Rock rage.(Book Review)

Nicola Shulman A Rage for Rock Gardening: The story of Reginald Farrer. Beacon Press, 209 pages, $23

Reviewers of books do not normally begin by praising the publisher, but in this case David R. Godine's commitment to bringing out a line of garden books no longer in print and new volumes about the near-forgotten greats of garden writing should be applauded. Serious garden literature occupies that small corner of the bookshelf not taken up by practical books on gardening, which have in recent years enjoyed a market boom analogous to that of cookbooks. Godine's list is aimed at the reader who is interested in the lives and works of gardeners and garden writers of the past, particularly those of an original bent and lively prose style. Books by and about them are engaging to read, whether or not one is oneself a gardener.

This publisher's latest offering, Nicola Shulman's A Rage for Rock Gardening, is a short and fascinating biography of Reginald Farter, a near-forgotten gardener, writer, and plant collector who transformed the alpine garden from Victorian trophy status to something akin to Gertrude Jekyll's simple yet sophisticated version of the English cottage garden. In Farrer's case, the objective was not garden design as a seemingly artless art form but rather the selection and cultivation of alpine plants in a naturalistic manner.

This was not easy. It demanded a keen knowledge and ability to reproduce to the extent possible the conditions of these delicate, finicky plants' original mountain habitat, something the talented amateur botanist Farrer was singularly well equipped to do. His family's estate, Ingleborough in north Yorkshire, boasted a limestone cliff overlooking a lake, a fissured karst formation with underground streams and caverns. It offered as close an approximation as any geologic situation in England of conditions conducive for growing alpine plants. From childhood, when he had precociously mastered a great deal of botanical science, this was his laboratory.

But science was for Farrer a means not an end. Like his relative George Sitwell, the author of On the Making of Gardens (recently republished by Godine), he was an Edwardian aesthete. With no small degree of snobbery, he praised the beauty of certain plants with unabashed ardor. This style of garden writing, at once discriminating and romantic, had a powerful influence on Farrer's contemporaries and followers in this literary genre, and to prove the point Shulman provides a brief selection of their writings in an appendix. According to her, "Up until now, serious garden writers delivered their advice in tones of omniscient authority, remote and unassailable. Farrer wrote as a personality, full of prejudice and indefensible opinions."

His literary voice, at once confident and confidential, is lushly vivid in its descriptive powers. For instance, a wild Mouton tree peony "carried at the top, elegantly balancing, that single enormous blossom, waved and crimped into the boldest grace of line, of absolutely pure white, with featherings of deepest maroon radiating at the base of the petals from the boss of golden fluff at the flower's heart." This observation was made from his vantage point on a hillside in Kandu Province in northwestern China.

The son of a remote and overbearing father who kept him on a tight financial leash, Farrer was short, disfigured by a harelip, and vocally handicapped by a cleft palate. An acolyte of Jane Austen (he carried a complete set of her novels on his expeditions ...