Mahonia. Veddw. © Charles Hawes

The Hardy Plant 2002

In 1816 (1), Humphrey Repton said that "the art of landscape gardening….. is the only Art which everyone professes to understand, and even to practice, without having studied its Rudiments." You might think that not much has changed. However, although gardens do occasionally get sloppily referred to as "art," no one really takes that notion seriously anymore. They would certainly not claim, as Walpople did, that "Poetry, Painting, and Gardening, or the Science of Landscape, will forever by men of taste be deemed Three Sisters."(2)

Gardening appears next to cooking or travel in the newspapers, not in the Review section. Gardening books are rarely reviewed in serious newspapers.(Gardens, never.) I recently invited someone - a cabinetmaker, as it happens, who perhaps should have known better, - to visit my garden. His response totally confused me: he began to tell me what a dreadful mess his garden was. Then I realised - he believes that a garden is only of interest to a gardener. And, on reflection, I realise that that is probably an almost universal assumption now.

Yet I have found that the most sensitive and perceptive comments about my garden have been made by visitors who are not gardeners. For example, last year the coach driver of a garden tour which was visiting the garden told me that he had spent the time while he was waiting for the tour to finish just sitting in the pool garden, enjoying the reflections and the view of the surrounding trees. This is the intention of this garden, of course, but no visitor normally spends an hour or more there. He then compared the design to a piece of music, elaborating on the similarities. Most of our visitors offer a version of "lovely garden, what a lot of work, what's that plant?"So it seems that even if a garden were art, the last people to notice would be gardeners. And few gardeners would ever aspire to create a garden as a work of art. Yet I think we cheerfully believe that our gardens are the best in the world. Just as the French still complacently believe their food and wine are unsurpassed, not noticing that the world has moved on, we see ourselves as a nation of gardeners, and we know what we like. Which is mostly plants, not gardens.

Imagine if we were to transfer our garden preoccupations to visits to art galleries. The majority of visitors would be there to admire the paints and visitors would demand that the different colours be labelled. We would get stickers all over Turner's sunsets identifying each colour, so that we could rush off to the nearest art suppliers to get them. Discussions of paintings would consist entirely of descriptions of paints and their applications, and only fellow painters would visit art galleries at all. The newspaper and magazine sections on art would devote themselves to discussing how to dispose of the empty tubes and discarded canvases, what to paint in winter, how to deal with woodworm in your frames and what to wear when painting. If a painter were seen to use colour with any more sophistication than a child, this would be worthy of comment and discussion in itself. And all paintings featured would be "lovely" with never a critical word for fear the painter would be upset.

How have we become such rotten garden visitors and indifferent garden makers? This universal lack of criticism plays its part. No one learns how to appreciate a garden; the art of learning to look is dead. Articles about gardens in magazines and newspapers are confined to descriptions, history, plant lists and praise; with handy hints sometimes tagged on at the end - the garden owner as handyman. These articles fulfil the expectations of advertisers for such articles to be "aspirational" and this informs the quality of garden writing we get. ("The Hardy Plant" has a rare independence which we should treasure.)

Dove at end of yew walk. © Charles Hawes

Criticism of gardens is confined to privately complaining about outdoor housekeeping, lamenting the weeds or the slug damage. We have no current tradition of garden criticism as serious evaluation and there is no context for such a thing in the media. Yet criticism is the very lifeblood of an art form; it raises standards, informs, educates and promotes intelligent debate. Someone pointed out to me that a tree at the end of our yew walk behind the tromp d'oeil urn was confusing to the eye, creating distraction from the focal point of the urn. I could instantly see that he was right, and the tree came down. This kind of observation is nearly as rare as flying pigs but vastly more welcome. It helped me see more clearly, and it improved the garden. This is the kind of illumination we need to raise our aesthetic standards.

Photography may have a lot to answer for. We have got used to looking at gardens as a collection of features. A photographer looks at a garden in a particular way - they are searching for a particular range oimages. They will need a sheet of pictures which include water features, statues, seats, ziggurats, arches or other bits of garden hardware, some plant associations, a middle distance view of a border, close ups of several plants, and ideally, but less and less frequently, an overall distance shot. And a portrait of the proud owner wielding a trowel - gardener as handyman, of course.

