Celebrated author Roald Dahl was a man of many accomplishments. Finishing school, he worked for Shell Oil Co in London and East Africa before training as a Hawker Hurricane fighter pilot in World War II, scoring 'kills' over Greece. Seriously injured in a crash in the Western Desert, he was dispatched as an intelligence agent to the United States. He achieved success as the writer of macabre short stories before he first turned to writing children's books--James and the Giant Peach was not published until 1961. This introduced Old-Green Grasshopper, the Ladybird; the Centipede, and the Earthworm, characters that came from what was obviously a gardener's fertile mind.
It is one hundred years since Dahl's birth on 13 September 1916 in Llandaff, South Glamorgan of Norwegian parents. The event will be acknowledged globally as Roald Dahl Day. But the man who also adapted Ian Fleming's
You Only Live Twice and
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for the silver screen was an enthusiastic gardener.
He moved back from the U.S. in May 1961 to Gypsy House, Great Missenden in England's famed Chilterns. He remodeled the garden there, planting it with vegetables, an orchard, and more than 200 native roses. Young daughter Olivia learnt to identify the roses and learn their Latin names. Dahl invented stories about the witches' tree at the top of the garden for his daughters. Once he made their names appear magically on the lawn one morning by sprinkling weedkiller on the grass at midnight, telling them it was the work of fairies. He loved his orchid house which also contained a huge cactus he had inherited from his mother and that periodically required the roof to be raised in order to accommodate it. A keen observer, short stories such as 'Conkers!' and 'Wild Mushrooms' emerged from penciled yellow foolscap sheets in his garden workshop. Then there were poems like 'A Little Nut Tree' and 'Jack and the Beanstalk' for, as he said, "A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men".
Alas, back pain from his wartime injuries continued to plague him. Six operations and increasing age took their toll. "Gardening is for the birds if you are sixty or over. I see all these old farts digging their allotments across the lane, straining their backs and bending their bones . . . I don't garden any more. I supervise," he told Dirk Bogarde, according to Donald Sturrock's biography.
His wonderful names live on: was it a Doodlewhang or a Boodlesniff? This year,
The Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary published his many invented words. His sometimes caustic views also seem to gain increasing popularity since his death in 1990:
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
"I live with my brat in a high-rise flat,
So how in the world would I know?"
