shilling and threepence for 10 and, as a sort of angelic, pre-emptive
strike, Arthur moved up to phase seven: the full editorship of Amateur
Gardening which he held, famously, for 21 years.
In 1959, the angels felt that the working gardener now had enough friendly
pictures of Arthur sowing seeds from his much-photographed hands, or looking
reassuring among the brasiccas with that trim moustache and ever-cheerful
eye. The next target lay in the idler reaches of the social pyramid, and so
phase eight began: the weekly column for the FT.
It started modestly with a piece on the definitive art of weed control but,
like weeds, it is still with us after 33 remarkable years, almost without
interruption. You all know and admire the clarity, generosity, grasp of
plain science and the range of plantsmanship and gardens visited all over
the world and written up to encourage us.
Perhaps you are wondering why the angels needed so many phases for their
purpose. They do believe in free will and, once Arthur was started, they
could guide but not coerce him. But they had also foreseen two dangers. One
was the appearance in 1970 of a second FT columnist who did not know the
true properties of bone meal, hated heathers, and was prone to run riot on
the topic of the National Rose Society's gardens. They had to have their own
man in place to keep me firmly in hand.
Their other reason, I can now reveal, was that they had foreseen the rise of
the conservation movement in the 1980s. Everyone would enthuse about the
merits of 'lost' garden plants and try to conserve them. However could we
keep a grasp on reality unless Arthur Hellyer had been conserved long-term
for the purpose?
I recall, with relish, the gentle deflation in his FT review of a book by
the director of Wisley called Vanishing Garden. The good director lamented
as lost treasures plants which Arthur had known intimately during his phase
three in the 1920s. With the unique authority of the one surviving expert
who had grown and assessed them himself, Arthur reminded the conservation
authors that, so far from being a tragically lost heritage, these plants
were weak, sulky nuisances.
Now it is to be phase nine. Will it be a new line in fruit management, a
critical review of gardening by urban councils, or the continuing defence of
the balance of knowledge and unpredictability in a garden-lover's life?
Perhaps all three; but before you could do more than wish the FT's senior
correspondent the best of it all, the gardening angels vanished to the
strains of their signature tune, In the Mild Mid-Winter, and I was left
wondering if even Arthur has ever seen a better year for winter-flowering
cherries.
The Financial Times
London Page XII