Weeding the Web

Gardening in art - Norman Rockwell's take on gardeners

A peep at ourselves – that’s the way I’d describe the exhibition of Norman Rockwell’s work at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, which you’ve just got time to see before it closes on 27th March. I do recommend it.

Rockwell has been a guilty pleasure for some of us. He’s been labelled sentimental, folksy, unrealistic, middle class. The pendulum is swinging, though, and his body of work is now acknowledged as an archive of American experience or, as Richard Dorment in his critique of the exhibition put it, “a monumental installation about America’s changing view of itself over the course of the twentieth century.”

You’ll be familiar with quite a few of his Saturday Evening Post covers, I’m sure, and there’s a complete list at Best Norman Rockwell Art. Unfortunately, the one that justifies a mention of him in a gardening blog isn’t illustrated, although it is on the wall at Dulwich among all 323 covers that he created for the Post between 1916 and 1963.

Good plants, bad gardeners

The horticultural equivalent of having eyes bigger than your stomach is buying a plant more suitable for a large estate than the small patch of green outside your back door. This is exactly what I did last week.

While so many nurseries have monstered into garden centres, with their detritus of "decorative" items and unrelated books, Farm Lane Nursery in Ashtead, Surrey, has stuck to what it does best for 35 years.  It seems tiny, but a visit that looks as if it will take all of five minutes easily turns into an hour, as you browse the rows of plants, nearly all homegrown, the "Bygones", which could make interesting additions to a garden, old tools, and stoneware. That temptation is a post for another day.

My last-minute purchase, grabbed from beside the payment hut, like a chocolate bar from a check-out, was Lonicera fragrantissima, in full bloom and smelling sweetly gorgeous. It's also only about 18 inches high. The owner made a shrewd assessment of me, and kindly explained that it was easy to keep in check at about 4ft if I pruned it before it got too big.