The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 267 No 7179 p904-936
22-29 December 2001

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Christmas miscellany summary

How does her garden grow?

In 1987 Diane Langleben and her husband moved house — and in the process completely changed Diane's life. Their new house came with a garden that had been part of the National Garden Scheme for some years. To be part of the scheme, as any good amateur gardener will tell you, is no mean achievement. Your garden is regularly inspected and provided it comes up to scratch you are invited to open it to the public.

"I have been entirely self-taught. I do not have time to read books, so I experiment with growing different plants. Sometimes they flourish, sometimes they don't. Some people have an image of me wandering round the garden with a trug in one hand dead-heading roses, but it is far more serious than that," explains Diane.

So serious, in fact, that Diane can be found in the garden in all weathers and it is not unusual for her to spend 12 hours on a Sunday at any time of the year, hard at work.

One of her achievements has been to design a potager (that's an ornamental vegetable plot that creates a pattern from the colour and texture of different plants). "Mine is loosely inspired by the garden at Villandry in the Loire valley," Diane says. "When I designed it, I made sure that every part of the potager was no more than an arm's length away from a brick path. That has two benefits: because I suffer from back problems I can sit down to garden, and also it is easier to care for because the soil is not compacted by anybody walking on it."

Diane is clearly knowledgeable about plants now, something she attributes to a good memory for their Latin names — possibly because of her training in pharmacy. "I try and grow unusual fruits and vegetables, and I have a collection of 30 herbs which I often use in borders. But we eat the herbs. I do not grow them for medicinal purposes. We also have a small orchard where we have five varieties of old English apple."

By dint of hard work and enthusiasm, Diane managed to maintain the garden's place in the National Garden Scheme and only stopped in 1999 when her neighbour (who had originally created both gardens, became ill). "We once had 600 visitors in one day," Diane remembers, "and as well as serving tea with homemade cakes we used to have live music. We raised £20,000 for charity in the 12 years we were open."

There have been other benefits, too, from her interest. Diane and her garden have been featured in the Daily Mail and book. She has appeared on television, given talks and she is even known in the gardening community in Japan. This is because the National Garden Scheme guide is published there and she has had private visitors and students wanting to see her handiwork.

Another turning point in Diane's pharmacy career came in 1999 when she left the Whittington hospital and came to work for PJ Publications where she is now editor of Hospital Pharmacist — which she finds more creative than hospital work — but even that cannot compare with that quarter-acre oasis in north London.