THUNDER AND LIGHTNING

After two days with heat and humidity building up, we had the most magnificent thunderstorm last night. Fat, white lightning broke the sky just after dark and a hard rain came down as if fired from a shotgun. The first huge clap of thunder sounded like a whole room of heavy furniture going through the floor.

It has been raining on and off for a week now. After the month-long drought, we’ve had up to 150 millimetres (6 inches) of rain, two months’ worth, coming down in one day in some places on Zealand, causing complete havoc in the areas that were hardest hit. In Calvesgarden, we’ve had only half of that and well spread over the week. The meteorologists explain that it’s only natural to have record amounts of rain after a record summer because the warm sea around the islands produces the thunderstorms. They also predicted that we won't have another summer like this in a hundred years. It's to be seen, I think. Their predictions about the summer weren't very hot as far as I remember.

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SUMMER LILAC

To the garden, the rain was a saviour. The roses have been looking tired for a while and the lavenders pale and dusty. The butterfly bush on the other hand is at its finest. It has been joined in blossoming by its lovely cousin, the brilliant yellow and orange ‘summer lilac’, buddleia x weyeriana ‘Sungold’, whose flowers are tightly packed in small glowing balls. I’ve learned that a new rival to ‘Sungold’ for the best yellow, B. ‘Honeycomb’, has a more refined habit and slightly lighter flower.

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THE PASSIONATE GARDENER

The German novelist Rudolf Borchardt’s famous guide to raising flowers, The Passionate Gardener, has just come out in an English edition (McPherson and Company). The book, which was written in 1935, but first published in 1951, can also be read as a history of gardening, from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, through the nearly flowerless gardens in the Roman Empire and the artfully artless flower gardens of the German Baroque, to the botanical gardens that flourished in the age of exploration.

Borchardt admired the botanists who brought back exotic species from around the world as much as he admired the amateur spirit of English gardening and its many eccentricities. During the Hitler years, his strong anti-Nazi views and remote Jewish heritage made him persona non grata in Germany. Only after the war did his reputation revive, with his collected works gradually appearing in a 16-volume edition. To this day, he is almost unknown to English readers: This edition of The Passionate Gardener is the first of Borchardt's books to appear in English.

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WEALTH OF TENSION

In a highly favourable review of the book in The New York Sun (Gardening as Spirituality, July 19, 2006), Adam Kirsch writes:

“Above all, and most important for readers today, Borchardt addresses the concerns of what we now would call environmentalism. Ideally, the garden is the site where man engages nature without defeating it, an encounter he expresses as ‘the eternal tension between the flower and the garden. ... The order within the flower is pre-human, and governs the flower itself. The garden speaks of human modes of order, where man is master, subduer, and transformer.’ The key to a successful garden, he insists, is to maintain ‘the wealth of this tension’, allowing the gardener and the garden, nature and humanity, to work in partnership.”

A View in the Elysian Fields from the Spring of Helicon in Buckinghamshire

Beside its philosophical overtones, The Passionate Gardener is also full of practical advice about soils, compost, weeding and such although they are often followed by endlessly ramifying digressions. Kirsch notes admiringly that within a few pages, Borchardt can find his way from “considering a window box of blue petunias in a slum apartment — a shrunken, pitiable effort which nonetheless shows ‘the essence of the human garden’ — and within a few pages find his way to the Garden of Eden, the Elysian Fields, Calypso's island, and the lilies of the field from the Sermon on the Mount.”