I Didn’t Get Where I am Today by Sitting Around Reading Ben’s Garden Blog

One day I hope to make a horticultural living, it’s a seedy ambition I’ll admit. I once thought that love, music, and gardening were above an hourly price, and that to confess a desire to do them for cash would be like admitting ‘one day I hope to make a living from my favourite daughter’. How could I sully something so beautiful and pure just to put bread in my mouth and beer in my belly? Well I’m thirsty and hungry and I don’t care anymore. I’ve sold my soul to the Great Green God and the high priests of BTECH and I want my earthly rewards.

High priests of BTECH deciding this years syllabus.

So I’ve started thinking about my career, and as part of my investigations into Making a Fortune and Getting Away With It I have come across a curious breed of people, the Pro-gardener. Pro-gardeners are tough hard-hitting male workers who don’t do gardens – they do jobs. If every statement you hear starts with: ‘I didn’t get where I am today by….’, you can bet you have strayed into conversation with a pro-gardener. ‘I didn’t get where I am today by walking around with my shoe laces untied’ ‘I didn’t get where I am today by wasting time eating vegetables’ ‘I didn’t get where I am today by twatting about on the internet’. Well Mr Alan Garden Sugar neither did I, they’re just things I like to do on the journey.

Pro-gardeners have a universal collective delusion that they are not horticultural workers, but mercenary bionic soldiers from the future. They swap notes and stories on X-K-8000 loppers and Slash-Master 3000 lawn mowers. They talk about kill ratios, conquests and terraforming alien ecosystems with massive muscle bound JCB diggers. The pro-gardener is an unfathomable and scary beast, and the main weapon in their arsenal is that some of them actually make money (almost unknown in the horticultural sector), but listen closely I have discovered a chink in their steel toe-capped armour! Their one natural enemy, a group whose mere mention will drive them to beetroot-faced strops and howls of snotty nosed derision. The jobbing gardener.

The jobbing gardener and the pro-gardener are locked in eternal combat, both service the same area and both are self-employed. The pro has the kit, the jobber has the price, the pro has a sign written van (something like ‘Ace 1 Gardens 4U – Be The Best’), the jobber has a bicycle and a rucksack full of jam sandwiches. But it is not competition that stokes the pro-gardeners antipathy – it is shame. The jobber reminds the pro of the horrible secret lurking behind their apparent success. The secret that its not very hard to mow a lawn, anyone can do it, all you have to do is walk in straight line.

Ace 1 Gardens 4U

Being of Orwellian mind I naturally sympathise with the jobber. These are the plongeurs of the gardening world. Downtrodden toilers who refuse to dignify humiliating labour by ascending the slippery golden ladder of success. To expand, to invest, to take out insurance and buy a decent pair of shears, all these things would be to admit defeat to the world and its salary driven norms. It is for the jobber that the Jolly Gardeners pubs of England are named, hard working men with no ambition beyond finishing a hot days toil and having a frothy pint of ale, and certainly no mind to go home and draw up a marketing plan. However being a hip young urbanite I have all manner of successful friends to keep up with, all sorts of expensive vices to indulge and a heavy London rent to pay – things that all whisper to me of a fleet of shiny silver BensGarden 4U vans, packed with well oiled Extermatron 900 strimmers and micro chipped smart trousers; after all I won’t get where I’m going by sitting in the sunshine drinking tea.

So here I teeter, like a young Anakin Skywalker battling with my conscience and the temptations of the Dark Side. A solution must found and something must be done. I invite reader contributions into how to strike gold in the world of horticulture without turning into a tosspot. Any winning answers will be entitled to either a 10% share of my future profits or a flagon of foaming ale (which at the moment look like being roughly equivalent in value).

Great gardeners of history #2

And so we must leave the Dark Ages, and with them St. Fiacre, crosiers, and the fragrance of unwashed monks, this month’s Great Historical Gardener is already waiting for us some 1200 years away. And he’s sickening fast.

Quickly then! Onwards and Eastwards! Let us hasten through the centuries and across the continent to the Crimean town of Yalta and the year of 1897. O.K? Good, Now lets just pause here by the sea for a moment, to catch our breath and exchange cassocks for waistcoats, before we meander up the hill to meet the second of our gardening greats; a consumptive doctor called Anton Chekhov.

