POETS AND GARDENS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23951, 28 October 1939, Page 4

POETS AND GARDENS

LITERARY COUNTRY-DWELLERS « Three Acres and a Mill.” By Robert Gathorne-Hardy. Illustrated. (Dent). £1 2s 6d. “ Calling for a Spade.” By Richard Church, Illustrated. (Dent). 11s 6d. Two books racy of the soil, each written by an accomplished poet and novelist, each concerned with the minutiae of making a home and growing a garden, provide a distinguished contribution to perhaps the best type of “escapist” literature that is available to-day. Mr Gathorne-Hardy’s “Three Acres and a Mill” is the more substantial work, alike from the viewpoint of the amateur botanist and the lover of informal travel narrative. Mr Church’s “Calling for a Spade” is ideally suited as a “bedside book” for those who delight to read of English country life.

Mr Gathorne-Hardy has lived for 12 years in a mill-house in a Berkshire village, the charm of which is apparent in the photograph reproduced on this page. But it is not the house, which struck him at first as “ very ugly,” but the garden, which has held him in thrall to this inconvenient home. In the September crisis of 1938 he realised how unstable the world, and this, his corner of it, had become, and in this book allows his mind to roam back over the triumphs, the setbacks and the trials which he experienced in making a true botanist’s paradise out of his three acres of land. It is not merely a record of gardening that he has made. His search for plants has taken him into the Pyrenees, to Iceland, the Canary Islands, the Alps and the Riviera. He speaks with an equal interest and authority of the peasants of Navarre and, of “ Saxifraga Aizoon ” and the common bog orchid. He is no mean writer, as readers of his novels will know, and no mean botanist, as students of his "Wild Flowers 'in Britain ” will recognise. His book forms the happiest combination of his gifts in both spheres of cultured and cultivated activity. It is beautifully illustrated. Mr Church’s botanical adventures are more modest, his sketches of people and places more circumscribed, and his book is much briefer. But he has the capacity to make the reader share with him an experience at once stimulating and, at times, trying, in home-making. His ancient cottage lay on the outskirts of Saffron Walden. When he acquired it six years ago its urgent need was thatching—apart from substantial interior repairs. He tells of

the difficulties and humours of the work that he put in hand, of the sparrows which, finding their nesting places on the roof-tree barred from them, assaulted the poor, struggling garden with venom. He writes of butterflies, of beasts, of flowers and country folk with a seeing eye. And the reader will share the quiet, unreproachful regret with which, an aerodrome having made life unbearably noisy, he decides to leave this retreat on which six year's toil was spent, to seek sanctuary in Dorset. , / J. M.