Digging Around with India Knight
At Home in India's garden
Digging Around is back! In this week’s episode of this occasional series, we’re Digging Around with the author and journalist India Knight, going on a fascinating tour along her gardening story.
India Knight is the author of five novels, the most recent of which, Darling, was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. She has written seven non-fiction books, most recently India Knight’s Beauty Edit: What Works When You’re Older. Her journalism appears in The Sunday Times. She lives in Suffolk.
You can find HOME by India Knight right here on Substack. It’s one of my favourite go-to reads; you’ll see why as you read on:
India, when did gardening arrive for you?
I’m the product of an entirely urban upbringing. From 1965 to 2015 I lived in cities and ‘the countryside’ was a mystery to me. I didn’t have the kind of childhood that ever involved lolling about under the apple tree, or golden afternoons in cottage gardens with hollyhocks, or the thwack of ball on willow on the village green. I wouldn’t have known what a village green was.
When I was growing up we lived opposite the Heath in Hampstead. I loved the wildness of it and how it made me feel, but it never occurred to me that you could replicate some of that feeling in a domestic garden. My experience of gardens as a child and young woman – this was the 1970s and into the 1980s – were that people had a lawn that they tended to obsessively, and then very neat borders of mysterious flowers, some prettier than others. Sometimes I came across quite grand gardens, and they seemed so formal and stiff – chilly, somehow. I had no interest in any of it.
I do have one very vivid garden memory though – I lived in Brussels as a child and one of my mother’s friends lived in an ultra-modern white house with acres of negative space and sculptural Italian furniture – quite avant-garde at the time – that had this completely wild, huge garden (no lawns!) that looked like she did nothing to it, though in retrospect I bet she did, a bit. But I remember lying on my stomach in the long grass aged maybe 7 or 8 and inspecting various insects feeling pure happiness and a sense of total freedom.
As an adult I lived in London for 45 years. All the outside spaces I had were very small and mostly paved, apart from in a house we lived in in Stoke Newington when I was in my early 30s. But by then I had two small children, so that particular garden – which in hindsight had huge potential - was all about sandpits, toy diggers, a slide, a particularly crap and perilous swing and a Little Tykes Cosy Coupe.
The next garden was a small paved square in Dalston, and by that point I was interested enough to get a gardener in. He made a tiny lawn, planted up the borders with big things like climbers, introduced me to the joy of pots and built a treehouse for the boys. He also put a Japanese maple in a pot, which I still have 27-ish years later (also two Dickinsonia which later grew massive but sadly perished in the Beast from the East). There was a wooden table to sit at, and a bench my mother gave me, and I think that was the point at which I thought ‘this is really nice, sitting here with these beautiful, nice-smelling things around me’.
I knew nothing. I didn’t understand that you couldn’t plant something in October and expect a flower explosion in December – I mean, I was idiotic. I didn’t know that the purpose of a plant is to procreate and that it dies back afterwards. I didn’t know you had to keep picking. Literally – no idea.
But I wouldn’t have known where to start in terms of adding to the garden myself. I was massively intimidated. I’d never grown anything and I was too scared to start – I thought it was a really, really specialised, almost magical skill that you had to really study for years, if not decades. And all the Latin! So off-putting to a novice. Also round about this time, my former husband’s stepmother who worked at Great Dixter took us round it one day. It totally blew my mind – but, again, it was like a magical foreign country. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to come away with ideas I could apply in miniature to my own outside space.
The garden after that was also a small paved square, North-facing, in Primrose Hill. This is when I started planting up my own pots, nervously and with no idea of what I was doing. It was pretty hit and miss, with heavy emphasis on geraniums, because my granny loved them and I’d observed they didn’t seem challenging. Eventually my pots became quite nice and I started growing salad and herbs on my window sill.
Then I moved to Suffolk eight years ago. We were tremendously lucky that the previous owners’ gardener agreed to work for us (seriously, thank God). At first I just left her to it, working her mysterious magic, but after a while I became curious about what she was doing and why. I also have a friend who is a very keen and competent gardener and who very patiently explained everything to me without laughing at my questions. I knew nothing. I didn’t understand that you couldn’t plant something in October and expect a flower explosion in December – I mean, I was idiotic. I didn’t know that the purpose of a plant is to procreate and that it dies back afterwards. I didn’t know you had to keep picking. Literally – no idea. But I became more and more fascinated by plants. If you were drawing a graph, this is the point at which the line very quickly becomes vertical.
Are you an all-weather or fair-weather gardener?