Anton

Chekhov moved to Yalta from Moscow in 1897, in the hope that the milder air of the Russian Riviera would help combat his tuberculosis. He built himself a house and then settled down to write and to garden; the two activities that would occupy him until his death seven years later at the age of only 44. It was here that he created what some argue are his greatest works The Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters and The Lady With The Dog. Almost no-one argues that his garden was one of his greatest works, good enough to eclipse even The Seagull, but this is just because you can’t withdraw gardens from the library and scribble all over them in green highlighter (to the Putney Library user with the green highlighter – you selfish bastard). Chekhov’s garden is the living growing expression of the horticultural philosophy outlined in his works of literature, a philosophy that is unconsciously shared by all great gardeners; and therefore worth examining in great and mind numbing detail, you lucky readers.

As a Russian Chekhov’s writing is heavily infused with descriptions of the natural world. I think because there is so much nature in Russia that it is impossible for it not to encroach on an author, and to enter all his works. It’s the same principle that drives Irvine Walsh as a Scotsman to write about drugs and Jeffery Archer as a politician to write about horse dung. Chekhov’s writing about nature displays none of the melancholy of Turganev or the swamping grandeur of Tolstoy. In Chekhov’s work nature is not necessarily the saviour of man, but man the guardian of nature. This is a gardener writing before he came to gardening, a man who recognises that humanity and nature are entwined and inseparable. He knows that man can irreversibly and casually ruin a garden (or lake or forest or steppe), but also than man working in close harmony with the earth can create something far more beautiful than the sum of its parts.

Chekhov and Tolstoy chat compost

In A Letter, an unfinished work Chekhov was composing when he died, the author writes ‘the most beautiful and the most rational, powerful, invincible part of nature is the part created by the genius of man, independently from nature’s will’ Quite right Anton! This is not the writing of a Russian disillusioned by mans cruelty and looking to nature for redemption, this is the work of an ambitious and questing garden designer. Chekhov was no smallholding, cabbage growing, good life fantasist. He recognised that in his garden man did not need ‘a small plot’ in which to vegetate, he needs ‘the entire terrestrial globe, the entire nature, unhampered, then he would be able to display all traits and features of his free spirit’

Chekhov in the garden

This is the spirit that drives Chekhov to be ambitious in both his horticultural literature and his garden: a play about an orchard becomes a melodrama set in a 2,500 acre cherry orchard, and a steeply sloping batch of bare Yalta earth becomes a heavenly paradise of native and exotic plants. Chekov gardened with abandon, he planted: 57 types of rose, 159 types of arboreal shrub, he planted 11 camellias and wrote ‘It was a miracle: camellia has blossomed in the ground in my garden- this phenomenon seems to be unknown in Yalta’. He planted 12 types of cherry trees; he planted pears, currents, gooseberries, peach trees, almond trees, apricots, quinces, watermelons, artichokes, asparagus and sunflowers. He planted Irises by the thousand, chrysanthemums and lilies, delighting in each bloom and eagerly anticipating the next. In the last years of his existence Chekov’s garden was his life. It seems a shame that this most noble gardening legacy has been eclipsed by something so tawdry as a literary reputation.

So my gardening pilgrims, give Sissinghurst a miss this year, Versailles can wait. To neon Yalta on the Black Sea – there lies the greatest small garden by the greatest small storywriter the world has ever seen.

Garden pilgrims visiting Yalta

Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (or, Physalia – the Brilliant Bionic Boat)

Being a gardener I know a few things about building. I know a patio is built on hardcore and sharp sand. I know a pergola is built on 300mm concrete blocks. And I know that life is built on broken dreams. Dreams of plants unflowered, dreams of crops that never grew, and most hauntingly, dreams of the open sea.

The Plan of Broken Dreams

Like most young men I grew up longing to be a pirate. To race around The Spanish Main, cursing and drinking and loosing thunderous broadsides, is there any better way to live? I spent long hours at university practicing my swigging, my spitting and my swashbuckling, all in preparation for the day when I would take up my graduate position as a Scurvy Nave. But it was not to be, man chooses not his fate and I was powerless to resist the call of the garden. So it is that I have spent these past years leaning on my spade and watching as friend after friend pierces his ear, ties his bandanna and embarks for a life of rape and pillage under hot Caribbean sun.

So thank god that after over 6000 years of civilisation someone has finally designed a sea worthy garden. At last the average Joe Horticulture can chase death, doubloons and dusky maidens across the Seven Seas, and not loose his tender annuals to salt spray. I give you the work of Vincent Callebaut and his magnificent floating garden – Physalia.

