Rock on, Reginald

IF Reginald Farrer hadn't been real some writer would have had to invent him.

Born in 1880, a cousin of Osbert Sitwell and the heir to the Ingleborough Estate, he was dwarfish in stature, had a cleft palate and a hair lip - conditions, physicians believed, that were caused by maternal flights.

His mother, Shulman observes, whose chief love was the church, had in fact been "surprised" by a chimney sweep.

Farrer grew up to leave Balliol College, Oxford, with a mere third in Greats and, like his father, embarked on writing novels that no one wanted to read.

He travelled to Japan and Ceylon, converted to Buddhism, liked to dress in a kimono when at home in Yorkshire... and dabbled in rock gardening - but belittled this one area of his own brilliance.

Says Shulman: "All the things that made life hard for him - his circumstances and upbringing, his desires and expectations, his impossible egotistic personality - would, in the world of horticulture, be recast as virtues and bring him to a place of greatness in its history."

Farrer was an alpine, or rock gardener, who at the age of 13 had found Arenaria gothica growing on the family estate and reported his dicovery to the Journal of Botany.

It was Farrer who, quite simply, was responsible for putting a rock garden in virtually every back garden in England and who dragged garden writing into the area of belles-lettres - once describing the large globular chrysanthemum as "a moulting mop dipped in stale lobster sauce".

As a "writer on flowers", Vita Sackville-West ranked Farrer just below DH Lawrence, describing him as "half-poet, half-botantist".

She greatly admired his extravagance as well as his accuracy - and well she might, since it was his example that gave her leave to carrying on in much the same vein herself.

Shulman writes engagingly and though a mere 125 pages long, this biography has the strengths of a work four times its size.

David Chapman