A Gardener’s Log

Were she alive, Edna Walling would probably be delighted to know that another of her books has been reissued. She might also be astonished and just a little peeved. After a brilliant career as a garden designer, columnist and author – as well as photographer, cottage designer and ardent protector of the natural landscape – Walling’s fame had all but faded by the time she died in 1973 at the age of seventy-seven. Few noticed her passing. However, her renaissance began in the early 1980s, with new editions of selected works and with Peter Watts’s widely praised The Gardens of Edna Walling. Many more such publications followed. Walling became a garden designer in the early 1920s in Melbourne. She had spent nearly two years at the Burnley School of Horticulture learning ploughing, pruning and fruit preserving, though almost nothing about garden design. Then she became one of the new breed of ‘Girl Gardeners’, tending the trim lawns and straight borders of the well-to-do. She found this work exhausting and unrewarding, and began reading up on English, Italian and Spanish landscape design, and experimenting with ideas in the gardens of amenable clients. By 1920 she felt confident enough to offer her services in a professional capacity. She quickly demonstrated that she had a superb natural talent – for both garden design and self-promotion. Walling’s gardens were exceptional: their beauty of proportion and grace of line were wonderful to behold. For those who could not afford such a creation, there was the chance to follow her ideas and vision through her gardening columns, notably in the Australian Home Beautiful, to which she contributed for over thirty years. It was these articles and her many photographs that became the basis for Walling’s books. There were four in all; A Gardener’s Log was her third, appearing in 1948. A Gardener’s Log was reissued in 1969, much to Walling’s joy, for she was beginning to use her publisher’s rejection letters as wallpaper. The 1960s had not been kind to the garden designer: she was out of favour, out of fashion, and her impassioned pleas for conservation had not endeared her to editors. She had always been ahead of her time, though she could never have foreseen how popular her work would be-come after her demise. A Gardener’s Log has experienced a splendid longevity. A revised edition, compiled and edited by Margaret Barrett and published by Anne O’Donovan, appeared in 1985. And it is this edition, with a rearrangement of photographs and design, that is the latest Edna Walling offering. This is a charming book. As Walling says in her original preface, ‘Above all it is hoped that the book may help in the creation of restful gardens … More and more we seem to need gardens in which we can live and relax rather than ones in which we work and sweat.’ The emphasis of the book is on initial hard work leading to low maintenance thereafter. Once you have laid that path, planted that tree and put in those rock plants, you can sit back and enjoy, for she tells you how to plant to reduce weeds and when to mulch to conserve water and so on. This sort of information does not date. Advice is given in short bursts with titled segments, roughly corralled under four-chapter headings devoted to the four seasons. She romps her way through all manner of topics such as ‘Steps can be tricky’ and ‘Thyme and luxury’. Indeed, she moves around and pops up in different areas like her very own foxgloves: Really, for gate-crashing commend me to foxgloves! They just make up their minds and off they go to some spot in the garden, perhaps to some corner you have not had time to think about (and how one loves them for that alone), or perhaps into a border for which you had quite different ideas … saying, ‘You see what a lovely picture we are giving you.’ The quality of the photographic reproduction is very fine, with a variety of Walling’s own black-and-white photographs plus a selection of more recent images showing her mature gardens in colour. There are also a couple of her delightful watercolour garden plans. The design of the book draws unnecessary attention to itself with some fake yellowing pages, but all in all one sees lovely things, in words and pictures – and beautiful images is what Edna Walling is all about.

Sara Hardy

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Ghost Cities by Siang Lu

No Country for Idealists: The making of a family of subversives by Boris Frankel

The Penguin Book of Elegy: Poems of memory, mourning and consolation edited by Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan

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