Adventures of a Gardener

Adventures of a Gardener by Smithers, Peter. Hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781860460593.

Sir Peter Smithers is the creator of a vision to which he gave substance in the four main gardens in his life, reaching maturity in that at Vico Morcote in Switzerland. There he designed and developed from bare ground a fully functioning ecosystem of exotics, a community which would maintain and rejuvenate itself according to the laws of nature, with only occasional interventions by the author and gardener. Replete with magnolias, camelias, tree peonies, rhododendrons and more than ten thousand species and varieties of plant, imported from friends and nurseries in Japan, Britain, the USA and New Zealand, this "community" has matured over the past quarter century into an enchanting display of interest and beauty, which Peter Smithers has captured on camera. Encouraged to do so by the Royal Horticultural Society, Peter Smithers here reflects upon the place of gardening in a busy life in the world of national and international politics. Starting with childhood gardens he traces the part which they played through his years at Oxford, service in Naval Intelligence, in Washington, in Mexico and in Central America, in England, France and Switzerland. Over the years he built up a global network of specialist gardening friends whose enthusiasm and expertise nourish one another across boundaries of geography and language. He and his friends have thus contributed substantially to the advancement of horticulture. This personal and captivating account is illustrated with sixty pages of colour photographs of plants, all of which were grown and photographed by Peter Smithers. It will interest the general reader as well as the knowledgeable gardener. It will amuse and inform them with advice empirically collated. How to eliminate earwigs nesting in bamboo canes, when not to prune magnolias, how to tackle refurbishing the Cathedral Close in Winchester with trees, the dangers of one particular orchids symbiosis with a particularly aggressive ant ... Here are the entertaining adventures of a lifetime, in and out of the garden.