Queen Elizabeth gives New Year Honours to gardeners

Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip are shown a new vegetable patch by a Buckingham Palace gardener. (Photo courtesy The Telegraph)

Queen Elizabeth II has pronounced gardening an honourable profession.

In the annual New Year Honours List she acts on behalf of the government and gives titles and medals to hundreds of politicians and their pals. Some worthy citizens who have served their country are commended too.

The Queen also has a few awards that are her own personal gift, and this year she recognized four gardeners.

No doubt as we weed and hoe we wish that someday, someone would notice our efforts. These lucky four had The Queen notice and reward them. Let's take a look at the gardens where they toil.

Sandringham House, The Queen's residence in Norfolk, England

(Photo courtesy KL Magazine)

People who live in glass houses...well, they apparently get gold medals. Royal Victorian Gold Medals.

David James Benefer, RVM. Glasshouses manager, Sandringham Estate (he has previously been awarded the Silver Royal Victorian Medal).

Highgrove House, Prince Charles' country home in Gloucestershire, England

(Photo courtesy Highgrove)

Royal Victorian Medal (Silver) to Mrs. Marion Rose Cox. Part-time Gardener, Highgrove House.

The Queen on the grounds of Balmoral, her estate in Scotland

(Photo courtesy The Telegraph )

Royal Victorian Medal (Silver) to Joseph MacLugash. Woods Foreman, Balmoral Estate.

Savill Garden, Windsor Castle, England

(Photo courtesy Charlotte Weychan)

Royal Victorian Medal (Silver) to Graham Passmore Stone. Horticulturalist, Crown Estate, Windsor.

Dr. Shirley Sherwood at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery, Kew Gardens, England

(Photo courtesy Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)

The government fished up this garden great and The Queen will give the Order of the British Empire to Dr. Shirley Angela Sherwood. Botanical Art Collector. For services to Botanical Art.

All hail Shirley for her astonishing collection, now safely stashed in an eponymous gallery at Kew Gardens; the first gallery ever to focus on botanical art.

As for the rest of us, we'll have to name a lot of plants after The Queen in her Diamond Jubilee Year and see if that gets us on the list.

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The dangers of garden literature

1911 edition, illustrated by Troy Howell

Frances Hodgson Burnett has a lot to answer for.

Her children's book, The Secret Garden, may be the best gardening story since Genesis, and it hypnotized me into a lifelong penchant for climbing ivy and a general yen for the overgrown look. Little did I know the price I would have to pay....

We have a tall, wooden gate in a little-visited corner of our garden. We built it ourselves 12 years ago, and you can imagine how my heart rejoiced when I saw ivy from the next-door neighbors staking a claim to our disconcertingly bare gate.

The years passed, and the ivy did what ivy does, and soon the gate was a solid mass of green leaves. It really did present the most charming appearance, provoking our plumber, on a recent circumnavigation of the house, to exclaim as he wrenched the gate open, "It's just like The Secret Garden!" Music to the ears of this Burnett-obsessed gardener.

Yesterday, though, verdant impressions notwithstanding, a visiting contractor pointed out the shakiness of the gate posts and offered to repair them.

The ivy had both hidden and exacerbated the weakness of the gate and the adjacent fence.

Bitterness coursed through me as I wrested the tangled mat of ivy from the gate and fence.

What a fool I was, I thought, as my Felco pruners flashed through the vines, to be taken in by such a book. It's one thing to fall for that stuff when you live in a land of 19th-century, brick-walled gardens, and quite another when you live in California. Look where my repeated readings of Burnett have got me. Now I'll have to pay good, garden-writing-earned money to repair the damage wrought by English ivy.

Ironic? Certainly. But do I really have to abandon the gardening tastes of a lifetime, go all Modernist and start planting phormiums?

It remains to be seen. In the meantime, there is one vow I can make.

I renounce Frances Hodgson Burnett and all her works.

For at least a month.

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Seven favorite gardens

Here are seven gardens I love:

Photo by Andrew Dunn

The garden of the Generalife at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. First, last and always, it is my ultimate garden. In a college art history class the slide of this garden enchanted me. Two decades later I finally made the trip and on a day in May I stood at this spot, alone and transfixed. As soon as you finish reading this post, buy a ticket to Spain!

Photo by Uris

The eight tiny Pavilion Gardens at the University of Virginia are enclosed by brick serpentine walls and flank the main quadrangle. Yes, Thomas Jefferson designed them, along with the rest of the place. In 1976 the American Institute of Architects, in a bicentennial mood, named the University of Virginia "the proudest achievement in American architecture in the past 200 years". Nice going, TJ. I have happy memories of hosting a birthday/croquet party in this Pavilion Garden.

