Dig your garden

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I know this post is going to have some of my readers guffawing into their laptops but I'm happy to admit to buying three - yes, three - volumes by Monty Don during the past week. Admittedly they were all at knock-down prices but each has its merits - The Complete Gardener, the Home Cookbook and this - (in my view, the best) - The Ivington Diaries.

I'm pretty much of the Gertrude Stein persuasion - "I am fond of paintings, furniture, tapestry, houses and flowers even vegetables and fruit-trees. I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it." As Daniel our neighbour said to me a while ago (himself a passionate gardener) "tu lis beaucoup dans le jardin ..." (translation: what an idle English slob you are - why not mow the lawn, weed the beds, prune the roses? ...). Nevertheless, I feel that Monty and I are, well, soul mates in some ways.

Evidence: he likes his breakfast (even getting up early to enjoy it alone), he anguishes about the work-real work equation (in his case the requirement of writing about gardening as against actually gardening), he seems increasingly at odds with the consumer-driven society he finds himself within and trying to find another way of living.

He writes well - on the pleasures of early mornings, on working compost, on the passing of seasons, on routines, of finding quality in the everyday. The Ivington Diaries (strange to say) seems to draw on rich literary soil - his creation of a utopian garden with his wife Sarah reminds me of Blake's home industry and shared creation. There's barrow loads of Thoreau in here, too - although never explicitly stated. Ruskin is there in the background, as well (the celebration of manual labour). And to go back to the beginning, isn't it Adam and Eve all over again? Then there's Monty's face - weather-beaten, drilled and spaded - that has the authentic imprint of a Son of the Soil. If I were casting for the film version of Piers Plowman he'd be first choice.

It's easy to ridicule him (the earnestness, the cultivated dishevelled look, a Bloomsbury-like sense of the Good Life) but I admire the energy and the line he's digging. Particularly now, that energy matters.

Here's an extract from his entry for 26 March 2006:

Some years ago Sarah and I were staying with the first of our friends to have a child. I suppose he must have been just over a year old. In the morning we heard this call from his bedroom: 'It's day! It's day!' Ever since then we have used it as a kind of mantra to remind ourselves of the wonder of a beautiful morning or a call to arms. ... Well, at this time of year I am chanting a constant, euphoric 'It's day! It's day!' Last Tuesday was the vernal equinox and this morning the clock acknowledged this tipping towards the light and gave us an extra hour of daylight in the evening. For all but the most resolutely matitudinal gardeners this makes all the difference in the world. It is, at last, day.