{"id":890,"date":"2013-09-09T04:17:59","date_gmt":"2013-09-09T12:17:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=890"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:32:04","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:32:04","slug":"book-review-a-time-to-plant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/book-review-a-time-to-plant\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: A Time to Plant"},"content":{"rendered":"

The front cover of Hugh Cavendish\u2019s new book, A Time to Plant<\/em>, looks like an abstract painting in shades of olive green, tan and rust.\u00a0 It is, in fact, a close-up of the exfoliating bark of a stewartia tree.\u00a0 The tree in question is part of a collection of stewartias at Holker Hall, the Cavendish family home in the English county of Cumbria.<\/p>\n

Passionate gardeners frequently turn into writers and aristocratic gardeners seem even more likely to do so.\u00a0 As the result, there are many histories of individual gardens, past and present, on the market.\u00a0 A Time to Plant<\/em> stands out for its eloquence as well as the beauty of the photo illustrations, all taken by Cavendish\u2019s artist-wife, Grania.<\/p>\n

The Holker\u2014pronounced \u201chooker\u201d–property has been in the author\u2019s family since 1536.\u00a0 It was originally part of the holdings of the Duke of Devonshire, whose primary estate, Chatsworth, is well known to garden lovers.\u00a0 Jane Austin fans also know Chatsworth as the stand-in for the Pemberley estate in the 1995 TV mini series version of Pride and Prejudice<\/em> starring Colin Firth.\u00a0 Holker\u2019s fortunes became separated from those of Chatsworth in the twentieth century.\u00a0 Hugh Cavendish, known more formally as Lord Cavendish of Furness, grew up there and inherited the property in at the age of thirty-three.<\/p>\n

He found himself in a dire situation.\u00a0 The gardens, which had been open to the public for some time, had fallen on hard times.\u00a0 The estate was in financial peril.\u00a0 However, instead of emulating many of his fellow aristocrats and consigning the property to the National Trust, Cavendish decided to undertake a rescue mission.\u00a0 He admits that upgrading and redesigning the gardens waited five years while he, Grania and their business advisors worked to restructure debt, revitalize the estate\u2019s profit-making businesses and create a plan for Holker\u2019s future.\u00a0 It is rare for a gardener to be so frank about the financial impediments to great garden plans.\u00a0 The early challenges in Cavendish\u2019s grand-scale horticultural career make the later triumphs even more inspiring.<\/p>\n

Cavendish bucked conventional wisdom by taking a hard look at every aspect of his gardens, including landscape designs that had worn out their welcome or simply never lived up to the original designers\u2019 intentions.\u00a0 Some, like Holker\u2019s struggling rose garden, were scrapped outright in favor of plantings schemes with a greater chance of success and more appeal to visitors.\u00a0 Others were replanted or re-imagined.<\/p>\n

Cavendish clearly loves his plants, large and small and is a UK national collection holder for some species.\u00a0 His observations are fresh and interesting.\u00a0 For example, experience at Holker has taught him that plants originating on several different continents look awkward when closely intermingled.\u00a0 Asian species work better in the Cumbrian landscape than related species that originated in North America.\u00a0 Presumably this means that Cavendish\u2019s Japanese stewartia\u2014Stewartia pseudocamellia\u2014is more simpatico than his mountain stewartia\u2014Stewartia ovata.<\/p>\n

As a businessman, Cavendish knows that the customer comes first.\u00a0 At Holker this translates to annual garden improvements designed to give repeat visitors something new to see and talk about every year.\u00a0 He and Grania have installed a substantial labyrinth with echoes of Stonehenge in its upended stone slabs.\u00a0 The wildflower meadow helps to unit the formal portions of the garden with the wild landscape beyond it.\u00a0 An ambitious water cascade delights visiting children.<\/p>\n

Hugh Cavendish pays fulsome tribute to the circle of women who, he says, have had an impact on the garden.\u00a0 He credits his many aunts; significant female friends, like English garden designer\/doyenne Arabella Lenox-Boyd; and even his mother, with whom he had an intense and difficult relationship.\u00a0 Perhaps most of all, the book is a love letter to Grania, his partner in all things, especially the garden.<\/p>\n

Now another woman is about to play a significant role in the Holker garden.\u00a0 Cavendish\u2019s daughter, Lucy, a painter, is taking over management of the estate and its businesses, while her parents retire to an advisory role and a house two miles away.\u00a0 The author professes not to be sad about the change.\u00a0 His concept is one of stewardship, rather than ownership\u2014perhaps the inevitable outcome of being only the most recent in a long line of masters and mistresses of Holker.<\/p>\n

A Time to Plant<\/em> brings past and present together.\u00a0 Though the author insists that he is fundamentally lazy, he proves to be an energetic chronicler of the life of his garden.\u00a0 The book has plenty about plants, from the beautiful rediscovered martagon lilies that dot the edge of the woodland garden, to the amazing \u201chandkerchief tree\u201d \u2013Davidia involucrata\u2014that took fourteen years to produce its first flowers.\u00a0 A helpful garden map on the volume\u2019s frontspiece and endpaper give the reader an easy frame of reference.\u00a0 Between the covers, Hugh Cavendish offers a literary map through his life and the forty-year Holker renaissance, with a graceful epilogue that points the way to the future.\u00a0 Taken as a whole, Cavendish\u2019s eloquent map provides the reader with a memorable journey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The front cover of Hugh Cavendish\u2019s new book, A Time to Plant, looks like an abstract painting in shades of olive green, tan and rust.\u00a0 It is, in fact, a close-up of the exfoliating bark of a stewartia tree.\u00a0 The tree in question is part of a collection of stewartias at Holker Hall, the Cavendish … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[646,643,234,644,642,645],"class_list":["post-890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-davidia","tag-garden-books","tag-historic-gardens","tag-holker","tag-hugh-cavendish","tag-stewartia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":891,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions\/891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}