Author interview: Ben Dark

…on his book, The Grove: A Nature Odyssey in 19 1/2 Front Gardens

The Grove by Ben Dark in our Daffodil Dell this week.

"Any walk is an odyssey when we connect with the plants around us. Each tree or flower tells a tale. Mundane 'suburban' shrubs speak of war and poetry, of money, fashion, love and failure. Every species in this book was seen from one pavement [sidewalk] over twelve months and there is little here that could not be found on any road in any town, but they reveal stories of such weirdness, drama, passion and humour that, once discovered, familiar neighbourhoods will be changed forever." 

Author Ben Dark about his book, The Grove

Humor in garden writing

Because I was reared on Christopher Lloyd’s gardening books, to me, garden writing should be funny. It should be made of crackling wit, and full of seemingly-unrelated bits of life thrown into the pot to stew into a robust understanding of plants and gardening. Ben Dark’s garden writing is certainly made with these same choice ingredients. In fact, I dare you to read his book with a straight face. Best to just give in with a little giggle and enjoy The Grove: A Nature Odyssey in 19 1/2 Front Gardens this summer at the beach, as I have done more than once.

The Grove was named the “best gardening book of 2022” by The Telegraph, and “A book to make even a quick trip to the corner shop endlessly fascinating,” by The Evening Standard. But I think that garden writer and TV presenter, Advolly Richmond, summed it up best: “I adore Ben Dark's humour and humility in equal measure.”

I’m very pleased to have Ben here today to talk about his book, his recent trip to Japan, gardening in the fourth dimension, and why he is a lawn apologist. Welcome Ben!

Ben Dark, garden writer & podcaster

"I awoke to plants with a convert's zeal... I could speak a new language... It was as if I had unquestioningly inhabited a city where people had no face, just a smooth balloon of flesh; and then one day I'd changed my spectacles and seen smiles everywhere. I had not been unaware of nature. I knew an ash tree and a horse chestnut and I had a recipe for sloe gin. But I was plant blind."

Preface to The Grove

Julie: Welcome Ben! How has being awake to plants helped you to engage with the world? 

Ben: That’s a wonderful question! It’s certainly changed the way I perceive the world. Recently, I was walking with my son and his friend, a little boy who mutters the names and models of cars under his breath as he passes them. Meanwhile I was (silently) doing the same thing with the plants we came across. Two people sharing the same place and experiencing it totally differently! I now navigate entirely by plant. Left at the camellia, right at the kerria—it has helped me find my way back to some very obscure hotels recently.  

Photo of Japan by Ben Dark.

Julie: You are just getting back from a trip to Japan, and you wrote about Japanese gardening culture briefly in the preface to The Grove. You say that it was during Victorian times that, "England, a nation that regarded itself as the apogee of horticulture, (was) confronted by a gardening culture older and more complex than its own."

Did the age of Japanese gardening culture show itself to you afresh on your trip? 

Ben: Yes! We Brits have old, noble gardens but generally the aristos stuck to being embarrassed by their forbears taste and wanting it gone. It’s a long history of flooding, turfing over, canalising, or rusticating what came before. Until eventually the money runs out and the garden gets stuck as Brownian or Arts and Crafts or whatever the last person with ambition was doing before the money ran out.

In Japan it’s not just that gardens have been there for a thousand years, it’s that they have been cultivated to the same vision for a millennium. It gives the most wonderful effect, particularly in the ancient trees. Continuous loving cultivation under a shared dream.

Cherry trees in Japan. Photo by Ben Dark

"The horticultural world is full of obscure things that can be grown in specialist places. Plants that are unknown beyond a circle of connoisseurs, often for very good reason... The windowsill geranium does no such thing...They can be bought in any supermarket and swapped for a swig of gin. Every house on Grove Park has a windowsill; it remains a mystery why they do not all hold a little pot of scarlet wonders." 

The Grove, pg 89

Julie: In addition to pelargoniums, which plants should we all be growing? For which plants should we swallow our pride and put down our prejudices? 

