Garden Tales To Tame Autumn Blahs

“The Transplanted Gardener: An American in England Looks at Hedges, Ha-Ha’s, History, and More” by Charles Elliott (Lyons & Burford, 221 pages, $22.95)

One morning last summer, June Williams peered out of the window of her house in the small Oxfordshire village of Cray’s Pond to find that someone had stolen the hedge. The whole hedge - 40 feet of well-trimmed, shoulder-high cypress was gone …. According to Scotland Yard, which actually has officers specializing in plant theft, a true crime wave is washing over rural Britain. - From “The Transplanted Gardener”

For the next few months, gardens will offer few pleasures except the satisfaction of knowing that if the roses are gone, so are the aphids. Too early yet for those glossy catalogs showing shell pink peonies the size of soup bowls. But thanks to sympathetic publishing houses, good books are arriving to get us through the winter.

These garden books of autumn are not of the what-to or how-to variety. They carry few instructions for double digging, soil testing or gazebo building. These are garden books to read for pleasure - garden lit, if you will, books with which to settle down in front of the fire or under the eiderdown.

My favorite this year is “The Transplanted Gardener,” a collection of Charles Elliott’s columns for Horticulture magazine. Elliott is an American, an editor in the London publishing office of Alfred A. Knopf, who now lives and gardens near the Welsh border in the English village of Skenfirth.

A former New Englander, he’s admirably positioned to compare and contrast gardens and their makers on both sides of the Atlantic. And his writing has more than enough wit and style to make the curious and frustrating hobby of gardening enthralling reading.

Among Elliott’s topics: shovels (“spades” in England), ivy (the kudzu of England), village mole-catchers, a rose he calls the “terrifying Kiftsgate,” which can grow 50 feet tall and 100 feet wide, lawn mowers, and lost and stolen gardens.

“I’m not sure why the idea of lost gardens has such poignance, given that every garden is at the mercy of time,” he writes. “The most devoted labor can’t keep trees from growing, ground cover from spreading, grass from infiltrating gravel paths. But most of us are able to accept … mere botanical exuberance. It’s obliteration that shakes you.”

Stolen gardens, or bits of them at any rate, disappear before their time, hauled away by thieves. In this book’s funniest chapter, titled “The Booby Trapped Carrot,” Elliott discusses the crimes against nature that constitute a major problem in Britain, and measures being taken to thwart the perpetrators.

OK, he concedes, equipment mowers, tillers, chain saws and such - got stolen back in the Berkshires, too. Tons of such gear vanishes from English garden sheds, but that’s not the end of it. Thefts of garden furniture constitute half of all art theft in Britain.

But wait. It gets worse. English thieves steal the very plants from the ground. Private gardens at stately and not-so-stately homes, parks and botanical gardens are being stripped like cornfields, to hear Elliott tell it, often by sweet little old ladies climbing off tour buses with secateurs in their Miss Marple-ish handbags.

In response, British gardeners are forming neighborhood watches, buying loud dogs, pouring noisy gravel onto their walkways, installing sensor-controlled floodlights and loading shotguns. “I myself favor trip-wires fitted to simple alarm guns that fire blank 12-bore cartridges,” one man wrote to his local newspaper. But he was considering even more radical measures: “explosive parsnips or thunderflash carrots, which would detonate when touched.”

The English gardeners’ obsession with theft competes with another, their mania for large vegetables. “It’s as if the nation’s gardeners are trying to make up for the fact that Great Britain isn’t very great any more,” Elliott observes, citing events such as the Kelsae Onion Festival, the Appleby Pot Leek Club’s competition and “the Olympics of monster vegetable growing,” the United Kingdom Giant Vegetable and Flower Championships. Growers approach such events “toting their produce in horse trailers.”

Here, too, is a look at the English garden tours that are attracting crowds of Americans. “Contrary to sentimental American assumptions,” Elliott writes, “the favorite summertime sport in the English countryside isn’t cricket. It’s garden visiting.”

He relates the history of the National Gardens Scheme, the idea of a Miss Elsie Wagg, who suggested back in 1927 that inviting the public in one or two days a year to view otherwise private gardens might be a fine way to raise money for charity.

“The Transplanted Gardener” has layers and layers of such good stuff. Like a 12-pound onion, really, but it won’t make you cry. Unless, of course, you laugh that hard.