‘The Pursuit of Love’ — and flowers

We are now into summer gardening, but in my part of Britain the roses are hardly out. It is a wonderful relief, a season like the old seasons 25 years ago, when midsummer never got ahead of itself. I am waiting for the best, while having time to look back on the prequel from March to June.

My view of it has been tinted by that classic work of social comedy, Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. In a primetime series on three Sunday evenings, while the tulips, for once, were still out, the BBC made a predictable job of massacring it, not least by viewing it through a one-sided feminist lens.

Aptly, they located it round the fine Gothic house at Rousham, in Oxfordshire, best known for its Georgian landscape garden, a masterpiece by William Kent, whose traces are an essential visit for anyone keen on the history of English gardens. Correctly, the garden itself was kept out of the story.

I live barely three miles from the book’s real model, the old Mitford home at Swinbrook (or “Swinebrook”, as they named it), on which its immortal account of the girls’ early years with redoubtable Uncle Matthew was indeed based.

Daily, I return from work past the churchyard where Nancy is buried and drive along what she once described as the bleakest road in the world. Her memories of it help me to enjoy it, especially in grim midwinter. So does the view across the valley, the model for the one in which Uncle Matthew used to hunt his children.

Two children were chosen to be pursued by his bloodhounds, while the other children hunted them with him on their ponies: “it was great fun”, the children felt, though it appalled residents in Kent when Uncle Matthew repeated the chase there. In the 1920s Kent was not much of a hunting country.

The BBC version misrepresented the fun and excitement, making the hunt a solo affair in which Uncle Matthew bellowed about his hatred of children while chasing them alone. I recommend trying a proper chasse des enfants on a Sunday afternoon. I have hunted two of my grandsons, on foot admittedly, in Richmond Park. They went and hid and were never quite caught when flushed out from the woods by me, the Lane foxhound: we enjoyed it hugely.

The original hunt-valley has been looking exquisite in this slow spring of intense green. It has been massed with buttercups and English bluebells, revelling in a wet year.

In her churchyard, Nancy Mitford’s gravestone is capped with a carving of a mole, the emblem that she used on her personal writing paper. Her view of moles may change your view of them, even when they burrow under your lawn. She regarded their tunnelling below ground and their emergence into the light as an analogy for us humans, hidden in subterranean darkness, one day to emerge into a resurrection.

The book’s Linda was misplayed by Lily James, but her first husband of three did indeed come from a family who would have avidly subscribed to the FT Weekend. Sir Leicester Kroesig, her father-in-law, was a fictional governor of the Bank of England and, like his son, had pursued a keen City career.

“Don’t know how you chaps can stand it,” Linda’s father, Uncle Matthew, told them, “it must be the hell of a life fussing about with other blokes’ money all day, indoors.”

Sir Leicester was also a keen gardener at his weekend home, Planes in Surrey. The BBC missed the subtlety of it, but Linda’s expectations still prompt thought. She and Fanny “motored down past acres of blossom”. The great difference, she says, “between Surrey and proper, real country, is that in Surrey, when you see blossom, you know there will be no fruit”.

In my review of the recent spring, I recall with pride my ornamental crab apples that have flowers in May, then vivid autumn colour, then fruit. They remain a first choice as trees for any garden, the smaller ones suiting smaller gardens.

My two best this year have been Malus Evereste, as ever, and Malus transitoria, a smaller flowered crab apple from the wild. They pass the Surrey test because they bear fruit in the autumn, though transitoria’s little yellow fruits are inedible and I never collect Evereste’s crab apples in order to make jam.

The garden at Planes, Linda predicted, would be “a riot of sterility”. So indeed it was: “Every tree appeared to be entirely covered with a waving mass of pink or mauve tissue-paper.” I assume she refers to flowering cherries, those imports into English gardens since the late 19th century. She has a point. You can still tell when you are well south of the Thames, in East Sheen or Tulse Hill, by the volume of crude pink double blossom on the street trees, with no prospect of cherries afterwards.

I confess to some bouts of sterility nonetheless. My spring garden is enlivened by a superb pink Prunus Accolade, a wide-spreading beauty, and the double white “longipes”, to give its popular name, the Japanese one having changed to a length that is hard for us to remember.

Among my fertile crab apples their pretty sterility, I tell myself, would pass the Mitfords’ Hons test, their mark of social approval. The BBC was correct to aspirate the H in Hons, as the girls pronounced it in that way.

We have had a superb year for daffodils, which enjoyed the wet winter. What about the Kroesigs at Planes? The daffodils there were “so thick on the ground that they too obscured the green”. They were “new varieties of a terrifying size, either dead white or dark yellow, thick and fleshy”. This spring I loved my double white and yellow Winston Churchill narcissi, and the big cupped Fortune that coincided with it.

The Kroesigs have been winning lately. Mass plantings of big yellow daffodils have become fashionable on the grass verges of country villages. I look at them, however, through Mitford eyes, which pined for “the fragile friends of one’s childhood”, pheasant’s eye narcissi, perhaps, and short-stemmed Lent lilies.

The BBC gave us one quick shot of the governor of the bank’s Surrey garden. Lots of flowery border plants were tumbling over low hedges of moth-free box. Over dinner, Sir Leicester had been “full of boring herbaceous enthusiasms”, but here I part company with the narrator. I regard him as a natural patron of this column, combining finance with weekend gardening.

In 1945, Nancy Mitford already held views that have sprung back into prominence. She disliked sterile trees with double flowers. They are now being attacked by narrow lovers of “native” planting under a new banner, biodiversity for pollinators. A few of them never do much harm to garden bees, spoiled for choice in the rest of a Kroesig-style profusion of flowers.

Uncle Matthew’s garden “was quite half a mile from the house and nobody went near it, except as a little walk sometimes in the summer”. I have been trying to imagine his view of bee-friendly planting, in beds where houseguests might be stung.

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