Physalia

A collision between a whale, a jellyfish and a fertile architectural imagination, ladies and gentlemen, this is the future.

Physalia commeth

Physalia will travel around the waterways of Europe with a cargo of scientists busily cleaning H20 and researching in a carbon neutral manner.

Physalia on Thames

An exceptionally interesting and eccentric thinker Callebaut has also designed floating cities for climate change refugees and a metabolic farm for urban agriculture in the shape of a butterfly. In his touring botanical garden there will be four main plating areas; Earth, Air, Water and Fire.

Air Garden

Let Callebaut be our catalyst and take to the oceans! Come ye, you alotmenteers and flower heads, you rakers and pruners! You are free gardeners, and you have as much authority to make war on the whole world, as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea and an army of 100,000 men. We shall grow fat on the blood of the rich while our fruits grow plump in Physalia’s hold and the waterways of Europe become cleaner and cleaner. For me the world has won back a bit of its magic.

Tea Almighty Ascendant

All of my gardening acquaintances are saturated with tea. If you poke them in the stomach little rivers of tea flow from their eyes and nose, there simply is not enough room in the modern gardener to fit in any more tea; they would certainly pop. This means that some other demographic must be behind the recently reported rise in tea sales, and it seems that the general public are responsible.

Radio 4’s Food Programme yesterday celebrated the leafy infusion’s resurgence in the U.K and Europe by sending a reporter to Malawi to sit in the shade and drink tea. Today I would like to join that brave journalist in paying tribute to Camellia sinesis by exploring what has prompted the return of the tea.

The triumphant return

As everyone knows tea is the yang to coffee’s yin. The two liquids are cosmically entwined, and much like good and evil one cannot exist without the other. This has been hugely harmful to tea sales over the last 30 years, as Evil is so much more exiting than Good. Tea speaks of comfort, reassurance and contentment, coffee whispers of sex, late nights and existentialism. I blame the Parisians; Parisians need coffee and cigarettes almost as much as they need oxygen, they adopted the South American bean as their own and they spun it into the metropolitan myth of berets, black clothes and affairs, thereby making it chic and sexy.

Next time you meet a Parisian tell them that Britain’s first coffee house opened before France’s (1650 and 1675 respectively) and that coffee is a far more British beverage than French, you’ll see them disown their national drink almost instantly. Luckily for tea sales on the continent the only thing more uncool and gauche than Le Rosbif is an American. It is the  sit-com Friends that ultimately claims responsibility for the rise in tea consumption in Paris. Setting the least cool television programme ever produced by the least cool nation on earth in a coffee house has dealt the black bean brew a blow from which it may never recover.

Parisians

So tea sales are on the rise in Paris and we can pinpoint why, but they are also rising in the U.K. Radio 4 claims that this is down to the new breed of tea enthusiast rushing around to get their high end Camellia kicks. This is nonsense, the gourmet tea market is certainly growing but it has such little impact on overall sales that it is effectively non-existent. In order for there to have seen a significant rise in overall consumption the general public must have been buying more tea. The reason for this shift in consumer habits is of course, xenophobia.

Xenophobia, racist scare scaremongering and a political shift to the right wing is the traditional European response to periods of crises. Economies start tanking, France gets Sarkozy, Italy welcomes back Berlusconi; we get David Cameron, Nick Griffin and good Honest British Cuppa. It’s a traditional drink for the traditionally minded. However, deep in the hearts of even the least forward thinking bigot there must be doubts over whether they can really extinguish the threat of multiculturalism just by drinking tea, some might even have realised that much of the tea they drink comes from India and China; the very economies that threaten to come over here and devour our women. Well chin up Little Englander I have good news! They grow tea in Cornwall.

Tregothnan estate in the sunny southwest has been producing tea on a commercial scale for a number of years. Apparently the climate is very similar to Darjeeling and they harvest around a ton a year. You’d think that Karl Marx would be happy that the proletariat can now grow their own hardy Camillia sinensis cultivars in back gardens across the land, and that they no longer have to rely on the bourgeoisie industrialists to supply their caffeine fix, but actually Karl only ever drunk herbal lemon infusions and frequently claimed that ‘all proper tea is theft’.

