So you thought gardening was the ultimate free-and-easy activity, did you? One where there’s no right and wrong when it comes to taste; just what cheers you up? Where you can put a garden gnome in the herbaceous border without worrying if the neighbours will sneer?
Well, you’re wrong, obviously. Every garden institution in the country, from Gardener’s Question Time on Radio 4 to the Royal Horticultural Society, is desperately trying to broaden the gardening community to be more diverse, younger, environmentally friendly etc, but make no mistake: gardens are socially divisive — especially now we’re told there are no rules.
The society garden writer, Isabelle Bannerman, in her latest book Husbandry (a pun on cultivation, and her husband-gardener) declares that there is now no Nancy Mitford-style U and non-U gardening. Except as a large garden owner, Flora Watkins, observes in The Spectator, this is untrue, for she instantly undermines her own argument by gunning for variegated leaves and blowsy daffodils.
Gardens are a minefield. For the socially insecure, it’s just one more area to slip up. The late Queen flouted the rules by enjoying cheerful red geraniums but others are less confident. The mischievous Nicky Haslam regularly includes plants in his list of Things Nicky Haslam finds Common — palm trees and tortured topiary yes, but hydrangeas? (I am completely over the Annabelle, but a nice blue lacecap?)
My Thompson and Morgan catalogue is full of flowers in bad taste. Bedding plants — especially double begonias. (Monty Don hates begonias per se.) Busy Lizzies? Nooo. And in a hanging basket…actually, anything in a hanging basket. Snapdragons or wallflowers, great, but multicoloured dwarf ones, nope.
It’s simplest just to take advice from the best garden writers: Robin Lane Fox, who gardens at New College Oxford; Vita Sackville West, the ultimate arbiter of good taste; Beth Chatto.
I have a simpler rule to identify the horticultural pariah: if you are lucky enough to have a garden in London, use it. Decking, all-covering paving…concrete, all mark you out as unfit to have a garden.
Do not talk to these people.
