Viva Lewes Issue #154 July 2019

ON THIS MONTH: FESTIVAL
Photos left and right by Penny Fewster
Charleston Festival of the Garden
Why do we garden?
Tom Stuart-Smith is curating this month’s
Gardening for Curious Minds festival at
Charleston. “It’s not so much a how-to type
event,” he tells me. “It’s much more about why
do we garden? And where does gardening fit
into the array of big issues we face today.”
So, Cleve West will be appearing, in
conversation – on the power of the allotment,
and veganism – with Green MP Caroline Lucas.
And Tom Brown will be speaking with Sarah
Wain and Jim Buckland about the West Dean
Garden-legacy they’ve just handed on to him.
“Themes are of having to give things up; and
taking on other people’s legacy”, says Tom
Stuart-Smith. “It’s a conservative approach,
really: looking after and caring for the best of
things.
“Gardening may have once seemed about
decorating the paths of the idle rich, or the
middle classes. Not any more. Today gardens
and designed landscapes are the main places
we come into contact with nature, and so
gardeners stand between people and nature as
custodians and interpreters.”
He draws attention to two others among the
rich mix of Charleston talks, before we touch
on the one he himself is giving. “Christopher
Woodward is talking on Virginia Woolf”, he
says, “and he’s just a brilliant speaker”. And Sue
Stuart-Smith – Tom’s wife – is a psychiatrist
whose book The Well-Gardened Mind, according
to the website, explores ‘the metaphor of the
mind as a nurtured, garden-like space’. She’ll
appear in conversation with broadcaster Rachel
De Thame.
Tom himself is giving a talk entitled Walled
Gardens – Mystery & Sanctuary. “Gardens are
sanctuaries”, he says. “I talked to Penelope
Hobhouse, one of the greatest gardeners of
the last sixty years, and she told me the one
place she could get away from the misery of her
childhood was in the garden.
“I’ve worked in many walled gardens over the
last ten years – such as one just completed in
Marrakech. In Islamic culture, the paradise
garden is a totally self-contained space. A very
concentrated, centrifugal thing. In Islam, it’s a
safe haven, separate from the desert – a place of
shade, water, scent and order.”
Tom also speaks of the romantic overlay of the
idea of the ‘secret’ garden. “There are lots of
literary references, of course – like The Garden
of the Finzi-Continis, by Giorgio Bassani, which
warns of the danger of being cloistered in a
garden, almost unhealthily inward-looking,
instead of being alert – in this case to the rise
of Nazism. Hermetic introspection can be
dangerous,” says Tom. “A walled garden can
be a meditative space but should never be
mistaken for the entire world…” Charlotte Gann
13-14 July. charleston.org.uk/festival-of-thegarden-2019
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