Sometimes, it is difficult to remember how we functioned before the internet took over the way we garden. Google the name of a plant today and, 10 seconds later, you know how to grow it and where to buy it. If you do not know its name? Google a picture and up comes its name in both Latin and English. Life for gardeners today is much easier than it used to be.
I was interested in gardening from a very early age. My pocket money was spent on seeds from Woolworths and the cash that decent uncles sent me for my birthday was splurged on tulip and daffodil bulbs. My parents and grandparents were shrub-gardeners — we had herbaceous borders, an orchard and a kitchen garden from which the gardeners seldom emerged — but ornamental trees and shrubs furnished the five-acre woodland garden where we tended to walk.
By the time I went to prep school, I knew the names of perhaps 100 magnolias, rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias. When I acquired my own first house — a modest three-bedroom cottage with no more than one acre of greensand — I naturally turned to trees and shrubs to furnish the garden.
Garden centres were few and their stock was limited. We looked to traditional nurseries for interesting plants, which meant writing off for their lists and enclosing stamps to cover the postage. Postal orders were required if the nursery catalogue was not merely a list of names and prices, but a source of information, with detailed descriptions, perhaps even photographs, of what it offered. That was how we built up our knowledge; we read the catalogues carefully and sent off orders for plants that were delivered for planting the following autumn.
There were books, of course, and one of the best for shrub-gardeners was a fat, green paper-back called Hilliers’ Manual of Trees & Shrubs. Members of the International Dendrology Society (IDS) carried it everywhere on the society’s excellent tours. Some still do. For keen collectors of trees and shrubs, however, there was nothing to compare with the wisdom and experience expounded in ‘Bean’, a massive masterpiece compiled by William Jackson Bean, curator of Kew, and first published in 1914 as Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles. The eighth and last edition of ‘Bean’ was published in four volumes from 1970 onwards.
There were such long publication gaps between the individual volumes that the first was given to me by my grandmother, the second by my father, the third by my wife and the fourth by my children. All four volumes are heavily annotated with my own marginalia and comments on what I have seen over the decades.
'There is nothing to match it on the whole world wide web. And it’s free'
Bean’s masterpiece is exactly the sort of publication that the internet has rendered redundant. However, the wisdom built up by generations of editors over the past 100 years has now been preserved by the IDS, which has acquired the copyright and put the entire work online.
What’s more, the society has embarked on the task of updating every description and adding thousands of new entries for plants that have emerged since the 1970s. This is inevitably slow work and expensive, too, but the solution has been to ask keen and knowledgeable plantsmen to sponsor a genus or a group of plants and then to employ top-notch botanists and horticulturists to pull together all the available research, knowledge and expertise, old and new.
The ebullient editor-in-chief is John Grimshaw, a botanist and horticulturist who combines his work on Trees and Shrubs Online with editing Curtis’s Botanical Magazine for Kew. His deputy, Tom Christian, has travelled the world in pursuit of trees and shrubs and is a long-term guarantee of the continued excellence of the IDS’s work. Updates of nearly 200 genera have already been completed, from Abelia, Abies and Acer through to Zelkova, Zenobia and Ziziphus.
Earlier this year, the IDS uploaded a major revision of Bean’s entry on hydrangeas. Everyone knows about hydrangeas and many of us have grown them in our gardens, but much has happened since the last printed edition of Bean, which devoted no more than 20 pages to this ‘small genus’ in 1983.
The IDS is adamant that its new account of Hydrangea is the most important ever. The PR blurb says — correctly — that it describes ‘73 species, nine lower taxa and over 570 of the most important cultivars, all illustrated by over 1,300 images’. Yet that is an understatement. Have a look and then reflect that the intention is to treat every tree and shrub that is hardy in the British Isles in the same degree of detail. There is nothing to match it on the whole world wide web. And it’s free.
Charles Quest-Ritson’s book The Olive Tree (Ediciones El Viso, £50) is out now
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