Fair-weather. I am not good at gardening at this time of year – I’d rather be by fire with a book (or a ton of seed catalogues, plotting). I am typing this looking out onto a border and so much needs cutting back – we’ve had a series of sharp frosts – that it looks tragic. I’ll get out there, but probably not today. I deliberately leave grasses and so on alone over winter – I love their shapes even when they’re brown.
Are you a weeder or a let-them be-er?
I’m a Centrist Dad about weeds. I actively like the look of lots of them, especially in large clusters, but there’s a limit. I hate hoeing, though. I wish I found it satisfying, but I don’t. I’m re-doing the veg patch at the moment and it’s going to be membrane, gravel and raised beds this time, purely for reasons of weeds.
What for you is the best part of gardening?
I LOVE seeds:
Seeds absolutely blow my mind – the idea that this tiny little speck of nothing contains all the information it needs to turn itself into something utterly magnificent. So the moment when the teenage seedling finally gets moved outside – well, I feel like there should be trumpet fanfares and flags everywhere. WELL DONE, COSMOS! YOU DID IT!
And a gardening hack or handy hint that you’d like to share?
You can do pretty much everything with a Hori Hori knife. I mean, not plant a tree, obviously, or prune. But pretty much anything else.
Does anything get your gardening goat?
Not really, though I wish municipal planting looked less municipal. And I don’t love things that look overly thought-out – I like looseness.
Bad garden habit?
I am very impatient, though I’m working on it. I do hover over seedlings going ‘Come on, hurry up’. I used to be quite lazy about watering the poor pots during very hot summers, but now I stick on a podcast and spend an hour doing it.
Happiness is….
The month of May. Cow parsley. Hawthorn blossom. Quince blossom!
To mow or not to mow?
I got rid of the main lawn and replaced it with wildflower turf, which I could not recommend more highly:
We still have one mown lawn, though I have my eye on it. But mown paths, for sure, and strimming around the base of trees, otherwise it just all looks chaotic.
Gloves or no gloves?
No gloves. You should see my nails.
Edibles or pretties - or both?
Very much both:
I am a greedy person and nothing – nothing – gives me more pleasure than growing my own veg. We have chickens, and I find it deeply comforting to know that for the majority of the year, come what may, there is always the possibility of salad and a herby omelette (plus veg for inside the omelette). And a jar of garden flowers on the table in the summer. The greens and the eggs and the flowers make me feel perfect happiness.
Proudest moment?
Stopping being scared and getting in there. The worst that can happen is the right plant in the wrong place – hardly a disaster.
Describe your garden in one word:
Exuberant.
If you could be a time traveller, which garden in history would you visit?
The old part of our house was built in 1558 and although the garden would have been farmland, I’d still have loved to see it.
Maybe a better answer is a proper Tudor garden, so let’s say Hampton Court after the garden was created, with sundials sculptures of heraldic beasts and a banqueting hall among the knot gardens.
And finally, India, if you could be a fly on the wall, which gardener/gardening moment would you listen in on?
Rachel Cooke wrote a fantastic book called Her Brilliant Career, about ten women of the 1950s, one of whom was Margery Fish. In 1956 Vita Sackville West reviewed Fish’s book, We Made A Garden, for The Observer. VSW – the most famous gardener in the land – said that it was
“by a woman who, with her husband, created out of nothing the sort of garden we should all like to have: a cottage garden on a slightly larger scale. … Crammed with good advice … I defy any amateur gardener not to find pleasure, encouragement and profit from [it].”
I learned from Rachel’s book that Margery then basically waited for her husband to die, got rid of his wretched lawns and manicured borders, created “a frothing sort of a garden” and launched her career. I’d love to have seen that process.
Thank you to India - a true inspiration who speaks for so many of us when describing the journey from not knowing anything at all about gardening, to becoming a proud gardener of the most beautiful plot.
Read HOME by India Knight here.
In other news, The Gardening Mind will be back with you this Saturday, with the first instalment of this year’s Small Garden Design Course. It isn’t too late to sign up - as a paid subscriber you’ll be able to take part in the Zooms and Chats which will accompany this course. It’s called Small Garden Design, but the material we’ll be covering is relevant to any sized garden, so do come and join us. And if you took part last year, I’m going to be asking you if you’d be brave enough to share anything that you’ve done in the garden/on the drawing board since. So get those ideas ready - and see you Saturday!
I really enjoyed this - it's eternally fascinating to nose into someone else's garden and their thoughts about it. Thank you Jo and India
Gardening is one of the times where I miss my mother who sadly died over 20 years ago. She was very knowledgeable about plants and knew the Latin names for everything. I’m not even sure how she learned about gardening - we always had gardens, and of course there was the WI! Looking forward to this Substack.