Ben: Shrubberies should make a comeback; hard to fit on a windowsill, though. And biannual wallflowers bought bare rooted and strapped together with an elastic band at the veg market. The perennial ones don’t have that hot clove-scented breath. And chrysanthemums will get the dahlia glow-up next.

The Grove's chapters are based on 19 different plants, from 19 different gardens. Here are a few chapters matched to plants at in my own garden at Havenwood.

"City gardens change hands frequently. We inherit and we bequeath. It can be upsetting to see a loved space in the care of another. There is no use complaining, 'I drove past the other day and they've chopped down my acer.' It is a sad way to make conversation. Yes, they got rid of your plant, they also painted over your walls and put their fridge where yours once stood. Gardens have a life measured in centuries and will outgrow all their owners... We will all be forgotten, and so will the gardens we created. We might live for a bit in the memories of those that knew us, or in the overgrown relics of our planting plans, but only as ghosts."

The Grove, pg 100-101

Julie: Since our time in our gardens is so short, what would you say is the best kind of gardening: planting for the moment, or for posterity? Or is it always both? 

Ben: Of course I’m going to say both! You shouldn’t offer such an easy get-out. But I will say that planting for posterity gives pleasure in the moment because it adds that fourth dimension – time! The umami of gardening. I imagine this little twig as a shade-bearing giant and daydream about the life the garden will live without me. That fourth dimension, the appeal to imagination, is so important in gardens and you really feel it when it’s lacking, even if you can’t quite lay your finger on what is missing. The fourth dimension is what pleases us when we see something really gnarled and old, the kind of tree you can look at and shudder with the thought of the highwaymen or plough boys who might have used it as shelter. I’ve been having lots of those shudders in Japan as I see trees beloved of X or Y Shogun or Emperor, or rock gardens raked every day for 500 years.

A raked Japanese garden. Photo by Ben Dark

Contrasting two UK gardens: Great Dixter & Sissinghurst

"Great Dixter has become an institution itself. Remarkably, it remains the most inspirational space in UK horticulture. That it has not become a museum to 'Christo' but continues to innovate and improve is down, in part, to its own strong-willed head gardener (and now chief executive), Fergus Garrett. But it is more than that. Every gardener who works there, every volunteer, seems to have fallen under the spell of the place. They are acolytes, part of a blissed-out, rural beauty cult, doing the best work of their careers in the service of a higher cause. Metre by metre Great Dixter is the best garden in England because, metre by metre, it is the garden most worshipped by its attendants. I'm sure this is because the staff don't have to wear uniforms." 

The Grove, pg 127-128

Julie: What is special to you about Great Dixter, besides its lack of uniforms? 

Ben: The lack of uniforms is vital! Dixter is special because of the people it attracts and generosity it shows them. None of the those it provides sanctuary to would come if they had to wear a polo shirt!

I think of it as an ‘anything could happen’ garden. You get the impression that anyone working there (I never have) could find a new plant or have a new idea and put it into the garden. It’s very exciting—particularly as a foil to its gorgeous neighbour Sissinghurst, which has to always look as if Vita’s just popped inside for another glass of sherry. Sissinghurst is like watching La Boheme at the Royal Opera—it’s going to be beautiful and you’ll probably cry, but you always know how it’s going to end. Dixter is a different, more disreputable night out, where you could end up on the wrong side of town. If that makes any sense.

Our back lawn at Havenwood this month.

"It is not the quality of the cut that invites us onto the lawn, it is the setting - the ancient walls of Headington stone, the swags of roses under leaded windows. Put the same square of grass on a roundabout and no one would care enough to visit it... No one really gives a fig about the density of the sward, what matters is the garden that surrounds it."

The Grove, pg 266

Julie: Now that your first son has grown from a pram rider into an older child, do you have a deeper appreciation for lawns as respite among planting and pavements? 

