These waged with some passion were between American growers and Scottish supporters who followed the entrenched but inefficient 19th-century

These, waged with some passion, were between American growers (and Scottish supporters) who followed the entrenched but inefficient 19th-century classification, and the British growers (mostly members of the Royal Horticultural Society's rhododendron group), who followed the new Edinburgh-based and very much simplified, one.We also have a considerable density of great rhododendron gardens, and in splendid settings. The species that comprised it were also themselves often variable. Rhododendrons hate being baked.We also have some exceptional collections. From the 1850s, a Mr Hooker, a Glasgow man, sent home endless marvels from the Himalayas, not only to the Royal Botanic Garden at Edinburgh, but also to the great gardens of the west coast (Castle Kennedy is a dramatic example, still with many of his introductions.)What gardeners gradually realised was that it was an enormous genus of plants, encompassing shrublets only six inches across, to trees 80 feet high.

What makes Scottish rhododendrons special, though, are our cool summers. So why us? Rhodos really do like our climate, especially that of the west coast, where the high rainfall and the acid soil suit them (and which they also find in parts of Devon and Cornwall). Huge tracts of our land are now covered with terrible assemblages of magentas, purples, undergarment pinks; scenes calculated to damage the retina and spawn a myriad terrible postcards. And just about every Scot feels an obligation to grow at least one. My own relationship with them veers from being madly in love with individuals to loathing them en masse. It is Scotland and it is rhododendron time again.

Everybody who loves them will be trekking to the west coast where some of the richest collections in Britain grow. Yet were he alive today he would surely be dismayed at how few characters are left.Not all is lost, though. Only the other day talk turned on a woman who dwelt upstairs in a tiny farmhouse, tyrannised her son and daughter- in-law who lived below, forbade them to have children, and for the final 20 years of her life never came downstairs.`Portrait of Elmbury' is published by The Windrush Press, Moreton-in- Marsh, Glos, GL56 OLL (01608 652012) (£6.99).. Once when a councillor complained that he had been misreported, the editor struck back by printing his next speech verbatim:"What I means to say Mr Mayor and what I means is I have riz to take up your valuable time to say as how I feels, and there's many in this chamber and out as feels with me, as how I feels that the council if you sees what I means is wasting a lot of valuable time by argifying about this matter about which I feels, and there be others as feels it too."It is sad indeed that Moore, who survived being shot down in the Fleet Air Arm, should have died of cancer at only 59. But Moore draws a memorable portrait of Mr Chorlton, a scholarly teacher of the classics who was also an entomologist, a former country cricketer, and an imbiber of vintage port.Midnight steeplechases, Christmas fairs, village dances - all were reported in the local paper, whose editor was the admirably precise Mr Rendcombe. Another mentor was Bassett the fisherman, "the stillest person I have ever known - as still as the stilt-legged heron fishing in the shallows".

Legitimate activities apart, poaching was for many almost a full-time occupation.The author skates lightly over his own schooldays, claiming he learnt most from Old Jim, the bird-catcher, who would declare, "I'm no scholard", and signed documents with a cross. An equal cause of disturbance was Nobbler Price, who became mad when drunk and stormed about trying to shoot his wife, but ended up shooting the nanny goat in his back garden.Technically speaking, many of the men around Elmbury were unemployed; but this did not worry them, as they preferred to dabble in the endless casual jobs which were then available on the land: hay-making, thatching, rick-cutting, eel-catching, fruit-picking, turnip-pulling. It is slightly glamorised, as most books of this kind are, but firmly rooted in the earth.When Moore asked one old coachman why the place produced so many eccentrics, the answer was, "`Tis summat in the air as breeds 'em." Thus, jostling Black Sal, are Mr and Mrs Hook, who habitually fought each other in public simply because "for fighting on the scale practised by them, their hovel was not big enough". In fact, it is an autobiographical memoir of life in deepest Gloucestershire between about 1913 and the Second World War. Later he became a full-time author, writing 40 books.Portrait of Elmbury is described by its new publishers as a novel. Later he went to Malvern College - but classrooms never claimed much of his attention, which remained focused on poaching, ferreting, fishing, swimming and bird-nesting. Leaving school at 16, he joined his father's firm, and as a young auctioneer plunged back into the countryside from which he came.