Photo by Luu

I fell for Keukenhof Park in the Netherlands one spring when I was a teenager. So don't make fun of me!

Photo by Daderot

The Arboretum at Stanford University in California. Take a deep breath--can you smell the eucalyptus? The Stanfords planted exotic trees along with the native live oaks here, and it's a wild area that's a buffer between the campus and the town of Palo Alto.

Photo by Daderot

The University of California at Davis is near Sacramento, in the Central Valley. The Arboretum has walking paths on either side of a long creek, punctuated by foot bridges in a variety of styles. This particular bridge is a bit humdrum, but the stroll is delightful in all seasons, for humans and dogs.

Photo by Epibase

Moving on to gardens I have visited only in my imagination, we find ourselves in an herbaceous border at Mottisfont Abbey, Hampshire, England. The rose section is said to be superb. Someday I'll find out.

Photo by Epibase

Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, England. Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson created these gardens, and Vita wrote her garden columns in that big tower. If you've read Orlando by Virginia Woolf you've met Vita as the inspiration for the title character.

How did you get dragged by the hair on this garden tour? Blame Susan at Blue Planet Gardening, who tagged me. Her blog and site are Action Central for low-water gardening info; no additional charge for her quick wit.

I raise my muddy dandelion fork and tap seven more bloggers, bidding them to:

• Link back to the person who gave you the award.
• Reveal seven things about yourself.
• Choose seven other blogs to nominate, and post a link to them.
• Let each of your choices know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog.
• Notify your tagger that the post is up.

Take your own international garden tour and meet these seven outstanding bloggers:

• Shirl at Shirl's Gardenwatch in Scotland. Notes on her own and other Scottish gardens, and backyard hedgehog videos too.

• Emily at Emily's Garden in southern England for photos and reports on her extensive, beautiful garden.

• Fern at Life on the Balcony in southern California. She knows all about container gardening, and designs for both commercial and residential spaces. Big on Twitter, if you want to see how that's done.

• Gen at North Coast Gardening in California near the Oregon border. She's a gardening pro, with an especially well-designed blog. Makes her own how-to videos and is a rising national star.

• Maranta at Callus and Chlorophyll in Seattle is another gardening pro, who ruminates all day as he digs and prunes, and types out the goods on his clients at night. I call him the Thomas Pynchon of garden bloggers. No post of mine is complete without his clever comment.

• David in Missoula, at Montana Wildlife Gardener, is a biologist who has created an exceptional garden in town, while making few demands on the environment. He's a gold mine of information and is always a pleasure to read.

• Back on the East Coast, head for the Pittsburgh suburbs to read Burbs and the Bees by Beegirl. A fun, new blog about being as country as possible on the edge of the city.

As with all lists, it's hard to have to choose. See my blogroll for other excellent blogs, sorted by geography.

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The Queen is in her garden

Portrait of The Queen (2002) John Swannell/Camera Press

Exciting report from Buck House in London about the new kitchen garden!

Garden Organics supplied heritage seeds with appropriate names. The tomatoes are Queen of Hearts, Golden Queen, and White Queen; the beans are Royal Red and a rare, climbing Blue Queen; one of the lettuces is Northern Queen.

Which leads me to ask--have you ever chosen varieties just because they share your name (or title)?

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DVD Review: The Art and Practice of Gardening, with Penelope Hobhouse

Do you live alone in a stone manor house on a windswept moor?

I hope so.

Otherwise you'll have to forswear your family and friends when these two DVDs arrive at your door.

I can't stop watching.

I thought I was past my swooning Anglophile phase, but seeing the words Mottisfont Abbey puts me in a trance.

Penelope Hobhouse, the influential English garden designer, shows us a variety of delectable gardens.

A visit to the grounds of Barnsley House in Gloucestershire, home of Rosemary Verey, is wonderful. Taking a garden tour there with the charming Mrs. Verey, and watching her discussing her creation, is simply stunning. Mrs. Verey has passed away since this was filmed, so the footage is a treasure.

Such good structure and strong branching--I'm talking about the DVD menus, not the plants in the gardens. Menus allow you to choose English gardens or American gardens, gardens by style, or gardener's name--you wouldn't be interested in David Austin's own rose garden, would you? And while one is looking at these options on the screen, there isn't some repetitive drone of irritating music on a 20-second repeat, but the chirping of birds instead.

If one turns away from the screen, and hears only the fluting tones of Penelope Hobhouse interviewing a gardener, an American listener can be forgiven for getting a whiff of Monty Python.

After a good day's work in your own garden, get out the strawberries and cream, and take a relaxing tour of some beautiful English and American gardens. The problem is, they raise the bar so high you may be rushing outside with a flashlight to plant your own laburnum walk, just like the one at Barnsley House.

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