From time to time, people to whom I am introduced mishear and mistake me for a Guardian journalist. I can’t always quite be bothered to put them right. I am not ashamed of being a gardening writer — far from it — but my profession has, in recent years, become something of a genteel ghetto. There are a number of clever, talented, cultured garden writers at work, but they have a struggle to be taken seriously by the wider world. This is thanks mainly to a narrow concentration by television producers on practicalities and personalities, but is reinforced by book publishers’ obsession with photographic images. As a result, most people now think we are all Charlie Dimmocks, minus the top hamper.
This disadvantage is peculiar to our own day, however, as the exhibition The Writer in the Garden, at the British Library, shows.
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