My goal to read a book a month in 2020 and my newfound interest in gardening collided in my discovery of The Education of A Gardener by Russell Page (1906-1985). I read an accomplished landscape architect’s tribute to this book on Instagram which included a photo of his copy with its tattered edges. He credited it as one of his earliest inspirations and educators on the subject of gardening. The book was written by a master in the field of gardening and is used as a textbook (complete with an index) in landscape architecture classes so it seemed a good place for me to begin my study. I knew it might take me to lofty places of which I would never need to know, but it also would give me a good foundational acquaintance with the necessary terms I would soon encounter.
After reading two prefaces, a foreword, and a twenty-eight-page introduction, I feared this might not be that thrilling of a read as there was much detail given of the author’s projects which led up to the writing of the book. I suppose so much prologue is necessary in a legendary work whose followers beg for details of its genesis. However, when I crossed into Chapter One the reading became even slower, not because of lack of interest or difficulty in understanding, but because of the time it took me to go back and underline all the remarkable lines I now read. I basically read those passages twice. It was evident that Mr. Page had fully been taught by the garden and he was well able to articulate his knowledge. I started to wonder how he could keep up this pace of imparting wisdom for three hundred more pages.
“I have to keep three dimensions always in my mind and indeed the gardener ’s fourth—growth in time. ”
The author’s main point is to instruct garden designers to keep in mind the goals of suitability, simplicity, unity, and relaxation. He knew well how to do complicated designs but they did not accomplish the purpose of a garden. The beauty was achieved when the choices were fitting for the area and the owner. This exercises a mastery of knowledge used for the ultimate enjoyment of a garden.
“I have always tried to shape gardens each as a harmony, linking people to nature, house to landscape, the plant to its soil.”
With the reading of this book, I have adopted the practice of circling a word I don’t know, looking it up, and writing beside it the shortest definition possible, sometimes drawing a sketch. This will help me to review and further cement the word in my mind when I flip back through and read the things I’ve marked.
Here are some of the words I met in this book:
faience—glazed ceramic ware
cloyingly—distastefully excessive
apposite—apt
insuperable—impossible to overcome
corymbs—long outer stems
propinquity—proximity
racemes—flower stalks along a central stem
pall—to lose strength or attraction
parapet—short protective wall
coppice—trees trained to branch from the stump creating a wall
sward—area of grass
palimpsest—each style overlaid by its successor
quinquennial—every 5 years
welter—a confused mass
copse—small group of trees
becks—mountain streams
I noticed the European spelling of some words such as centre, colour, and meagre and that what we call a lupine in North America is a lupin in Europe and Australia. I got familiar with some of the nomenclature used for plants such as calling a Japanese maple an acer and calling foxgloves digitalis.
“…The most striking and satisfying visual pleasure comes from the repetition or the massing of one simple element.”
One thing this book imparted to me is an appreciation of trees. I have known of quite a few types of trees in the past but for the most part I would say that trees have just been background to me. Now, just riding down the street as a passenger I find it so interesting to look at the trees—which kinds and when they are at their peaks and how big they get and their interesting leaves and bark and shape and how they are pruned and when they bloom. I can appreciate better the years it takes to grow a full-grown tree and all the things that had to go well for that to happen. Trees provide boundaries, structure, beauty, and shade to our gardens. I can identify so many more trees now than I could before I read this book, partly because I finally put names to trees that I have seen for years but not known what to call them. To know is to enjoy.
“…Trees will be the raw materials with which you will construct a landscape or a garden…You must learn to know them from as many aspects as you can. ”
In the second half of the book, Page talked about making gardens in different areas of the world. He mentioned festivals in which he participated which took a year of work and duly noted how some huge bets didn’t pay off and left him scrambling and begging off of friends to prevent a public disaster, like finding in February that thousands of tulip bulbs planted for a spring show had rotted. THERE’S a lesson that we all can use, in the garden and everywhere else.
“If you wish to make anything grow, you must understand it.”
But I discovered probably the most useful part of the book in the final chapter and no doubt the other chapters prepared me for it. The whole book was about Russell Page’s work in other people’s gardens, but the final chapter laid out his plan if he were to plan a garden of his own, which he never did. To get the final word on what he had gleaned from all of his many experiences was pure gold. He knew the expense and upkeep of complicated garden designs. He saw all the work and money that went into creating WOW gardens whose owners rarely even entered them. His final word on gardening was that it should create a quiet harmony. In planning his own garden, he would avoid dramatic strokes of attention-getting colors like red, orange, and fuchsia and use pale colors instead. Quiet harmony. Ironically, I come away from this book shouting in my head “QUIET HARMONY.” Yes, I agree. We need quiet and we need harmony and we need to find it at home. What a beautiful and worthy gift our gardens have the power to give us.
“…If this intermittent vision becomes a reality…it will be satisfying for like all gardens it will be a world for itself and for me.”
Perhaps you can glean the benefits of this book from just reading my review, but if you want to read it for yourself, I would suggest reading chapters 1-7 and 13. That cuts out one hundred twenty-five pages that mostly list which plants he used in different scenarios, many of which I could not picture: great information for a career landscape designer but TMI for the rest of us. Still I can say that I am glad I read this book and hope that the principles I learned from it will be evident in the creation of my future gardens and in my appreciation of the plant world.
“A garden really lives only insofar as it is an expression of faith, the embodiment of a hope and a song of praise.”