21st March 1977
As I walk around my garden I am not always thinking as a gardener. My mind does not always analyse the gardening situation, the need for pruning, the arrival of the time for applying a good mulch, the first signs of the black fly invasion. And I certainly don’t see my garden in botanical terms. Maybe I have a blind spot but there almost seems to me to be no connection between botany and gardening. My garden reminds me of a hundred personal things. Not sentimental nonsense, just episodes or people in my life. There’s a dahlia whose name I don’t know, but I know who gave it to me. And a clematis that commemorate an eventful weekend. There are plants that originated from holidays, or from visits or visitors. There are plants that were acquired by what gardeners describe as ‘nicking’ – and where is the gardener who has never surreptitiously nicked a cutting when he shouldn’t have done? My conscience is clear. Or is it? How is it that I remember so clearly where these plants came from?
You would not be interested in a travelogue through my garden, but when the lavender is in flower it reminds me of a stifling hot day far away, and in my mind’s eye I see the lavender fields from which our plant was taken. My friends are called to mind whenever I see Betty’s azalea, or Angus’s dahlia – these are not the botanical names, these are my names, for this is my garden.
But wherever there is a garden you are likely to see a camellia, a fuchsia, a gardenia or a forsythia – and these give a kind of immortality to mortal men. There was a man called Camellus, there was a Leonard Fuchs, there was a Dr. Garden, and there was a William Forsyth.
At this time of year the forsythia is in blossom almost everywhere – a lovely yellow bush – a marvellous perpetually-recurring memorial to (I hope) a worthy man. Maybe you would like to try forsythia as a bonsai. It is available /
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available almost anywhere, it strikes roots quite readily from a cutting, it even seeds itself fairly frequently in odd corners of gardens. Forsythia is easy to grow, and it has the advantage that it will flower quite early in its life when the seedling is quite small.
I don’t know who Wm. Forsyth was except that he was superintendent of the Royal Gardens Kensington and lived from 1737 to 1805. If he was the man who introduced the forsythia into our suburban gardens, he brought more pleasure into the world than he can ever have dreamed of. And if you get a cutting of forsythia and rear a little bush in a pot, you will be rewarded each year with a dash of colour and an impudent anticipation of Spring that will bring pleasure into your life, and make you think kind thoughts of Wm. Forsyth, whom you never knew but whom you will regard henceforth as a friend.
[Unauthored]
[Article believed to have been written by and/or attributed to (so therefore credited to) Matthew/Matt/M. Weir]
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