My studio is full to the brim with groaning shelves. My book collection includes plant encyclopaedias, gardening how-to books, coffee table tomes, rich with illustratustrations of unattainable horticultural splendour and hundreds of gardening memoirs.
I'm not about to throw them away, but having just re-read a slim volume my father purchased in 1969, I wonder why I ever bothered to buy any gardening books of my own, since that date.
It's a stylish paperback, of 64 pages in length, written by Peter Shepheard and published by the Council of Industrial Design - the forerunner of my sometime employers, The Design Council.
Shepheard was that rare thing, an architect of buildings and of landscape. After a shining university career, he became a successful practitioner, founding the company Shepheard, Epstein and Hunter. By the sixties he had become something of a TV celebrity as well.
But neither his fame, his business acumen, nor his scholarship can account for the wisdom of this book. The advice it offers is at once progressive, while at the same time being rooted in the old ways of gardening.
Shepheard's polemic is simple. He believed that gardens should echo nature. He had no time for, " crazy paving, tiny (fibreglass) ponds, streams of improbable source, gnomes ...and dwarf cypress trees." He dubbed this, Godwattery and condemns it as sentimental and ill-informed.
Instead he argued for a landscaping that learns from nature. In citing the Japanese garden design tradition, he warned that we can not hope to copy nature. Instead he urged his readers to distill the wonder of a "whole landscape into a few square yards, with nothing but a few stones, a few plants and some sand."
Shepheard was brought up in Birkenhead and spent his childhood wandering the Wirral Peninsular sketching from nature. He remarked in later life that he had found those landscapes ravishing.
One spring he helped his father, also an architect and a nature lover, to construct a pond and a rockery in their back garden. The lessons he learnt there, about how plants grow naturally between rocks, the effect of light and shelter and how a pond can achieve ecological balance, are reiterated in delightful in this book, written more than forty years after that halcyon experience.
On every page we can hear the boy, the father of the man, but also the son of the father, encouraging us to observe and to think about what we see around us. It is a scientific skill; observation and deduction. Shepheard called the ponds he designed balanced-life ponds. He encouraged his readers to eschew insecticide and to mulch with compost rather than using inorganic fertilisers.
Shepheard reminds us that lawns need not be made merely of grass. He tells us that in Japan the grass is seen as a weed and the moss as sacred. He extols the virtues of daisy and dandelion, of leaving swathes uncut.
Shepheard reminds us that every plant we can have in our gardens is a weed somewhere in the world. He questions why we might want to look beyond the naturally occurring plants to furnish a planting scheme.
This was very advanced thinking for the time. Rachael Carson's book, Silent Spring, had been published in 1962. Her ideas had hit the headlines, but the implications for gardening were only just being recognised.
But Shepheard knew, even then, to leave the aphids as food for the ladybirds. (A piece of advice that many gardeners would do well to follow today.) I wonder whether he had read about this, whether he had observed it, or whether it was his father's lore.
I dedicate this article to my own father, Timothy Herbert Shillam. He was an engineer, and believed in the powers of knowledge and the mind to solve the problems of our world. It was he, who encouraged me to observe, to learn and, most of all, to think for myelf. He died on 24th October 2014. I hope that I will always remember his example.
