I'm reading some very elegant fiction just now, and alongside that some equally beautifully written non-fiction. But regarding the latter, while there's no doubt that Monty Don is a wordsmith, what is every bit as obvious is his absolute passion for his subject: for making and tending and re-making and living in and with a garden.
The Ivington Diaries is his record of creating his own garden from a two-acre field. Using diary entries spanning the years from the early days up to the present he recounts every step and stage, every pleasure, pain and preoccupation associated with having a garden. This is not a manual, a how-to book or a set of seasonal reminders - though the reader will learn much - more than all those things, it's one man's acccount of his relationship with the soil and what grows from it, and above all with his own 'place'. He is very clear on that, saying "... it is not an idea or technique or any particular plant combination that makes a garden lovely but that sense of place - the indefinable quality that makes you want to be here - which the gardener falls in love with. And this book, above anything else, is a love story."
It certainly is that, and as intimate and personal as any love story is. As a lover does, he notices things - not just the obvious, but the details such as the play of frosty moonlight on topiary yews or the simple beauty in a hazel hurdle. As much an idealist as a realist, he is very honest about his own shortcomings and about showing things as they are, so many of the book's photographs (all his own, too) reveal the working side of the garden, the business end, the way things get done. But there's passion on every page, whether he is discussing the efficacy of a mulch of mushroom compost, or describing "the full curve of hip and buttock with the tuck of waist" on tulips: "decorously beautiful while being outrageously sexy", you can sense the quickening of the pulse. Isn't that what writing is all about?
