Down The Garden Path
Beverley Nichols, Rex Whistler and William McLaren
I should have heard of him sooner. I’ve been gardening for most of my adult life and have not one, but three decent sized bookcases devoted to natural history and gardening. I have the usual field guides, garden guides and perennial guides, plus oodles of niche gardening books the likes of which are rarely, and sadly, ever opened— ‘Baskets from Nature’s Bounty’, ‘A Weaver’s Garden,’ and ‘Chicken Gardening’ among them. I own books on shade, houseplants, palms, dead plants, live plants, paintings of plants, foliage and roses. Glossy photo books, diaries, and more ‘year-in-garden’ books than years I have left to read them. But I didn’t have Nichols.
And I might have gone my entire life never owning a book by Beverley Nichols if it weren’t for my local library. There I stood one drizzly winter day and plucked a vintage-looking novel-sized hardcover from the gardening section. The title, apt to cheer anyone, was ‘Merry Hall’. The story, I learned from the back flap, was about an English bachelor restoring a Georgian manor and its garden in the late 1940s.
I don’t know about you, but chances are if you’re reading this, you might have harboured just such a restoration fantasy. I certainly have. A walled kitchen garden? Deep rich soil left from annuals past? Don’t even get me started on walks, pools, potagers and pergolas.
I snatched up the book. And the next in the series, and the next… until I needed to start on his earlier work with a copy of my own.
I ordered Nichols’ book, ‘Down the Garden Path,’ first published in 1932, from my local, and was there within the hour of its arrival. Shirley had only just called and there I was, practically panting. I felt I had to explain myself.
“He’s really quite a lark.”
A lark? (A Nichols word if there ever was one!). The ladies were aflutter.
“We had a peek. The lupins…he made it sound positively dramatic collecting seed.”
Shirley opened the cover. “And look at the endplates.”
Her awe was apt. Rex Whistler, an extraordinary talent, illustrated Nichols work before he died during the Second World War at Normandy in 1944, aged 39.
I opened the book and admired the hand-drawn aerial map of a garden which unfolded before me. A kitchen garden, fields, an orchard, and statuary— gardener’s Narnia.
‘Down the Garden Path’ is the first book in Nichols’ thatched cottage trilogy after which ten more books about homes and gardens follow, not to mention novels, mysteries, travel writing and more. William McLaren illustrated future books beautifully.
If you have a new home or garden, read him. If you dream of one? Indulge. Nichols writes from a distant time; there are butlers, gardeners, and staff, but he himself lived as many writers do, teetering on an edge.
His stories about becoming a gardener have kept his books in print for over seventy years. This week, in a desire for comfort and jollity, I’ve returned to P.G. Wodehouse which remind me of Nichols. As the narrator (and actor, writer and broadcaster), Stephen Fry said, “his rhythms awoke me to the possibilities of language—its tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me. And more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.”
I feel the same way about Nichols.
X Christin