Flowers from a cottage garden

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33448, 1 February 1974, Page 20

Flowers from a cottage garden

Poorman’s Nosegay. By Lesley Gordon. Collins and Harvill Press. 222 pp. Illustrated. Cottage-garden flowers are the subject of this charming, entertaining and learned book. It is not a gardening manual — as Mrs Gordon points out, cottage-gardeners need not have green thumbs — but a mixture of things: part historical, part botanical, part literary, with much information about the medicinal and dietary properties of the plants included as well. The flowers of the “Poorman’s Nosegay” are not those of a rich man’s garden, says Mrs Gordon, nor even those of a “well-to-do” garden, but they are the oldest and best-loved, and they have survived the rise and fall of countless exotic hybrids in English country gardens. They are also the flowers most beloved by the English poets, in whom Mrs Gordon is as well read as she is in botanical literature. She remembers with John Clare

where the Marjoram once, and Sage and Rue, And Balm and Mint, with curl'd leaf Parsley grew, And double Marigolds, and silver Thyme, And Pumpkins ’neath the window climb. These, and snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils, primroses and cowslips, wallflowers, anemones and violets, forget-me-nots, irises and honeysuckle, carnations, hollyhocks, foxgloves, and countless other flowers, are described and discussed with the affection of a gardener whose like is to be found nowhere outside of England. The book is not, however, merely a collection of nostalgic Home Counties reminiscences. Mrs Gordon quotes William Shenstone: “Pray, how does your garden flourish? I warrant you do not yet know the difference betwixt

a ranunculus and an anemone. God help ye 1” By the end of the book the reader does know the difference; and he knows why it is important.

Botswana story Sunrise Tomorrow. By Naomi Mitchison Collins. 160 pp.

This story is somewhat of an oddity in that first it is a story of Botswana — which, to the uninitiated, before independence was Becheuanaland, and second, that it is written by a Scotswoman who visits the country for three months each year and has the most paternalistic tone towards the southern Africans that one can imagine in our present day. Stylistically, although it is apparently written for an adult audience, it wouild be most suitable for a rather unsophisicated adolescent. The Africans here are happy, laughing people, confused by the mechanical inventions such as trucks and a plane that hanpens to fall out of the sky. They are on the threshold of adopting modern medicine but still clinging to the folk cures and witchdoctors of their tribe. The authority of the uncle in the family is starting to wane as young people wistfully and rather placidly seek independent decisions. Should the searching reader select this book in spite of its dust cover with a brightly smiling African nurse holding a trusting sick baby, all in green, what does he learn? That the Botswana nation is composed of dull-witted childlike individuals who, on the male side, own broken down vehicles and sit in the sun, and on the young female side yearn to have freeswinging unhampered breasts again.