Reginald Farrer’s Peony Paradise
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Let it first be said that this is a biography of a gardener by a gardener. Second, let it be known that the reviewer is also a biographer/gardener (in that order). Like gardeners, biographers roam the earth collecting specimens and making field notes. Gardeners, like biographers, are on quests for stories harvested after painstaking cultivation.
I spent a few days pondering whether my analogy was a tad precious, then read near the end of Nicola Shulman’s succulent biography (David R. Godine, 119 pages, $20) how Reginald Farrer focused his gardening on the “singular beauty of the individual plant.” On his horticultural expeditions, he kept diaries, which he called the “best English biography.”
Farrer was a bad novelist but a brilliant gardener and writer – not so surprising, since he had no patience for people but a lavish love of landscape, especially when infiltrated with alpine flowers and rugged rock formations. My only grumble about Ms. Shulman’s gem of a biography is that she says so little about his watercolors, which she rightly terms Chinese-inspired.
The art historian in me longs to know how he was able to create his delicate watercolor rendition of Cremanthodium delavayi. The flower shoots out of the ground, its stalk bisecting the picture plane, while the bloom bends in a downward curve between the valley and mountains seen only in outline – just like the mountain-and-valley panorama idealized in so many Chinese landscape paintings.
What Farrer could paint, he could also write – here literally prostrating himself on a hillside before his discovery, the wild Chinese peony:
Here in the brushwood it grew up tall and slender and straight, in two or three unbranching shoots, each one of which carried at the top, elegantly balancing, that single enormous blossom, waved and crimped into the boldest grace of line, of absolutely pure white, with featherings of deepest maroon radiating at the base of the petals from the boss of golden fluff at the flower’s heart. Above the sere and thorny scrub the snowy beauties poise and hover, and the breath of them went out upon the twilight as sweet as any rose. For a long time I remained in worship, and returned downwards.
The English professor in me wants to analyze the sensory impact of this passage, but the historian will simply note that Farrer found his peony paradise in 1914, and to get to this site he had to brave the hazards of traveling in some areas of China that no white man had entered and other areas where white missionaries had had their tongues – not to mention other parts – cut out by robber bands and warlords attacking European intruders.
Who was this intrepid Reginald Farrer? He was a Yorkshireman from a well-to-do, philistine, upper-class family. He had a hare lip and a cleft palate and was able to make himself understood only after several painful operations that kept him close to home. By the age of 8, he had embarked on his study of plants.
He made it to Oxford, where he formed a few close friendships – though he could easily put off people with a voice that sounded like wind through cracked metal and an arrogance that was softened only by his beautiful eyes. Curiously, Oscar Wilde is never mentioned in this biography, even though Farrer was clearly an aesthete. His relentless devotion to beauty alienated him from his family and from most people he encountered.
To the worldly, there is nothing more useless than the aesthete. How is such an impractical person supposed to make a living? Yet Farrer did so by revolutionizing gardening, turning it into an aesthetic enterprise that, in turn, created a market for his gardening books. Or, as Nicola Shulman puts it, Farrer transformed gardening from the “diversion of dukes” to the hobby of millions.
Before Farrer, gardening was by and large the occupation of professionals and aristocrats who engaged in “carpet bedding,” strewing across a landscape flowers chosen mainly for their color and size and not for their individuality. By making the single flower a prize, Farrer made it possible for anyone to garden. Acreage meant nothing. What mattered was creating – or finding – the right environment for the individual flower.
Farrer’s specialty was rocky hillsides, but his principles can be applied anywhere – including my own flat patch of paradise in southern New Jersey. Farrer demonstrated that you can make your own world, regardless of its size, beautiful. By the time he died in 1920, as Rebecca West observed, England could never truly be a socialist country, because its people were too busy cultivating their own gardens.
Ms. Shulman provides an extraordinary example of how Farrer’s aestheticism helped him to thrive. He passed a slow winter in Lanchow, China, praising the “vast and pure serenity” of the season, “its flawless light, its colour, its feeling, its atmosphere,” and concluding, “there is hardly a day when it is not like champagne to take the air in Lanchow.”
Meanwhile, Frank Meyer, a practical American sent out to China to figure out why American chestnut trees were dying, bemoaned the primitive conditions – the lack of hot water, the headache-producing charcoal heating, the unsanitary buckets that carried both drinking and waste water. Spotting Farrer and his photographer-assistant, the redoubtable Henry Purdom, Meyer wrote: “These last two … are somewhat out of order, and do not seem to be inclined to tell a fellow much.” Meyer and Farrer did not occupy the same universe.
If you fancy yourself any kind of gardener at all – let alone a reader of exquisite biographies – this dream of a book belongs on your shelf or, better yet, cradled beside your bed, or even under your pillow.