I have always loved seeing lichen on stone walls and in churchyards but until I read Katherine Swift’s The Morville Year I had no idea how fascinating it really is:

A lichen consists of not one but two organisms living in symbiosis: a fungus, capable of withstanding extremes of temperature and drought but unable to photosynthesis, and an alga, which – Dalek-like – inhabits the protective structure provided by the fungus and in return manufactures enough food for its own needs and those of the fungus.  Every lichen partnership is unique, and neither partner can survive without the other.

There are some seventeen hundred British lichen.  Many churchyards have well over a hundred, cohabiting on individual gravestones in what lichenologist Dr Vanessa Winchester calls ‘miniature, self maintaining gardens’.   Churches and churchyards are important havens for lichen, even where stone is common, because the churchyard may include gravestones made from different sorts of stone, not necessarily native to the area, each of which will support a different population of lichens.

Lichens are extremely sensitive indicators of environmental pollution: a rich bloom of lichen means clean air.  They also grow infinitesimally slowly – half a millimeter a year is fast – so lichen growth is also an indicator of age.  Many lichen will be as old as the tombstones on which they live.  So don’t scrub them off (it is a misconception that they destroy the stone) but do keep the surrounding undergrowth cut, as lichens need sunlight in order to thrive

So now I know…

Now Katherine Swift, one of the most acclaimed gardening writers of her generation, takes a fresh look at the garden she created over twenty years in the grounds of Dower House at Morville, meditating on everything from the terrain and its history, to the plants and trees, and the odd habits of the animals and humans who inhabit the garden.

Is everything in the landscape older than you think?  Might a flower in your hat change your life?  Can cats and cardoons cohabit?  These are just some of the topics that Katherine Swift considers in this enchanting companion volume to The Morville Hours.

With specially commissioned colour photographs of the garden by Jane Sebire and line drawing by Dawn Burford, the book follows the turning wheel of the Morville seasons, from the green shoots of spring, through summer and autumn, to the stark beauty of winter, and back to spring again.  It is a journal full of surprises and enchantments that will appeal not only to gardeners, but to all who enjoy the natural world.

Review:
This book follows on from Katherine’s very successful book The Morville Hours and is once again the book is elegantly written. The chapters in the book consist of articles from the column she wrote for the Sunday Times when she was their gardening correspondent between December 2001 and July 2005.

Katherine talks about her day to day musings as she tends to her garden throughout the year. It covers the things that that worked out well in the garden, some happy accidents and future possibilities for the various garden rooms. It is however much more than a gardening book, covering diverse subjects such as astronomy, bees, the Morville cats, past American Presidents and other historical figures. In one chapter she muses about time and the use of a garden tree to construct a sundial within a turf maze and how it was ‘initially’ in time with the church clock.

Amongst the things I learned are that there are eleven thousand species of moss worldwide, that lichens are not one organism but two living in symbiosis and that bees do not hibernate over the winter, they are in perpetual motion and continually beating their wings to keep warm.

As with the The Morville Hours it is a book that I will read again and also dip into from time to time. I am looking forward to her next book which is provisionally entitled ‘A Rose for Morville’. I am also reminded that I must visit the garden, living in Shropshire I don’t really have an excuse not to.