The definitive account of the remarkable botanical entrepreneurs of the 19th century is Alice Coats’s The Plant Hunters. We owe to Robert Fortune, George Forrest, David Douglas and others the plants that are ubiquitous in our gardens today, but which were acquired by way of perilous expeditions and the arduous collection of specimens. Buddleias, azaleas, rhododendrons, hydrangeas and many more are staples today, but they were brought back to the UK by men who risked life and limb, climbed mountains, braved bandits and pirates, or scoured remote areas of China, like Ernest Wilson in his pursuit of Davidia involucrata, the handkerchief tree, the ultimate horticultural trophy of the early 20th century.
Willa Cather’s My Ántonia is the great novel of pioneer life in the American west. Ántonia Shimerda is the daughter of Bohemian immigrants, and the feisty central figure of a narrative that darts about in time and space, conjuring up the Nebraska landscape that is “nothing but land, not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made”. This is prairie life at its very beginning – sod houses, the struggle to grow things. It is full of marvellous imagery, my favourite is that of the plough with the sun sinking behind it: “exactly contained within the circle of the disk, the handles, the tongue, the shade – black against the molten red”.
Midnight’s Chidren has to be the fictional blueprint of a beginning, of new growth. Salman Rushdie’s epic novel charts the challenges that faced India in the early years of independence, through the eyes of Saleem, one of those born on the stroke of midnight on the day of independence – the cultural, religious and political differences, the migrations and wars, the suffering and expectations. The book was also the most prominent expression of magical realism, which Rushdie argued allowed political ideas to be expressed in ways more pungent than those available in conventional literary style.
The Beginning of Spring is Penelope Fitzgerald’s Russian novel, set in Moscow in 1913. It is an amazing re-creation of the city, the Russia of that time, extraordinary in its detail of furnishings, practices, attitudes, behaviour. Fitzgerald had only been to Russia once, briefly, and obviously not in 1913, making it an exemplary instance of fiction where careful research is the hidden seven eighths of the iceberg. It is also elliptical, elusive. We, the readers, know that the revolution is not far off; this is never hinted or implied, but there is this curious sense of something new and unidentifiable that lurks, epitomised in a mysterious woodland scene with figures that may or may not be conspirators.
Margaret Mead’s Growing Up in New Guinea was a huge success when it was published in 1930. I remember reading it in the 50s, with fascination – the first work of anthropology I had come across. She was studying the childhood lives of the Manu people of the Admiralty Islands, north of New Guinea, comparing the relatively relaxed attitude towards childcare there with western practices. I found that less interesting, back then, than her intimate observation of the lives of the Manu, and how children behave while growing up in such a contrasting society. Her writing was the kind of accessible anthropology that I have found absorbing ever since; she was in many ways a pioneer, bringing anthropology to a wider audience.
• Penelope Lively’s Life in the Garden is published by Fig Tree. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
