The poet and the plantsman

By Julie Kavanagh

Twenty years ago James Fenton (pictured above left), looking for somewhere near Oxford to make a garden, bought a derelict farm with a hundred acres of land. About five miles out, south-facing with an established orchard, it was just what he wanted. His friends, on the other hand, thought he’d gone crazy. Fenton’s poems were born of a vivid engagement with life – the memory of war and children in exile – and he was as much a man of action as of letters. He had reported from the front-line in Cambodia and Vietnam, ridden a tank during the fall of Saigon, and survived months in the Borneo jungle with the explorer Redmond O’Hanlon. So why settle for a mid-life of rural domesticity?

Long Leys Farm was no pastoral idyll. The outbuildings were in ruins, a monstrous pylon delivering Swindon’s electricity supply loomed over the grounds, and the orchard was barricaded against apple-pinching kids with old bicycles, tyres and rusty buckets. Fenton’s friend Ian McEwan, the novelist, called it Scene of the Crime Farm: “It was a windswept, bleak stretch of open land and one of the barns had a rotting car inside. It looked like the kind of location a body might be found in an advanced state of decomposition and I earnestly advised James not to buy it. I told him he should look for an old vicarage somewhere.”