Elymus triangle, Veddw. © Charles Hawes

The Hardy Plant 1997

Moral Extremes in the Garden by Anne Wareham

Did the great liberation of the 1960s go too far? Are people now waking up to the price we have paid for the extremes born in that era? Is it time to review the attitudes that the last generation have grown up with? In other words - do we need to take a fresh look at standards in gardening in this country?

Consider this comment by one of our popular gardening writers:"Creating a garden is as valid an artistic experience as anything that Rodin may have felt, bashing away at his sculpture. It is important that tenets of so-called good taste should not intrude here. Gardening must never be put on a pedestal. All that matters is that it should give its maker pleasure." (Anna Pavord "Gardening Companion" 1992 Chatto & Windus p.60.)Or what about this?

Recently, on a television programme which was based on helping gardeners with their problems, someone asked for help to design an island bed in the middle of their lawn. Instead of being advised to abandon such a horrific idea, they were told to plant it "however they liked." This seemed to me to be singularly unhelpful, most especially since the presenter then sneered at the result. Another programme has since invited us to admire a garden where the owner proudly told us that he likes to grow anything and everything that spontaneously appears in the garden, without interfering.

Against these extremes of liberation I would like to argue a case for the opposite end of the spectrum - beginning with an assertion that how we design our gardens is a moral issue. This is what Gertrude Jeykll has to say:"I am strongly of the opinion that the possession of a quantity of plants, however good the plants may be themselves and however ample their number, does not make a garden; it only makes a collection. Having got the plants, the great thing is to use them with careful selection and definite intention...... it seems to me the duty we owe to our gardens and to our own bettering in gardens is so to use the plants that they shall form beautiful pictures; and that, while delighting our eyes, they should always be training those eyes to a more exalted criticism; to a state of mind and artistic conscience that will not tolerate bad or careless combination or any sort of misuse of plants, but in which it becomes a point of honour to be always striving for the best. It is just in the way it is done that lies the whole difference between commonplace gardening and gardening that may rightly claim to rank as a fine art." (Gertrude Jekyll "Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden, Antique Collectors' Club edition 1987 p 17.)

Now this is stuff I like, and I would appreciate the present gardening world to similarly demand that I take my gardening seriously. I like the idea of having a duty to my garden. It is a big thing, I think, to be changing the landscape, and not to be done lightly, casually or in a simply self-indulgent way. It takes a lot of work to undo someone else's gardening efforts. (I speak with the voice of experience here.) Many people make gardens which impinge on others people's sight, and consideration of their neighbours should ( - oh, forbidden word!) encourage them to take their gardening activity seriously. But more than this, it is totally dispiriting and depressing to put effort into something that you are not taking seriously. It is far from being liberating and exciting - it is only a hair's breadth away from an enormous and flattening "so what?"

Miscanthus in autumn. © Charles Hawes

Imagine - there you are, with your inevitable impulse plant purchase, wandering round, wondering where best to put it. You consider the colour of its flowers and begin to feel concerned. "No, it won't fit with that; no, it wouldn't be quite right there." And then you realise that it really doesn't matter where you put it. No-one cares and there are no standards that you aspire to. You can stick it in anywhere. Well - why bother?

I prefer to believe that it is important for us all to strive to do everything we do to the very best of our abilities, for the good of our morale and our self-esteem. I believe it is worth reading everything about gardening that I can get my hands on; worth spending every holiday studying other people's gardens; worth steeling myself to remove plants that have taken years to grow when I am at last forced to admit that they are in the wrong place. (Fellow extremists may be interested to know that this once led to my transplanting a fully grown rose bush in a drought. It survived.) I have almost - almost please note,- given up buying plants on impulse, as I've got so fed up with not being able to find a good place for them. I hate the way they glower at me from their pots, reproaching me for my greed.

Many of us like to claim that gardening is an art. If it is, then perhaps it merits critical judgement, careful study and the effort of learning to be discerning, of not simply admiring every arrangement of plants in a garden as "lovely." Thus I make myself unpopular with my fellow gardeners, who find me shocking in my inability to be pleased with the average garden I see.

It is interesting to me that it is in the area of design that we have been encouraged to be lazy and "liberated", not in the practical gardening work. Yet it is there that liberation is required. In my experience a great deal that we are instructed to do in our gardens is unnecessary and unresearched. I don't wish us to return to all Victorian values - in particular I have no great faith in hard work performed simply for its own sake. I think we could benefit from spending less time digging, scarifying our lawns (who wants a scared lawn ?) and spraying insects, and instead spend more time sitting and looking, walking and looking, standing and looking - and always wondering - is this the very best I can do?

Published in The Hardy Plant Autumn 1997

Hedges in snow. © Charles Hawes