Yew and non-yew-the title spells it out. "U" people favour yew hedges. The book jacket underlines the point: a Yew lady gardener with dowdy hair, spectacles, old trousers and smart hunter gumboots is clipping the initial "y" of the title, having just finished trimming her topiary box balls; at the bottom, a non-Yew man in track suit and trainers is suspending a hanging basket from the final "w"; at his feet, a gnome fishes from a kidney-shaped pond.
The subtitle of the book reads: "Gardening for Horticultural Climbers." It is designed like an easy to read textbook, with summaries in shaded boxes, useful lists, a questionnaire, a free-flow diagram, jokey drawings, recommended further reading and useful things to say such as: "Yew is really much faster growing than most people think."
The author's thesis is stated in chapter one: "The garden has become one of the last bright sparks among the dying embers of British class." The analysis is deadly accurate most of the time (I should know because, to my annoyance, I find myself judged "an unbearable garden snob" after answering the opening questionnaire: "Are you an upmarket gardener?"). Flowering plants, trees, paving, furniture and clothes are all closely scrutinised: Yew gardeners like small green flowers, hellebores and euphorbias, herb gardens and potagers, York stone, pleached limes and standard hollies. Non-Yew favour multi-coloured petunias and pampas grass, concrete pavers, dwarf conifers, Leyland cypress and the double pink flowering cherry "Kanzan."
Where does Bartholomew himself stand on all this? His cheeky face grins from the back flap. He is an amused observer, and gives the Yew gardener a hard time, pretending to concur, like all good satirists, while remorselessly mocking.
Bartholomew gained "audiences" with the two ladies whom he regards as the gurus of the Yew, Rosemary Verey and Penelope Hobhouse (although not with Sir Roy Strong, the Marchioness of Salisbury or David Hicks). His publi-shers had to employ a libel lawyer to check his text. As it is, his teasing of the two gurus is merciless. There is a strap along the bottom of one page which reads: "If Rosemary Verey says it is all right, it is." Penelope Hobhouse is described as "worryingly smart with her long mid-green jacket," but her cardigan, her "muddy beige blouse" and un-made-up face save the day. In fact he has a sneaking admiration for the gurus, or at least is fascinated by the phenomenon of their huge success.
Bartholomew is on record as saying that "gardening is the one area of human enterprise where well educated, upper class ladies of a certain age can become international stars." In contrast, he treats non-Yew gardeners with indulgence, praising their riots of colour and proposing a lobby group for the protection of gnomes (Grump: Gnomes Resist Unfair Mass Prosecution). He points out that cheap white plastic garden furniture is more comfortable than expensive teak or iron: "While the non-Yew gardener stretches himself in an orgy of physical well being, the Yew gardener must sit on his stiff wooden bench and suffer for his class." Being quite obviously Yew himself, the author is more restrained about poking fun at the non-Yew gardener.
This is the wittiest garden book since Karel Kapek's The Gardener's Year. But it has one drawback: it puts you right off gardening. Some readers of Nancy Mitford stopped saying "mantelpiece" and "notepaper" after absorbing her social taboos; but no one could seriously decide to follow the instructions given in chapter two of this book ("Every object made of plastic or concrete must go... Anything made in the shape of a kidney must be removed. The hanging baskets must be dropped...") because the Yew gardener pilloried here has two serious defects. The first is arrogance: the inflexible conviction that Yew taste is the right taste. The second is a backward looking conservatism, which seeks refuge in the 17th century knot garden, in old seats, old roses, old bricks. Bartholomew explains this passion for age as "a loss of self-confidence among the upper classes." The Yew gardener is a safe and unsurprising stereotype but, in the words of the late Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe: "To copy the historic form of the past is to raise a corpse from the dead and pretend it is alive."
Fortunately, there are more than two gardening stereotypes. I suggest a third: neither Yew nor non-Yew, but New. New gardening, as befits the late 1990s, is interested in the shapes of abstract art, in plant ecology and in the idea of flux. Designs echo Jackson Pollock's drip paintings; Beth Chatto has turned a car park into a gravel river bed with borders of drought resistant plants, sheltered by a grand hedge of the despised Leyland cypress; Derek Jarman's garden of driftwood, elon-gated flints and seakale melts into the flat bleached shingle of Dungeness. I like to think that in future gardening histories Yew gardening will be a mere note in the margin of the 20th century. The really important action is happening elsewhere.
Yew and non-yew
James Bartholomew
Century 1996, ?9.99
