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David Green
Brampton, Cambridgeshire
Sir: In his review of ‘Secrets of an Isis smartphone’ (Arts, 17 July) James Walton repeats an idea I’ve heard before: that British volunteers who went out to fight for Isis are the modern-day equivalents of the International Brigades who fought Franco’s fascists in the 1930s. But surely those volunteers are more like the few Brits who fought for Franco? The modern-day International Brigade volunteers must be those who fought against Isis, such as Mercer Gifford. They are the equivalents of the brave men and women who, like Orwell, fought fascist ideology nearly a century ago
David Ford
Louth, Lincolnshire
Sir: I agree with Charlie Newington-Bridges’s praise of Jeremy Clarke’s column (Letters, 24 July) but I disagree with the idea of reading it first. Why peak too early? If you read in the correct order, you reach Jeremy’s page with a heightened sense of anticipation and enjoy it all the more.
Nicky Gill
Richmond, Surrey
Sir: I have another use for ‘ping’ (Mind your language, 17 July). In some parts of Wales, a microwave oven is sometimes referred to as a ‘popty ping’ — popty being one of the Welsh words for oven, and ping for the sound you hear when it has finished. It rolls off the tongue somewhat easier than the official Welsh name of ‘ffwrn microdon’ doesn’t it?
Peter W. Morris
Ynysybwl, Mid Glamorgan
Sir: I am researching a memoir of my mother, Pamela Berry (Hartwell), 1914-1982, and would be most grateful to hear from any Spectator readers who have in their possession letters from her which they would be prepared to share with me. Please email harrietcullenuk@yahoo.com.
Harriet Cullen
London SW10
Sir: I enjoyed James Bartholomew’s article ‘Losing the plot’ (24 July) and I am pleased that he has sounded a warning note, for something so precious to our national life as the garden must never be taken for granted. But his conclusion that ‘gardening is dead’ is arguing too much from the locally particular to the general, and is mercifully premature. Kensington is altogether another part of the woods from unfashionable east Northamptonshire, where plastic grass is as rare as a rose in January. As for British chrysanthemum nurseries, the major reason for their decline is that chrysanthemums are thoroughly out of fashion — at present. Dahlia nurseries are a different matter.
With regard to his theory that it is women’s jobs that prevent them from giving the time to the ‘gentle pleasures’ of gardening, I find it remarkable and admirable how working women carve out time to tend their gardens, some even managing to open them once or twice a year for charity. Of course, there are contemporary barriers to adventurous gardening, most particularly the availability of distractions like holidays and second homes, the building of most new houses on very small plots, and the lack of status and money in professional gardening (despite the complexities and intellectual challenges of the job). But the urge to make a garden is a very strong and enduring one, and has lately been promoted by the succession of lockdowns. Nil desperandum.
Ursula Buchan
Glapthorn, Northants
Sir: Plastic and paving may be replacing plant-based gardening in some small city gardens, where busy families are desperate for easily maintained living space in the open air, but it is probably done mostly by people who would never have seriously gardened anyway; the London housing boom shows people longing for gardens. James Bartholomew is quite wrong to say that the making of great gardens is in decline because middle-class women are too busy working; they may perhaps pave the Kensington garden, but they still mow and grow in the country. The designers of great gardens, by contrast, have always been or become professionals, whatever their sex, and I see the best fully employed making exactly the kinds of large, plant-rich and surprisingly traditional gardens which Mr Bartholomew says are in decline.
Stephen Anderton
Forest Coalpit, Abergavenny
Sir: Those who favour outside rooms furnished by exterior designers are missing the pleasure gained from growing plants from seeds and cuttings and the sentimental attachment to mature plants sourced from family and friends. In my case these include a yew hedge, a 30ft bay tree, an amelanchier and numerous shrubs and perennials, mostly propagated by my mother many years ago.
Carola Wolverson
Abington, Cambridge
Sir: All the evidence is that gardening is booming: according to the Horticultural Trades Association, three million people took up gardening during lockdown, half of them under 45. Far from carpeting the land with fake grass, today’s gardeners are more aware than ever of the need to use nectar-rich plants, and almost every seed company has a range of pollinator-friendly plants. And unlike the Victorians, we’re not pouring poisons on to everything to keep insects at bay. British gardeners continue to be hugely influential. Garden designers like Tom Stuart-Smith, Jo Thompson, Nigel Dunnett, Sarah Price and Andy Sturgeon are making wonderful gardens both here and abroad and are worthy successors to Gertrude Jekyll and Lawrence Johnston. And you only have to look at the thousands of superb private gardens that open for charity under the National Gardens Scheme to see that gardening is still an essential part of British life.
Constance Craig Smith
London W12
Sir: I can assure James Bartholomew that 60 miles south of London, gardening is the passion of many rural residents — on a quiet evening, you can almost hear the sound of weeding and pruning on the air.
Noel St John White
Brightling, East Sussex
Sir: James Bartholomew is misinformed on numerous counts. Drawing on unsourced statistics from between 15 and 23 years ago to make the case for the loss of London’s private gardens, and suggesting that it ‘seems likely those trends have continued’, is lame in the extreme. Just how he established that in the 1970s there used to be 120 chrysanthemum growers and that by 2010 (11 years ago!) there were just three demands some evidence. I can find none. The 2020 RHS Plant Finder lists more than 600 varieties of chrysanthemum on offer in the UK from more than 30 nurseries. The past ten years has not seen a tenfold increase in growers of chrysanthemums.
We might forgive his preposterous aside that ‘real gardens’ tend to be cared for by ‘ageing widows’, but to suggest that there is a decline in British gardening and it is ‘largely because women nowadays have different kind of lives’ should have been enough to consign this nonsense to the bin.
Charles Hawes
Member of the Professional Garden Photographers Association and Garden Media Guild, Monmouthshire
Sir: It is simply not true that gardening is now confined to ageing widows. Living, breathing things — plants, birds and animals — mean more to us in this age of plastic sterility than ever before. ‘You are nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on Earth.’ An old cliché, but how true.
Ann Pilling
Hawes, Upper Wensleydale
Because you read about countryside
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