(haute Culture)

The Age

Friday July 11, 1997

Sarah guest

Pity poor Ratty

LETTERS from southern England: Ratty, the creation of Kenneth Grahame in The Wind in the Willows, was a water vole who inhabited an Edwardian gentleman's residence and enjoyed messing about in boats. A childhood favorite, he was a common sight in rural southern England when I was growing up. And Beatrix Potter's, Squirrel Nutkin was often spotted raiding the bird table or flipping through the trees. Now both are gone - or almost.

The red squirrels have been replaced by a merry and multitudinous band of greys. (Vermin, the locals call them, but they are not without intrinsic squirrel charm.) And on this visit I've learnt that water voles too are in sharp decline. Poor, poor Ratty. It was not the dreaded drunken stoats and weasels of the Wild Wood that took his salubrious riverside home but all-American minks. Today water voles are only found in sub-standard suburban habitats and are thought to be facing ultimate extinction.

My childhood reading also included Norman Lindsay's immortal book The Magic Pudding and I am reminded that I've seen very little of the Bandicoot and his watermelon in recent years.

New to the English scene are colonies of cooing collar doves - self-important birds that sport neat black clerical collars above their grey suits. These are recent arrivals from southern Europe and now, for better or worse, they coo from every corner. Perhaps in time they too will gain immortality as children's animal characters.

NEW to the British gardening scene and not yet in general cultivation are 150 varieties of flowering onions - Allium species and their cultivars. These came to light in Russia and southeastern Europe when the Iron Curtain fell. The British have been seeking "new" plants for their exquisite gardens for hundreds of years. It's a sort of national obsession.

And, fortuitously, alliums are fashionable and served up in all the best gardens in the company of old roses and new clematis.

There's no doubt in my mind that the British are the masters of plant management and decorative gardening and that, in a short space of time, these "new" plants will look as if they were introduced with the Roman invasion - as were many others. But, if my admiration for the creative genius and craft of British gardeners knows few bounds (please, no more "stone" greyhounds), my primary admiration is for their relatively new "meadow" gardens.

These do not attract the knock-your-socks-off attention of their formal gardens but the subtleties and physiological basis of these small cohesive landscapes remain in the mind for a great deal longer. Among the best are those of Christopher Lloyd, who writes for Country Life, and gardens at Great Dixter in Northiam, Kent. There, set off in a sea of shimmering grass and sorrel seeds, I saw blobs of blue geraniums, tall white moon daisies, buttercups, purple thistles covered with brown butterflies, navy-blue iris and

poker-like white orchids.

All are refugees from the meadowlands which, because today they are treated with artificial fertilisers and weed-killers, no longer provide a habitat for these plants. The roadsides in Kent look like flower gardens too. There are scarlet corn poppies, pink corn cockle, red campion, blue corn flowers and bright-yellow corn rattle. These old cornfield "weeds" now flourish in the scratch-about conditions on the road sides.

"Natural" gardens are based on extensive knowledge and keen observation - the annual or biennial chop must be administered at just the right moment. And, as far as I know, these skilled gardeners do not administer bathloads of weed-killer, as is sometimes done here, so that the daffodils will be visible above the grass.

THE other day I joined a friend at a local pub called The Chequers - it's in Smarden, in the Weald of Kent. At the time nothing seemed unusual about the place. A chequered-board adorned the outside of the pub and the inside contained, inexplicably, a collection of toy elephants. It was only later, while reading the Oxford Dictionary of Plant-Lore, by Roy Vickery (Oxford University Press), that I learnt that 'chequers' was a local name for the fruit of the wild service tree, Sorbus torminalis, and that a very old specimen grew right there in the pub's tea garden. All I had noticed were the ducks on a pond.

I told this story to an Australian friend who said in a deprived voice: "We don't have that sort of history in Australia." She may be right, but we have our little old stories and mysteries, too. Let me give you an example.

The only thing I bought while away was a wooden box made, perhaps, in the 1820s. It is not particularly well made or beautiful and is constructed from what the English antique trade calls partridge wood. We would probably call the wood bull-oak or Allocasurina luehmannii and there are records indicating that this timber was exported from NSW during the early years of settlement. Right now the debate about whether my plain-Jane box was made here or there.

I HAVE discovered a wonderful shop for gardeners called, quite simply, Garden Books. It is to be found at 11 Blenheim Crescent, London W11 2EE just off the Portobello Road where the trash, tourist and treasure market is open on Saturday mornings. They trade in old and new gardening books and on a worldwide basis. Telephone 171 7920777; Fax 171 7921991. If you buy a book, they give you a bookmark embellished with a silly quote from Hilaire Belloc. It reads like this: "So I went into the garden and ate three worms, two smooth ones and a hairy one; the hairy one tickled all the way down." It's that sort of place.