London - Anne Wareham hates gardening. She hates planting bulbs (“I wasn’t made with a hinge in my back”). She hates cutting things down, cutting them back and pulling them out. She hates weeding. She hates the boring repetition of sowing seeds, mowing, cutting hedges, potting up and propagating.
“Gardening is boring,” she says. “If there are enjoyable jobs, they’re mostly enjoyable for the result, not the process. There is no actual intellectual content to the task itself, even if there may be in the planning and designing.
“How can the organic lot, condemned to their knees in a truly endless task of pulling things out, enjoy gardening?”
All this hatred of gardening would be utterly unremarkable in somebody who never went near a trowel. But for someone who hates gardening so much, Anne does an awful lot of it.
Together with her husband, Charles Hawes, a garden photographer, she tends four acres of labour-intensive gardens and woods at her home in Monmouthshire.
She’s done weeding, sowing, mowing and hedge-cutting for 25 years, turning the Veddw House Garden, near Tintern Abbey, into one of the most acclaimed in the country. And now she has written a book about Veddw and her attitude to it - The Bad Tempered Gardener, illustrated by her husband’s pictures.
Over the years, her garden has become a very serious venture indeed, with 25 different areas - including a cotoneaster walk, a wild meadow, an orchard, a magnolia walk, a hazel coppice, a pool garden, a hedge garden, a hosta walk, a cornfield garden and a parterre made up of grasses.
So, erm, isn’t there a contradiction there? She hates gardening, yet gardens the whole time.
“What I do like is a garden, and I have no other means of obtaining one,” she says. “For me, the point is the product. A garden, designed and planted to give delight to the eye, and the realisation of a fantasy about what could possibly be made with the shape of the land with plants, with the work of the seasons and the weather. This is the point - and it is worth all the rest.”
In the flesh, Anne is not at all bad tempered; she’s a little shy, in fact, with a nice line in bone-dry humour, grounded in sharp intelligence.
Brought up in Yorkshire, where she also went to university, she had a career as a probation officer and worked in psychiatric care. Then, in her late 20s, a friend gave her a handful of seeds, and she became gripped by gardening.
After completing a garden in their home in East London, she and Charles moved to the Welsh borders to devote their lives to creating a garden to last a lifetime.
Her amateur interest extended into her professional life, and she began to write on gardens for newspapers and magazines. She also became a founding member of “thinkinGardens”, a group set up with the support of the Royal Horticultural Society to encourage serious discussion of gardens.
But as Veddw and her gardening writing matured, Anne became enraged with the patronising manner, hypocrisy, childishness and lies of the gardening world.
She says: “I began to get tired of hearing every garden described as ‘lovely’. I visited many of them and often found them to be banal. I got bored of reading endless descriptions of plants and little useful guidance as to how to use them together.
“I became impatient, because I could find intelligent and challenging ideas in all sections of newspapers and magazines except the garden sections.”
She had plenty of criticisms of gardens, famous or not, but found herself censored when she tried to put them into print. Even her book has been cut - and names removed to avoid references her publisher thought could be libellous.
Her criticisms come not from personal dislike, but from the unthinking ways of the British gardener. Too many people just plonk plants together in a garden without thinking about how they fit together in an overall shape.
“The British collect plants and they inflict them on their gardens, leading to a lack of coherence and a lack of beauty,” she says. “I think the rot set in with the Victorian plant-collectors.
“People just don’t look carefully at their gardens. Greed for clothes or consumer goods is vilified as consumerism, but greed for plants is applauded. The same people who might think it’s terrible to fill their houses with bric-a-brac fill their gardens with the equivalent.”
Specifically, the things that get her goat include over-cultivated roses - “blobs on sticks” - and over-designed corners of gardens. “They might get some famous designer in to plan one corner of their garden, and then leave the rest of it totally out of keeping with the designed bit,” she says.
At Veddw, Anne goes for strong shapes and patterns, straight lines, squares and circles, often constructed in yew, box and beech.
She’s not above eye-catching gimmicks. Here, there’s a gold-painted timber cut-out of a buzzard. There, in the woods, is a telly opposite a chair, a reference to the popular Welsh pursuit of discarding machinery in areas of natural beauty.
The British don’t look at gardens in this considered, large-scale way partly because of the limitations of gardening criticism, Anne thinks.
Open-garden schemes have also conspired to produce a safe, dull world, where criticism is never allowed. “The National Gardens Scheme supports this over-politeness,” she says. “Because it’s charitable, no one is critical. And so nothing changes, and people go on longing for nostalgia, still wanting to make cottage gardens.
“The state of gardens in this country is the same as cooking was in the Fifties, before Elizabeth David came along - she was chucked off magazines for being rude. Whenever I write a critical article, there’s a storm of protest.”
And if the professional gardening world is cautious and backward, TV gardening programmes are, if anything, worse. Anne herself worked on a programme called I Own Britain’s Best Home And Garden, starring Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen.
“Gardening programmes are so patronising,” she says. “All that ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘passion’, all that waving your arms around - they look mentally challenged.
“If you went to an art gallery and started jumping up and down, you’d be led away.
“And I would no more listen to a gardening quiz than I would go deep-sea diving; that is, only on pain of death.”
As a result of her outspoken views, plenty of gardeners have taken against her. One expert recently called her a “lazy gardener”.
That misses the point - Anne toils ceaselessly at Veddw but, as she puts it: “I’d much rather sit down with a good book.”
Anne doesn’t see the point of doing unnecessary work. She uses black dye to get the right kind of reflection in her reflecting pool. She never turns her compost heap, cleans her gardening tools, edges the grass, digs up plants or divides them, puts out slug traps, cleans the greenhouse, removes leaves from borders or labels her plants.
And she doesn’t grow vegetables either, as they’re so widely available in the shops. The back-breaking work she does do is just a necessary evil on the way to producing beauty.
“Sometimes, I look out of the window and that ridiculous thing that you think people invent simply for effect happens - my jaw drops,” she says. “Something is unexpectedly lit up, as if someone is pointing it out with a spotlight. The sun suddenly points a finger at it and I gawp.”
That is the point of gardening - to produce the kind of beauty that lifts the mood of even the worst-tempered of gardeners. - Daily Mail
* The Bad Tempered Gardener by Anne Wareham (Frances Lincoln).