You'd have to have a hard heart not to chuckle at F.C. King's name. And this IS Sick Veg after all.
I was delighted to find a cheap copy of this slender classic from 1951. I have restored it with a replica printed dust jacket. It was written in his capacity as the head gardener at Levens Hall in Kendall in Cumbria. King met Sir Albert when Howard was evacuated from his home in Blackheath, London in wartime 1940 to Heversham, just a mile away. As a result the text is topped and tailed by Howard.
John Harrison of "The Allotment Garden" says,
"Levens Hall’s ten acres of gardens date back to 1690s including the world’s oldest topiary gardens. Even though the days of estate gardens were fading following the First World War, being Head Gardener of something like Levens Hall was a very prestigious position."I'd heard of King before but first came across the book when it was mentioned approvingly in Joseph A Cocannouer's "Weeds: Guardians of the Soil" (another classic). This is because King took an astonishingly progressive view of weeds,
"Everything in Nature has a definite place and it is our duty, as gardeners, to find a much better use for weeds in future than we have done in the past. Frequently I am amused at the amount of sympathy I receive from visitors when they see my weed crops. It is difficult to convince them that I deliberately encourage such growth on any piece of ground not immediately requiring food production..."
And he explains a number of advantages to their cultivation.
King, a compost evangelist, while not entirely a proponent of No Dig, did "not advocate digging it deeply into the ground. The best results I have obtained by its use have been on plots where it was kept reasonably near the surface."
Most bracing is his belief in the need to return organic matter from the city back to the countryside,
"For too many years townsmen and countrymen have tried to exist in a state of complete divorce the one from the other. Such a condition is wrong from every point of view. A campaign to educate the town-dwellers in their duty towards the land which is their heritage and from which they spring is long overdue."The opening line touches a cosmic note in accord with my book, "The Garden". It starts, "Nature is one and indivisible..."
