Forty years ago I sat down to discuss the vexed topics of winter-flowering irises and autumn-flowering nerines. I had never written a gardening article before and I was doing these two entirely on spec. I never imagined that I would write more than 2,000 others in a weekly sequence, all for the same newspaper, the FT.
Not long ago the FT’s Lucy Kellaway wrote on the implications of staying in the same job for 20 years. I read her with wry amusement, especially when she wondered if continuity might be a sign of timidity or lack of talent. She is only a beginner. I see myself as about two-thirds of the way through my life’s work. It is not founded on funking. The FT would probably say that it was based on their tolerance and wise laissez-faire. Actually it is based on my daily gardening, the challenges of changing practice and, ultimately, love.
Back in the late 1960s there was still the last flicker of reckless patronage of the young. Nowadays they are battered through graduate theses, sent off to schools of business or journalism and regarded as unsafe until they have had the stuffing knocked out of them by post-Thatcherite elders in the food chain above them. I never forget the counter-examples, Keats or Schubert, Aristophanes or Orson Welles, geniuses at ages between 20 and 26. As an undergraduate at Oxford I had become good friends with the sons of Pat Gibson, then managing director of Pearson, owners of the FT. Typically he took time after lunch to hear out the least-likely request from yet another enfant terrible. It gave an unusual twist to the “flower power” of the times. I wanted to write gardening columns, inspired by the famous columns of Vita Sackville-West, planter of the great garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. Was there a newspaper I could approach?