Beverley Nichols at Merry Hall: Geraniums, Peonies, and Garden Philosophy
Today's Garden Words were featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
Words inspired by the garden are the sweetest,
most beautiful words of all.
September 11, 2019
On this day, The Daily Gardener continues its tribute to the ineffable Beverley Nichols — the dapper chronicler of English gardens and their eccentric keepers.
This week’s selections come from his later years, drawn from his enchanting Merry Hall trilogy. Written between 1951 and 1956, these books tell of Nichols’s adventures in rejuvenating a Georgian manor house in Surrey — a place he transformed with charm, wit, and a touch of theatrical mischief.
He lived there for a decade, from 1946 to 1956, tending both his borders and his sentences with equal devotion.
Merry Hall is a thing of elegance and audacity. Nichols takes readers through rose beds and ruined follies, across drawing rooms and compost heaps, all the while offering revelations about the gardener’s heart. In his hands, the act of pruning becomes philosophy; the arrangement of blooms, a moral compass.
His garden — like his prose — balances discipline with delight.
“...If you are picking a bunch of mixed flowers, and if you happen to see, over in a corner, a small, sad, neglected-looking pink or peony that is all by itself and has obviously never had a chance in life, you have not the heart to pass it by, to leave it to mourn alone, while the night comes on.
You have to go back and pick it, very carefully, and put it in the center of the bunch among its fair companions, in the place of honor.”
With that tender image, Nichols reminds us that gardening is a moral art — an act of noticing the overlooked and elevating it.
Who among us has not rescued a drooping pansy or given a bedraggled pot a second chance?
The garden, like the gardener, is redeemed by compassion.
“Long experience has taught me that people who do not like geraniums have something morally unsound about them. Sooner or later, you will find them out; you will discover that they drink, or steal books, or speak sharply to cats. Never trust a man or a woman who is not passionately devoted to geraniums.”
Ah, the infamous Nichols wit! It comes wrapped in satire but rooted in truth. Geraniums — sturdy, fragrant, unpretentious — mirror the gardener’s best qualities.
To dislike them, Nichols proposes, hints at a flaw in one’s moral compost.
One envisions him at Merry Hall, cocktail in hand, eyeing guests suspiciously as he measures the sincerity of their affection for Pelargoniums.
Today, as autumn’s breath turns petals crisp and golden, these words remind us that every plant, like every person, deserves affection and attention.
And perhaps, before the season slips fully into sleep, we should bring one neglected bloom indoors — placing it, as Beverley would insist, in the place of honor.