I had , when I studied horticulture back in the 1970 ’s , the good fortune to be discover to the last propagation of a groovy gardening tradition . At the New York Botanical Garden , where I was a student , there were still a routine of elderly gardener who had been trained on not bad private estates in Europe . They were , often , less innovative than the practiced of their untested American trained colleagues , but they had a mastery of gardening as a craft that far go past anything you will find today .
My wise man at the Botanical Garden , for instance , the former director of gardening , T. H. Everett , had turn his way through a traditional apprenticeship on land before enrolling at a three - yr educational programme at Kew . As an prentice , Everett had had to master , through endless repetition , a vast range of practical techniques . This result in a sort of heftiness store that can not be acquired through books or lecturing . Everett ’s teachers had bequeathed to him hundreds of years - worth of pragmatic experience . When , late in life , Everett publish his ten - volumeEncyclopedia of Horticulture , an astonishing amount of the text infer from his own personal experience .
This sort of craft died with the final stage of the apprenticeship system in the eld that conform to World War II . you’re able to get a flavor of it , however , by see a new movie , Portrait of a Garden , by Dutch filmmaker Rosie Stapel . Available throughiTunes , this celluloid takes the spectator at a ruminative pace through a twelvemonth in the oldest “ kitchen garden ” in the Netherlands , part of an estate that dates back to 1630 .
The possessor of the landed estate , Daan van der Have , work in the garden with 85 - year - honest-to-god pruning master Jan Freriks , pinching and snipping and planting concord to systems perfected over centuries of observation and practice — in the subject of the pruning of a black-market mulberry tree , the proficiency date to the reign of Louis XIV .
The time frame of these two master gardener is very unlike from that of modern practitioner . In the grammatical case of a two membership of pear trees that flank an arbor , they have pruned meticulously for 15 class by the clip when the movie was shoot , further what will one day become a arrant tunnel . One might think that two senior valet , with expiry impending , would be in a hurry to get results . But these two employment within a custom that is timeless . watch over them , one recognizes what we , in our haste , have lost .
