The second is that Waco serves as a symbol of a widespread sense of siege which is uniquely American

The second is that Waco serves as a symbol of a widespread sense of siege which is uniquely American. The first is that the bombing is merely the latest episode in the rising tension between the US government and its gun-loving white religious right, for whom America’s fast-growing network of state militias provides an ideal forum. What, for example, links McVeigh and his kind with this devastating commemoration of the fire which ended the FBI siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas? Why should militant racist right-wingers find such significance in a tragedy which occurred in David Koresh’s multi-racial community?

There are two answers to this question. The arrest of Timothy McVeigh has brought to the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing a wave of speculation about America’s ultra- right groups and their religious, racist and militant interconnections. One would happily let that pass if one was confident that the bright future that is being proposed was not, in fact, a way of making the library more obscure than ever.. Yet the number of varieties of plants that are of interest to the modern gardener is quite astonishing. The Plant Finder, the book that lists outlets for growing plants, features some 60,000 varieties.Many of these varieties are plants which are propagated vegetatively, so the total list of seeds of interest to the gardener would be different from the total list of plants.

Whether it would be larger or smaller I do not know, but it would undoubtedly be huge.It would seem eminently practical to have a London Seed Bank, at which there were well-maintained and preserved stocks of seed from all commercial merchants, from heritage groups and from scientific institutions around the world. Since a part of the interest of the society, and of keen gardeners, is in the preservation of plants whose habitat has disappeared, or plants which once featured prominently in gardens but are now mysteriously in abeyance, it would seem congruent with the function of the library that there should be a bank next door from which one could, as it were, withdraw the genetic material one had been reading about in books.Whatever happens, the row over the Lindley Library will have destroyed that quality it once had, the quality of being one of the best-kept secrets in London. There seems to be no shop or centre to which one can go in the certainty of finding all the varieties of seed that are commercially available, let alone those which are collected by botanical gardens and other scientific institutions. The matter is now being put before Sir Ralph Gibson, an independent assessor, who is to draw up a report.If the Rochester Row proposal would leave the library with an embarrassment of space, I have a suggestion, modest but, I think, creative in its way. And, of course, had it not been the occasion for such passion, no doubt the decision would already have been made and one would have woken up to find the present accessible arrangement ended, irrespective of the wishes of the society’s members.Since the only problem, at present, appears to be lack of space for the books and their conservation, I very much hope that the counter-proposal prospers, and that it becomes possible to purchase the Rochester Row police station, which is due to be decommissioned, and to convert it for the purpose. The point about the Lindley Library is that it has all this down to a T, but it also has an unrivalled collection of botanical and garden history books.

This is, then, a library for students of the history of science, for students of garden history (a growing subject, which relates to architectural, literary and social history), for botanists and for professional and amateur gardeners.One thing about the RHS is that if you set out today to refound the thing from scratch, you would never be able to afford to do so. Many of the library’s books are considered works of art in themselves. The scientific illustration of flowers became, if you like, an inadvertent art form.Today, one would not be able to afford the books, let alone the building to put them in, along with the large exhibition spaces in central London. So it seems a particular shame to do anything to reduce the facilities available to the society’s members, let alone the public.The proposal to remove the library to Wisley, in Surrey, has already been vigorously opposed by this paper’s gardening correspondent, Anna Pavord, and, as far as I can see, by most of the people who have addressed themselves to the subject. And then a trip upstairs to the Lindley Library makes a logical addition to the day.Now the number of books you need to consult for the practicalities of gardening is really very limited. It is punitive in that it bites into an offender’s free time; positive in that it involves work of public benefit at little cost to the public purse; and reparative in that the offender is asked to make good the harm which he or she has caused. Perhaps uniquely amongst penal sanctions community service is accepted on all sides as a “good thing”.Indeed, successive surveys have shown considerable public support for sanctions which involve some form of reparation or restitution by the offender.