Anna Pavord: silently cultivating language

“A glorious sound!” she exclaims, speaking down the line from her stone cottage, with its lovely gardens (you can explore them on YouTube), which lie folded in the hills of West Dorset’s pastoral landscape. A tremendous storm is raging as we speak and it’s the rolling clouds that are roaring in the background today, she tells me.

This, though, is the landscape she loves best alongside the Welsh hills and valleys of her childhood. Indeed, thanks to that picnic, 75-year-old Pavord reports that the square on the hypotenuse is “inextricably mixed still with bracken, tall and green, the slightly damp acid smell of the turf always cropped short by the sheep on the hill and the view back down over the Deri and the Rholben to the Usk shining in the valley below.”

Her teacher mother had been born in this Welsh landscape, as had her headmaster father, Arthur, instilling in Pavord, a renowned gardening writer and best-selling author, and her brother, a profound love of the natural world. In Beginnings, the opening chapter of Landskipping, in which Pavord eloquently and elegantly relates how landscape became an artistic, cultural and tourist phenomenon, as well as an agricultural resource, she recalls childhood memories of lying in bed at night and seeing great flares lighting up the sky from the iron masters’ furnaces in Brynmawr and Blaenavon.

“Over there the valleys which had once been green were bounded by grey-black heaps of slag. So I suppose the fragility of a landscape was stitched into me from the beginning. And a need for land to go up and down if I am to feel comfortable in it,” she writes. Which explains, she tells me, why she remains unmoved by the landscape of East Anglia, say, but finds the “magnificent, intractable” Highlands thrilling. “I am a Celt, after all. But I’ve always lived in the west – first Wales, then Dorset for 40-odd years, which is why, I suppose, Wester Ross is so special to me and my husband, Trevor Ware. We have been visiting the Highlands for many years, renting a cottage as often as we can afford it. I like to write in Wester Ross because there are no distractions. I wrote most of Landskipping there without broadband, telephone, television – no connections at all to the outside world. It was wonderful because I don’t use the internet for research anyway; I prefer libraries and second-hand books from eBay. I spend all my money on old books, hence the fact that I’m usually dressed appallingly in one of my three daughters’ cast-offs.”

She spent three weeks in Wester Ross giving Landskipping a final polish while living alone, apart from the cacophony of those rutting stags. She confides: “I need to be on my own to write; I have to be solitary, secluded. When you have been married for 50 years as we have, you do not have to live in each other’s pockets, much as we love each other.”

Nonetheless, she relied on Ware, who worked in marketing for a Fraserburgh food manufacturer, then at Fochabers for the family firm Baxters of Speyside, to provide food parcels of avocados and chocolate brownies to help with the writing. “Which they did.”

Landskipping is her sprightly take on the now archaic word “landskip” for landscape, which when it first appeared was considered a foreign word, often written the Dutch way, “landschap”, and used to describe the pictures that 18th-century artists in England began to make. Eventually it took on the sense in which we use it now, notes Pavord, whose wonderful bestseller The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad, led to her being for ever known as “the tulip lady,” a soubriquet she certainly does not disdain. The book, which she worked on for seven years, came out in 1999, topped bestseller lists everywhere, including the New York Times, and has remained in print ever since, an international publishing sensation.

She’s gone on to write a number of other books – The Naming of Names and most recently, The Curious Gardener. Landskipping, however, is the first book she has written which did not begin life as a book. “I’m at the end of my working life,” she says, “so I wanted to do something for pure pleasure. I decided to celebrate all the landscapes I have walked through and which have been so important to me. Landscape has been a joy, a delight, a solace for me as I hope it will be for some of our grandchildren – we have 12. But I didn’t have a narrative. All my other books have had a story, a structure. I told no-one I was writing this book until I handed my agent the finished manuscript.”

For four years she worked on it, researching poets and painters, inspired by landscapes, as well as the invention of landscape tourism in the Lake District, Snowdon and the Highlands. Then she stumbled upon an entirely different group of men, the agricultural improvers, who travelled around looking at the land’s usefulness. (She’s the only writer I have come across who can make the Board of Agriculture fascinating.)

“It was so exciting,” she recalls. “The dates were almost uncannily the same, all those men – and I am afraid they were all men since men do have this need to conquer things – looking at the land from the artistic point of view, while others were exploring how it could be best managed and farmed. Travel guides were also being published, instructing tourists how to appreciate ravishing views.”

Women toured with enthusiasm and their watercolours but few wrote for publication. She quotes Dorothy Wordsworth, who toured the Highlands with brother William in 1803, writing wearily of submitting themselves to the Blair Castle gardener, who dragged them from place to place, calling attention to “dripping streams.” An earlier tourist, Celia Fiennes, wrote in 1685 of her delight at leaving the chaos of the Lake District behind (though she liked the waterfalls) for more ordered, cultivated landscapes.

For some the view did not exist until it had been mediated. The poet Thomas Gray toured the Lakes in 1769. He put on a blindfold for the ferry crossing from Bowness to Windermere, and on arrival turned his back on the famous landscape and looked at it first through the lens of his Claude glass, a four-inch convex mirror mounted on black foil.

“It did more than an iPhone. It ‘corrected’ the landscape, made it more manageable, more painterly, got rid of extraneous detail,” writes Pavord. Tinted lenses could even turn sunlight to moonlight. She rails against the current mania for mediating experience through an iPad or Smartphone camera. “I simply want people to stop and look, take the time to do so. The problem is people have forgotten how to look.”

Landskipping is being labelled as part of “the new nature writing” since the search is on for the new H Is For Hawk – Helen Macdonald’s prizewinning memoir – or the next The Fish Ladder, Katharine Norbury’s lyrical journey through the British countryside investigating the mystery of her own history.

“As I understand it, many books [in the genre] deal with personal trauma. In H Is For Hawk, Helen Macdonald is dealing with her grief over her father’s death, for instance. I don’t want people to think I’m picking up on that trend,” sighs Pavord. “I’m not writing about personal trauma – luckily, I don’t have one. I simply want people to stop and look at landscapes and think about them. I wanted to paint it with words. I’m not a historian – I have a degree in English, which fits you for nothing – but I love making words lie down in order and considering carefully how people will read them.”

Is she still planting tulips? She once expressed a desire to plant every variety, but there are some 6,000 listed and she has managed to grown more than 400. 

Nowadays, she plants and grows magnolias and has a lovely magnolia grove in her sequestered garden. “They are so beautiful, with such abundant blossoms, and they’re so ancient. I’m afraid I’ve become obsessed – again.”

Happily, there are no records of these lovely flowers driving anyone insane.

Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places, by Anna Pavord (Bloomsbury, £20)