Thought-bytes Posted on February 6, 2012

I have embraced my iPad as eagerly as anyone, but I do not twitter and will not tweet. It’s not that I disdain brevity of expression. Indeed for almost forty years my Pocket Wine Book has tried to encapsulate the essentials of its field in far shorter phrases than the 120 characters allowed in a tweet. That’s what I call verbosity.

No, it’s not the language I fear for. It’s our minds. Once we had, and thought we needed, a variety of ways to learn the contents of each other’s minds.

Surely this is the whole point of literature. The power and delight of a library is that each book you open is a glimpse into another’s consciousness. Lectures, essays, sermons were formal means of exposition. And the highest means of all was poetry.

Now we have twitter; the thumb-jerk expression of fleeting thoughts. It is pure chance if they have any significance beyond their moment of conception – and transmission. Will some future Jobs or Zuckerberg find a way of validating second thoughts – even third ones? Could there be a shiny new format for joined-up thinking?

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Trad? Who’s he?

Trad’s Diary started as the editorial column of the RHS Journal when it was remodelled and relaunched as The Garden in 1975. I was responsible for the changes, wrote the column then, and still do when I have an idea, 45 years later. I am Hugh Johnson, author of Trees, The Principles of Gardening, and lots of stuff about wine.

Trad borrows his name from John Tradescant, gardener to Lord Cecil at Hatfield and to King James I, one of the first to introduce plants from abroad to England. His family name, having become extinct, seemed a fitting label for a column of garden jottings. It was adopted in 1977 by the new Trust for the Garden Museum in Lambeth, where John Tradescant (the accent is on the second syllable) lived and is buried. Today the museum is in full and exciting expansion mode. I urge you to visit its website, visit it personally, and support it as much as you can.

Trad took to the ether as a blog in 2008. There have been two anthologies, in 1993 and 2009, and since 2008 the text has been published quarterly in Hortus magazine. Scroll back, if you have time to waste, over hundreds of earlier entries. Better, use the Search button to look up things that might interest you. This index facility is priceless to the diarist; now he can see how often he repeats himself. Thanks to Simon Appleby and Bookswarm for making this happen.

Hugh’s Gardening Books

Trees

Trees was first published in 1973 as The International Book of Trees, two years after The World Atlas of Wine….

Hugh’s Wine Books

Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book

I wrote my first Pocket Wine Book in 1977, was quite surprised to be asked to revise it in 1978,…

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The International Dendrology Society (IDS)