The Garden 2002

Viewpoint Piece for "The Garden" by Anne Wareham

Gardens are often casually referred to as "art", but I think this is more a result of sloppy thinking than a serious proposition. We certainly don't behave as if gardens are art.

Imagine if we transferred our current garden visiting preoccupations to visits to art galleries. The majority of visitors would be there to admire the paints. 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 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 and how to deal with woodworm in your frames. 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.

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.

Elymus at Veddw. © Charles Hawes

Most garden visits in England and Wales are made through 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, then open for business on Easter Monday and have not a soul turn up.

So garden visiting is predominantly a charitable exercise. This is clearly going 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.

The aesthetic standards of the NGS are not terribly high, but their prestige is. Visitors are no doubt awed by this status and tend to take what is offered as a model of the ideal garden. 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.

It might be thought that show gardens at Chelsea, Chaumont, or now at Westonbirt, are closer to conventional art, both in the way the gardens are displayed, and in the nature of the gardens on display. Many show gardens, such as Dr Christine Facer's "Genetic Garden" at Westonbirt, could transfer quite happily to Tate Modern. But if these gardens are reviewed anywhere, it will be alongside the cookery pages and suggestions about what to do about slugs. And do visitors see beyond the plants and any gimmicks? It is a shame that when medals are awarded for show gardens no detailed explication is given which might raise public consciousness and stimulate discussion.

How have we become such rotten garden visitors and indifferent garden makers? The universal lack of serious criticism is central. 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 practical hints sometimes tagged on at the end - the garden maker as handyman. Criticism of gardens is confined to privately complaining about outdoor housekeeping, lamenting the weeds or the wilt. 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 educates, it informs, it raises consciousness, promotes intelligent debate and so raises standards.

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. Weather is filtered out. Everywhere we now 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.

A photograph of a garden! View across Veddw South Gardens. © Charles Hawes

I often wonder what people actually make of some of these gardens in the flesh, having seen the glossy glamorised version first. Some of our most celebrated gardens are, after all, more spin than substance. The story of the Emperor's New Clothes is pertinent here. When people are told that a garden is wonderful often enough they believe it, and their eyes then surely see it that way. But sadly we have no delinquent small boy disrupting this tale with unpalatable truth. Consider - most garden magazines feature several gardens each month. There are about ten dedicated garden magazines all wanting their quota, the weekend newspapers almost always feature a garden and then there are many other more general periodicals which regularly feature gardens. Are there really enough good 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?

For the past fifteen years I have been making what I hope is a serious garden - in the sense that I hope it is worth taking seriously, even where it may entertain, amuse or fail. Because of our polite silence about the quality of gardens, calling them all "lovely" and never saying why, I have been making my garden in isolation, with no exchange with my peers. This lack of dialogue must affect the quality of what I make.

Reflecting Pool. © Charles Hawes

Of course, as in any other art form, technical proficiency is crucial, but it is actually easy enough for an amateur to learn "how to garden". Long before Alan Titchmarsh there were the "Expert" books. It is even easy enough to learn the rudiments of garden design from books. But that is not enough for those of us below genius level to learn to make a garden which might merit the term "art". We need to live in a world where that art is taken seriously. I am sad to report that the few illuminating or helpful comments about my garden have tended to come from non gardeners.

It was someone who just happened to be accompanying a coach tour who spent an hour in the pool garden enjoying the reflections and the trees, and then compared the design to the composition of a piece of music, giving me a totally new perspective. The only visitor to become really excited about how the garden pays tribute to the local landscape and history, and how it plays with ideas of "natural" and "wild," was a novelist. Her interest led to discussion which helped me develop these themes. Gardeners tend to say "lovely garden, what's that plant?"

So what do we need to do to return British gardens to the art world? The Arts Council could offer bursaries to garden makers and innovative garden projects. We could separate garden appreciation from hints on slug control; and we could create a forum for serious discussion and criticism of gardens. Most of all we could find a way to break out of the "gardener's ghetto", where gardens are only seen to be of interest to gardeners. 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." This is a great aspiration, and something our gardens rarely meet. But we could do it. I'm game.

Published in "The Garden" August 2002

Gladiolus.(oh, yes it is..) Veddw. © Anne Wareham