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'Plants are just itching to grow': Ken Thompson on his approach to gardening
Ken Thompson has his head in his hands. “I think the problem here,” he says after a full minute of silence, “is that I cannot put myself in the mind of someone who would do that. I literally can’t imagine how you would decide that’s a good idea.”
We’re in Thompson’s home in Sheffield to talk about The Sceptical Gardener: a collection of his pieces for the Telegraph. The book, like his columns, is a treat, covering everything from flower names for girls to the effect of trees on house prices, to why bumblebee nest boxes are a waste of money. Thompson’s home, like many in the Sheffield suburbs, is perched on a hill, with the garden running down the side.
The view, like the garden, has a calming effect – until I tell him about some friends of mine in London who decided to replace their lawn with AstroTurf. For the only time in our conversation, he’s genuinely angry. “If you want to do that, sell that space to someone who’ll actually garden. Buy yourself a bigger house if you want to walk around on carpet. Don’t walk around on it outdoors. That’s a terrible, terrible thing to do.”
It’s understandable that Thompson would be upset. His life and work have been about working with nature. Now semi-retired, the 61-year-old spent decades as a plant ecologist, specialising in the germination and dispersal of seeds. In conversation, he’s a teacher rather than a preacher.
It’s the same approach he takes to gardening. Where many people try to impose themselves on nature, he and his wife have stuck with the three-tier structure they inherited 25 years ago: flowers on the top, a meadow and a few trees in the middle, and the fruit and veg at the bottom. “There’s no real design here,” he admits. “I’m definitely a 'stick it in and see where it goes’ gardener.”
Yet the results are delightful – there are sweetpeas, fuchsias, Bramley apples, cyclamen, an enormous magnolia. On the edge of the meadow sits a lovely mulberry, grown from seed, and another apple tree, being slowly colonised by a wild rose. Perhaps the most interesting feature is a collection of four silver birch trees, planted cheek by jowl some 25 years ago mostly to see what would happen.
Remarkably, all four have thrived. Has Thompson ever been tempted, I ask, to apply scientific principles to his own garden – to fill it with exotic plants and weird experiments? He laughs. For one thing, his wife would never let him: the garden is at least as much hers as his. But also, he’s a slow learner. Due to its slope, and the Sheffield climate, the garden is relatively dry – but he still spent years trying to grow moist-soil plants such as Tropaeolum speciosum and Himalayan blue poppy (Meconopsis) simply because he liked them.
Thompson came to gardening relatively late in life, while he was living in Plymouth in the Eighties. (Another legacy of this era is a passion for Plymouth Argyle F.C. – picked up from his two sons who were born there.) It took him a while to realise that his career mapped on to his new hobby. “It didn’t dawn on me right away, the connection between what I was doing for a living and gardening,” he says. “I didn’t see them as joined up.” His career as a writer, however, did grow out of his work.
“Every now and then I’d read something in an ecology or a botanical journal, and I’d think, 'You know, gardeners would find that interesting.’ ” That includes challenges to conventional wisdom – in fact, there’s an entire section of his book titled “Not Worth Doing”. So what, I ask him, are the biggest myths in gardening? “One that’s so pervasive it’s not even seen as a myth is the idea of fertiliser,” he says. “Farmers use shedloads of fertiliser, because they have to. But the ornamental bit of a garden is essentially a closed system – as long as you’re taking waste to the compost heap and then putting compost back on, the nutrients aren’t going anywhere.
If you’re not growing veg, there’s no case for using fertiliser. All that happens is that you end up with soils that are ridiculously high in phosphorus to no great purpose.” Another myth is that native British plants are the best for wildlife. “All the evidence so far says that that’s not true,” he says. “The classic book is by Jennifer Owen, who did a 30-year study of the wildlife in her garden in Leicester. No one will ever do anything like it again: for 30 years, she tracked, identified, counted everything in her garden. And what she found was shedloads of diversity.”
Perhaps, I suggest, gardening is a bit like cookery – new discoveries have made some impact (in the form of molecular gastronomy), but haven’t yet trickled down. “Science has not penetrated into gardening as much as I would have liked,” he agrees. “What you might call old wives’ tales are resistant to change. The famous one is that you can’t water plants in sunlight, because it scorches the leaves. You can go out into your garden on a sunny day, and look at your plants, and say, 'Well, is this happening?’ And of course it’s not.” So are Telegraph readers upset when he tells them they’ve got it wrong? Not at all, he says: they tend to take it on the chin. There are, however, subjects “that you touch at your peril”.
When he wrote about why “forest gardening” wasn’t very sensible, “everyone seemed to assume I was a mouthpiece for Monsanto. And never, ever accuse cats of harming birds.” If Thompson has a manifesto, it’s to persuade people that gardening is pretty much the best thing ever – good for your health, your soul and the natural world. This can, he admits, be an uphill struggle. “It’s seen by the non-gardening public as just a bit odd, a bit quaint,” he says.
A glorious exception is the new Matt Damon film, The Martian. “It’s the first film I’ve ever seen that has a botanist as a hero. It’s because of his botany skills that he doesn’t die. He says at one point: 'Mars will feel the power of my botany!’ ” Partly, the problem is that people think gardening is harder than it is. “A lot of people are frightened of gardens – they think they’re out to get them.” But it couldn’t be easier.
“Plants are just itching to grow. They just need to be given the chance.” In particular, he says he’s “astonished” by how many people don’t bother growing fruit and veg. At the bottom of his garden there are leeks, beans, courgettes, mange tout, beetroot, parsnips, broccoli, rhubarb, plums, raspberries, strawberries. Gooseberries, he stresses, are “ridiculously easy to grow”. His mantra, he says, is “work with your garden” – and embrace the unplanned.
That’s how he ended up with the birches, or a Twayblade orchid (now sadly deceased), or an Eccremocarpus scaber, the Chilean glory flower, which grew through a crack in the concrete and now clings precariously to the stucco of his house. “If something germinates, let it grow until you know what it is,” he says. “It may be something really interesting.”