Ben: I’m a lawn apologist! I love lying insect-high on warm grass with a good book. I just don’t like knee-jerk lawns or Lawn Obsession. You’re right to call lawn a respite, though. I think we are very drawn to green clearings, particularly after wandering through a lot of planting, it gives the ancient part of our brain a rest from wondering what’s behind the next tree.

I’m seduced to contrast. It’s why fresh growth on ancient stone as at Oxford appeals so much! Or pavement weeds in the business district. Good lawn can be used as a shock in a wilder garden.

I’ve been following the progress of the walled garden at Knepp where Tom Stuart-Smith is putting in this fantastic gravel-banked, clay-pitted plant community at the heart of an utterly re-wilded country estate, but when someone is interviewed about it they always say something along the line of: ‘This space used to be a croquet lawn and it didn’t fit well at the heart of these 10,000 acres of savage nature.’ And I think, ‘That sounds perfect.’ Imagine staggering, bramble-raked and bleeding, from all that mud and scrub and suddenly finding yourself on the finest turf with a bench and little rill tinkling somewhere. Lovely.

The Grove on the bench in the Birch Walk

"The need to do causes more damage in gardens than benign neglect ever has. Romance is a thin paint and is built up in layers. No serendipitous mingling of branch and bloom can happen if the gardener acts as an overbearing chaperone, slapping away shrubs as soon as they look at each other. There can be no beauty in the cracks if everything is weeded the second it appears."

The Grove, pg 285

Julie: My mantra with self-sowers has been "leave it and let's see what it does," which has produced both magical and regrettable effects in the garden. Where do you think the line is between "benign neglect" and nincompoopery? 

Ben: Another excellent question. I’m in a rented garden in Copenhagen at the moment and the previous occupants have obviously emptied a few packets of wildflower mix over the borders at some point. It must have been a meadow blend because it’s full of Achillea millefolium. Great plant but too straggly for a border and too flat and see-through in spring without the meadow grass backdrop. I love the summer flowers but I’ve been pulling it out for things that look better year round.

The obvious answer is that nincompoopery begins when the neglect is creating more future work – letting ground elder grow through herbaceous borders, for example –or damaging other plants. I’d never call a failure to achieve the desired look nincompoopery, though. I’d call it gardening!

The title page and first illustration by Skevoulla Gordon in The Grove by Ben Dark.

"While writing this book I was asked which of the gardens on the Grove was my favourite. There are a few I particularly care for, and I hope that comes across in my writing, but none is a clear frontrunner. Instead I answer the question with what I would do if I ever had a Grove Park garden of my own. This imaginary space is the ½ garden of this book's title, one that is almost real because it goes everywhere with me..."

The Grove, pg 298

Julie: Your description of your ideal garden in The Grove includes a winding path, a bit of lawn and a bench; Alchemilla mollis on the path, Wisteria sinensis on a railing, and  Rose 'New Dawn' on the house. Has the garden of your imagination changed in the past few years? Has it developed a bit of Baltic Sea flair during your time living in Copenhagen? 

Ben: Maybe I’d bring in the hollyhocks. There’s nothing like a Danish fishing village with blue blue seas and yellow yellow walls and a load of hollyhocks leaning over the cobbles. But I’d also have to bring the seagulls and the salt air, and I’m not sure my grapes would like it!

Julie: Thank you for joining us, Ben! Where can we find out more about your work? 

Ben: My pleasure. I have a website, BenDark.com, but Instagram might be best: @TheBenDark.

The Grove by Ben Dark near the yew arches at Havenwood.

I know that many readers here will want to take a look at Ben’s book: The Grove: A Nature Odyssey in 19 1/2 Front Gardens.

If you are looking for something to listen to during your long hours of weeding this month (aka keeping the nincompoopery at bay), I highly recommend going into the vault to listen to Ben’s garden podcasts, The Garden Log and Dear Gardener. I have spent many pleasant hours weeding and planting to these two.

Have you read The Grove? Love to hear!

*Amazon Affiliate links are included in this newsletter. I make a few cents per recommendation, each of which I hope will be helpful to you!