I am a great admirer of John Sales. He is one of the sanest and most perceptive professionals I’ve come across in the garden world. None of that ‘all gardens are lovely’ from him. So I’ve been looking forward to this book since I interviewed him in 2014. I hope this persuades you to buy his book. (also available as an ebook)

Many thanks to Victoria for her review.

Anne Wareham, editor

Shades of Green by John Sales, reviewed by Victoria Summerley

When the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warned that those who battled with monsters risked becoming monsters themselves, he didn’t have the National Trust in mind. Yet there is an aspect of the National Trust – in common with many other large organisations founded with the best possible intentions ­– that can seem monstrous as it grows ever more tentacular.

It’s one of the many fascinating themes that John Sales touches on in his book, Shades of Green (published by Unicorn Press, price £25). Sub-titled “My life as the National Trust’s head of gardens”, it describes not only the challenges posed by the restoration and/or conservation of 51 National Trust gardens, but also John’s own horticultural journey.

I’ve always admired Sales as a gardening guru who combines an air of quiet authority with a twinkly-eyed sense of humour. I was shocked to discover that his parents took very little interest in his academic progress, and seemed so pessimistic about his prospects that Sales himself was surprised when he got into the local grammar school.

This is, possibly, forgivable on the basis that his parents ran a small and somewhat precarious business, but what is more difficult to excuse was the attitude of his school. On hearing that he was interested in a career in horticulture, they advised him to leave school at the age of 16 and not bother with A levels.

It says something for Sales’s determination and enthusiasm that within five years of finishing National Service, he was appointed a lecturer at Writtle College in Essex. (He had been posted to Malta, where he appears to have divided his time between his duties at RAF Luqa, lying on the beach – and completing a correspondence course in general horticulture.)

The very first chapter in the book is a good illustration of why we needed a National Trust back in the 1960s, and how the sort of conservation strategies and policies which we take for granted today started to evolve.

It opens with Westbury Court, a little jewel of a garden in Gloucestershire, which had been bought by a developer in 1960. In those days, there was no protection for gardens, unless they were connected in some way to a listed building. The Dutch water garden at Westbury had been created by its owner, Maynard Colchester, between 1696 and 1705, and remained pretty much unchanged for 250 years, but the latest house on the site was much newer. It was only when an 18^th century pavilion was discovered during demolition work and listed by the Department of the Environment that the garden was given a reprieve at the very last minute.

It was a good beginning, but Sales does not hold back from criticising the current attitudes and policies within the National Trust, who he says is in danger of compromising “the obligations of preservation in the interest of unnecessary commercialisation”.

Recently, there seems to have been, he says, “a relentless and indiscriminate drive to augment visitor numbers whether or not the property can continue to support the increase” and he condemns the National Trust “branding” – the shop, the cafe and so on – which can blur the individual characteristics of a property and make it look like part of a franchise.

He points out that the decision to do away with the role of “gardens adviser” has left the NT gardens without an expert overview, and – to a certain extent – without the records that the regular visits by the gardens adviser to the properties would create.

However, the purpose of this book is not to excoriate the National Trust (thoroughly enjoyable though that may be for those of us of an iconoclastic nature) but to celebrate the gardens.

It could have taken the form of one long catalogue of restoration projects, but Sales has grouped the gardens into seven different chapters. The first and second deal with the emergence of the National Trust as a garden conservator, and how long-term conservation plans are created.

The third chapter is one of the most amusing parts of the book. It is entitled“Encounters with donors”, and Sales’s experiences at the first garden in this section – Florence Court in County Fermanagh – read like a cross between Tom Sharpe and J D Salinger.

He recounts how, at his first meeting with Lady Enniskillen, his attempts to talk about the management of the garden were met only with comments about “how pretty everything looked”. At the end of the tour of the garden, she asked her first and only question: “Can you tell me the name of this pretty bush?” Sales looked in the direction of her pointing finger, and saw a vast mound of Rhododendron ponticum.

The process of planting was a nightmare, recalled Sales. At one point he staked out a plantation, carefully labelling each position. On his next visit, there was no sign of plants, positions or plantation. “Och, Mister Sales,” he was told, “the very day after you left there was a terrible blast and all your little labels blew away, indeed they did!”

If Chapter 3 is rich in comic relief, Chapter 5, entitled “Storm” is the most poignant. It deals with the effects of the Great Storm of 1987, which uprooted, loosened or broke 90 per cent of the larger trees in the Pinetum and the Top Garden at Nymans, and destroyed the central pleasure ground at Petworth, including England’s tallest cedar of Lebanon.

Many of us remember the scale of the devastation but for head gardeners, it was  heart breaking. The gardening staff at Nymans, for example, had to come to terms not only with the destruction of a lifetime’s work, but also the prospect of months of mud and chaos as the diggers moved in to clear up.

In an era when books about garden history are published almost daily, it is particularly interesting to read one by someone who was actually involved in creating part of that history. I was intrigued to see, for example, that John Sales gives generous credit to Lanning Roper for his work at Chartwell, particularly for transforming it from a private home to a place of public pilgrimage.

Stefan Buczacki, in his new book From Blenheim to Chartwell, is much more critical of Roper, saying effectively that he was the wrong man for the job. Sales, while not totally uncritical, succeeded Roper as gardens adviser at Chartwell, and one wonders whether he is more tolerant of his predecessor because he faced the same challenges.

But then Sales comes across as a pragmatic and diplomatic operator. He started work with the Trust as Graham Stuart Thomas’s assistant and while he obviously had a good working relationship with Thomas, it must have been a baptism of fire.

He says that while Lanning Roper charmed most people, he failed to charm Thomas, and there are many references in the book to Thomas’s prickly relationships both with colleagues and owners. Sales recalls that “Graham Thomas was never welcome at Nymans”, for example, and he “had never been invited” by the Dashwood family to visit West Wycombe Park.

Thomas would spend the months of December to February writing his books, so when Sales joined the Trust in January 1970, he was left to tour the gardens alone. Luckily, remembers Sales, his first meeting with Thomas was at the great man’s garden in Woking.

“Apart from gardens our tastes were almost entirely dissimilar, but he treated me with great courtesy, once he had decided that I ‘would do’. The decision seemed to be based on a leisurely tour of his garden, during which he asked me ‘tactfully’ a series of questions, mostly plant names, all of which luckily I knew.”

One of the best of many good things about this book is that you can use it for many purposes and on many levels: as a sophisticated in-depth guide to the National Trust’s garden properties; as a basic history of conservation, and as a fascinating eyewitness account of an unparalleled era of restoration activity. Whatever your reason for reading this book, read it you must.

Victoria Summerley. 

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