The pictures are carefully shot to present the best of the garden, and, to be blunt, a good photographer can and does make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. A good photographer would have taken the picture of the yew walk when the tree was still there making sure that the tree and the urn ceased to compete by clever choice of angle or focus - or would not have taken that picture at all. But there are a great many aspects of a garden that are not possible to photograph, as I discover repeatedly to my regret. A large part of our garden has a backdrop of mature beech and oak trees, forming a semi circle, which is echoed in a large semicircular border round a lawn, creating a kind of amphitheatre effect. This is immediately visible and obvious to a visitor but it won't make a photograph, because a photograph can't reproduce the perspective. If you walk down to our meadow you pass first through a short hornbeam tunnel, so that you move through enclosure and shade before stepping out into the open space of the meadow. A photograph can't capture that experience.

A walk in the garden is a journey; it is essentially informed by movement. A camera is static, and film fails to "see" or scan in the way the human eye does. Photographs need good light on a still day; most of the best are taken of gardens that are never normally seen. They are taken when the rest of us are still asleep, because the light is right then. Gardens are actually characterised by wind and weather, twilight and shade, growing and dying, a million elusive atmospheres.Many people may spend more time looking at photographs of gardens than at gardens themselves, apart from their own garden. As a result we have come to regard gardens as a collection of things - a set of features and a plant zoo, perhaps a place to display plants arranged by colour. That's what photographs show us. We lose the idea of space and movement in a garden, of quiet pauses, the use of emptiness. Everywhere we find gardens crammed with restless incident - and as a photographer's dream, these are often the gardens we are offered as models in books and magazines. I often wonder what people actually make of some of the gardens in the flesh, having seen the glossy glamorised version first.

I believe the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes is illuminating here. When people are told that a garden is wonderful often enough, they believe it and their eyes will surely see it that way. But sadly we have no delinquent small boy disrupting this tale with unpalatable truth. Consider - there are magazines featuring six gardens a month, there are about a dozen dedicated garden magazines all wanting their quota of gardens, the weekend newspapers nearly always feature a garden and then there are other more general periodicals which regularly feature gardens. Are there really enough class gardens to satisfy this appetite? Hardly. And are they all continually in peak condition and at their best season? Unlikely.

Then there is the cult of celebrity to contend with: gardens of celebrities, celebrity gardeners, celebrity gardens, gardens made by celebrities. All lovely? Clearly there is a distinction between private gardens made purely for their owners' pleasure and those open to the public. A private garden is a private concern, and may be a plant collection, a barbecue site, a football pitch - whatever. But once a garden is open to the public, expectations should rise.

Unfortunately our garden visiting suffers the problems of charity and amateurism. Garden visiting is virtually monopolised by the National Gardens Scheme, and the consequences are not all beneficial. If you want to open your garden at all, you have to open sometimes for the NGS, - unless you can afford to advertise on national television, - because the Yellow Book is the source of almost every garden visit. Playwrights and novelists don't offer their work to the public for charity, but a garden maker must. If you need to make some money from entrance fees to fund the garden you face a hard, uphill and dispiriting task. It is heartbreaking to open for charity on an Easter Sunday for the NGS and have two hundred visitors and then open for business on Easter Monday and have not a soul turn up.

So garden visiting is predominantly a charitable exercise. This clearly has to inhibit the serious criticism that could raise standards. No one wants to hurt the feelings of someone doing a good deed. And people tell me that garden owners wouldn't open if they thought the garden might be subject to criticism - whereas authors, playwrights, artists and musicians long to be taken seriously enough to get reviewed. All this helps to keep us locked into amateurism and all the downsides of that culture. We are stuck with a popular image of garden opening as a genteel activity focused around jolly nice teas, and gardening as a dull hobby for the middle-aged.

I recently saw an argument that a work of art should "interest the eye, excite the brain, move the mind to reflection, and involve the heart"… (and ideally)….. "come at us from an unexpected angle and stop us short in wonder." (3) I think gardens could just about manage this if we were prepared to take them a bit more seriously. And pigs might fly?

1. In his preface to his book "Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening"

2. Quoted in "The Genius of Place: the English Landscape Garden, 1660-1820 ed. John Dixon Hunt & Peter Willis; London: Paul Elek 1975.

3. Julian Barnes "Breaking the Mould" The Daily Telegraph December 15th 2001.

Published in the Hardy Plant, Spring 2002

Rose. © Charles Hawes