Ken Thompson - An Ear To The Ground

How did plants get to be the way they are? Why do they have pretty flowers? How different would things have been if the wrong kind of pollinators had got the upper hand? Why are Latin names so complicated, and why Latin anyway? Why is a weed-free lawn an ecological impossibility? This entertaining book gives the answers to these questions and many more. It shows how a little botanical knowledge can bring not just better results but peace of mind, and that losing sleep over such traditional gardening bogeys as weeds, pests and pruning is not necessarily the best course. In this new edition Ken Thompson grabs the opportunity to explain why any old plant will do for companion planting - but also that it can do as much harm as good - and why planting by the moon is complete and utter nonsense.

SUBSTITUTE GARDENING BOOKS FOR HISTORY AND THE first three sentences of the preface to Sellar and Yeatmans classic sum up my feelings about many gardening books. Comparing the carefully composed pictures of acres of manicured lawn and herbaceous borders at the peak of their July perfection with ones own humble plot, its hard not to be discouraged.

The time therefore seemed ripe for an altogether different kind of gardening book, and this is it. Its aim is simple: to allow you to understand why your garden is the way it is. If your lawn is full of weeds, it will explain why this is an entirely natural state of affairs. If your attempt at wildlife gardening has produced nothing other than a patch of rank grass and thistles, it will show you why this outcome could have been avoided only by almost superhuman effort. Often it gently suggests how things might be improved, but this is not its primary aim.

It is perhaps worth mentioning at the outset that this book differs in another important respect from nearly all other gardening books. It takes its inspiration not from the gardening literature, and only rarely from the agricultural or horticultural literature. Most often it draws on botany, ecology and natural history in the broadest sense. In other words, from a literature that seeks not to control the natural world, but merely to understand it.

Armed with this volume, you will be able to appreciate your garden for what it really is a large, unplanned and slightly out-of-control scientific experiment. You will then be properly equipped to rejoice at your successes and, more importantly, learn from your failures.

BY A WIDE MARGIN, GARDENING IS BRITAIN S MOST POPULAR leisure activity. Gardens occupy a greater proportion of the land area in Britain than in any other country. One quarter of the land area of the average British city is private garden. Tourists visit Britain from all over the planet just to see our great gardens. The landscape garden is arguably the only truly original British contribution to the history of art. If gardening is ever admitted to the Olympics, there is no doubt who will win more than a few medals, without the assistance of any performance-enhancing substances beyond some compost and a mug of tea.

How have the British come to occupy this unique position? The explanation involves at least three separate elements. The first is our remarkably mild climate. Britains position on the westerly edge of Eurasia, bathed by the warm Gulf Stream, means we can easily grow plants from all over the temperate and much of the subtropical world. Now and then some of our more adventurous plantings are killed by a hard winter (Is it hardy? ), but by and large this only adds extra interest to our perennial obsession with the weather.

The second part of the jigsaw is that, paradoxically, despite having a climate where almost anything will grow, our native flora is remarkably impoverished. We have our recent climatic history to thank for this. Several times over the last few million years much of Britain has been scraped clean by glaciers. The parts that remained clear of ice were Arctic tundra. During these ice ages (which were far longer than the intervening warm periods) the sea level fell and Britain was joined to Europe, but as the ice melted we once more became an island, most recently just 10,000 years ago. Each time this happened many plants forced out by the ice did not manage to return. However, the glaciations also had more far-reaching effects. Each time the ice retreated, warmth-loving plants advanced northwards from their southern refuges. This advance was easy and rapid, because the land left by the ice was not densely occupied by trees. But the same was certainly not true when the ice returned, and the warmth-loving plants were generally unable to retreat, so most simply died where they stood. Those that survived the warm periods did it by moving up and down southern mountains, retreating to nearer the summits during the warm periods and returning to lower levels during the cold ones. As a result there were always some plants in the south, ready to move north when the opportunity arose. Not all Europes original complement of plants managed to work this trick successfully during several successive glaciations, and many became extinct. One example familiar to gardeners is the genus Magnolia, once abundant in Europe (including Britain) but now extinct here. Another is Rhododendron, now with only four species in Europe (out of 850 worldwide), none of them much grown in gardens. Many familiar garden trees and shrubs survive in Asia and North America but have disappeared from Europe, including Sassafras, Lindera, Illicium, Mahonia, Stewartia, Hamamelis, Itea, Hydrangea, Physocarpus, Gleditsia, Pieris, Aralia and Liriodendron.

A third element is Britains long history of colonial expansion and exploration. British art galleries, museums and gardens are testament to the jackdaw-like acquisitiveness of the British abroad. British gardens have been enriched by countless plants brought back by waves of colonial expansion, from the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and the Himalayas. The RHS Plant Finder now lists over 80,000 species and cultivars for sale in British nurseries and garden centres. Edinburgh Botanic Garden alone grows over 17,000 species (ten times the number in our native flora), Kew substantially more than that. Nor is the process complete. Every year new species are discovered and many, sooner or later, find their way into British gardens. A dramatic recent example is the Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis). This remarkable relative of the monkey puzzle was discovered in 1994 by David Noble, from the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, while walking in the Wollemi National Park, about 150 kilometres north of Sydney. Despite being one of the worlds rarest plants down to fewer than one hundred adult trees at the time of its discovery it looks set to follow in the footsteps of that other great survivor,