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R J HARRIS
Chrissie Laming

Pics Olive Harris

R J Harris is the professional horticulturist who grows vegetables, fruit and flowers organically with the help of some of the oldest, lowest-cost and least-used of horticulture's tools. Among them are

the moon's phases

knowledge of plants' ability to help each other to thrive or to perish

knowledge of plants' ability to be proof against the depredations of the insect world

knowledge of plants' inability to resist the depredations of the insect world.

A Cornishman discovered nationally by BBC2 -- one of the United Kingdom's public-service television channels -- R J Harris is the head gardener of the 200-acre Tresillian Estate near Newquay in mid Cornwall, England. Mr Harris began as an apprentice in Cornwall in the mid '50s. He has practised in the U K's public and private sectors. His professional studies of the influence of the moon's phases on plants date from the '60s. They have been -- and continue to be -- augmented by communications from horticulturalists worldwide, inspired by the publication of
'R J Harris's Moon Gardening' in late 2002 and making clear that whilst moon gardening may be a dead art in the United Kingdom, it is practised in one form or another from New Zealand to Indonesia, from the Scandinavian countries to Italy and to around the Mediterranean.

R J Harris is well-known in the U K's West Country as the chairman and committee member of several professionally-recognised horticultural societies. He is a show judge, a prize-winning show participant, a lecturer and an experimental horticultural archaeologist. He combines these activities with being an elected councillor in the U K's local government system. He is also a poet and a story-teller, and he appears in TV and radio gardening programmes for BBC2, Carlton West, BBC4 and BBC Radio Cornwall.

A special charge on him has been the restoration of Tresillian Estate's Victorian walled kitchen garden. This, in the mid 1980s, and like so many of the U K's historical walled gardens, was derelict. He has returned it to its original design and to its original abundant production. In doing so, and standing in the shoes and occupying the minds of those who managed the kitchen garden before him, he pursues a programme of research into yesteryear's varieties and yesteryear's ways with them. As word spreads of his efforts, the garden becomes increasingly a Mecca for writers, publishers, photographers, radio and TV producers, educationists and students at all levels in horticultural training.

Upon a number of fundamental, practical levels his restoration work does not emulate the practices of his Victorian predecessors. They dare admit no constraint in their fight to supply to the big house nothing other than an unbroken

stream of unblemished produce and plants. When pest and disease struck, they did not hesitate to order the preparation and application of poisons that were harmful to humans, animals, birds and insects. With a half-century-long career behind him -- and with having witnessed the limitations and penalties of 20th-century gardening -- he is now of sufficiently senior status to be able to jettison the practices that he sees as undesirable. He applies in their place his own combination of moon-influenced, positive organic horticulture (seeing this as more than solely a rejection of pesticides and herbicides), compatible planting and folk memories that reach out to us from the days of the Romans, the Greeks and the Romanies.

About 'R J Harris's Moon Gardening'