Karl Marx

The World’s 11th Most Deadly Plant

The young don’t like gardening, and I’m not surprised when information leaked from the Internet informs me that privet is now considered the world’s 11^th most deadly plant. This ludicrous terror scare gives yet more ammunition to cool trendsetters who argue that the plant kingdom is the wimp’s kingdom, and that gardeners are the wimpy bodyguards of the wimp’s kingdom. I’m quite happy living in a nice safe world – like most readers here I’d usually take a cup of tea over a syringe full of heroin, and a stroll in the park over a bit of base jumping, but I’m an aberration against the world of cool, and I’m afraid as someone who reads gardening blogs, you are too. Safe is out, ludicrous risk is where it’s at in 2010. In order to get the young to like gardening we need to sex it up, we need to show off the dangerous side of the green-fingered way of life: we need to make it cool.

The world's least captivating killer

But how does one go about convincing the over stimulated and prematurely cynical youth of today that gardening is actually a radical life-affirming image-defining statement? (Cool people don’t have hobbies, they have statements)  One way to do it would be to focus on the plants, however I’ve been looking out of my window at the worlds 11^th most deadly plant for half an hour now, and it hasn’t done anything edgy at all. Plants can be dangerous of course; in the village I grew up in there is an old man whose brain has been parasitically infiltrated by a colony of Dahlias, all he can think and talk about is Dahlias. No doubt those flowers will eventually kill him, and it is a tragic tale, but it is not one that suits a heavy rock backing track and fast cut camera switches to good-looking guys with spiky hair, so we can’t use it as a cool converter.

If the plants are out then that just leaves the people. It is up to us, the gardening faithful, to show the world what gardeners are really like. Paul Debois recently published 43 Gardeners’ Hands, a moving collection of photographs of gardeners hands that examined what it meant to be a gardener in the pre-cool days, all nurture and earthliness and the value of hard work. I suggest the follow up be 43 Gardeners’ Scars where well known gardeners show of their most X-treme disfigurements and tell a little back-story something like ‘This is my black big toenail. Me and a bunch of mates had been gardening for like, 48 hours without stopping or sleeping or eating, it was getting pretty wild and I dropped a paving stone on my foot’. Then all we need to do is make a video of all the most beautiful and nubile in the gardening world cavorting around the allotment, pushing each other in the pond and pruning in their underpants because they don’t give a fig about you or your values, sell it to a mobile phone company to use as their new zeitgeisty advert and gardening is cool. Sorted.

Please get in touch with me if you have any interesting gardening scars or you would like to cavort naked around an allotment with me.

Prometheus Pyrphoros

Late December and Mother Nature sprawls unconscious, magnificently exhausted by her nine-month orgy of blossom and bloom. Many gardeners use this time of respite as a period of reflection, a time to review the successes and failures of the previous year and to plan for the next. These ‘gardeners’ think that because not much is growing, and because they’ve worked so very hard all year long, that somehow they are entitled to sneak inside, to sip full-fat milk and flip through seed catalogues. This is not so. When you sell your soul to the garden you reap the rewards in balmy summer, and in the frigid winter, you pay. To be a real gardener requires at least a show of year-round faith, even in February.

But how to reconcile the need for sacrifice with mans desire not to get depressed and really cold? Impossible? No! As the botanical Prometheus I here defy the gods of horticulture and bring you the secret to enjoyable winter gardening. No longer will you spend the months of penance defrosting borders with a hairdryer. No longer will your hands freeze to your gloves and your gloves freeze to your wheelbarrow and your carpet get ruined. No longer will each day end with a tearful promise never to garden again. I bring you fire. A bonfire.

Ben of Ben's Garden

A bonfire is to midwinter as a picnic is to midsummer; it is a spontaneous outpouring of lust life and lemonade. Like picnics, bonfires should not be overly planned they should just happen.  Bonfires clear gardens without requiring any conscious effort, who doesn’t remember running around their parents’ garden joyously pulling up sticks and benches and watering cans to throw into the fire. Light a bonfire in your garden and before you know it every scrap of rubbish will have been burned, it’s just such good fun to burn things.

As well as providing some valuable outside hours for the winter gardener, bonfires provide social relief for the usually solitary horticulturalist. My friends rarely seem enthusiastic when I call them to say ‘hey I’m about to mow the lawn. Do you fancy coming along?’ and those that do turn up to watch only do so out of a sense of obligation.  But if I telephone with the promise of fire an exited turnout is almost guaranteed. Bonfires also give off a lovely woody smoky aroma that clings to spectators and means that you can smoke cigarettes without my girlfriend finding out.   

So this winter don’t give up on gardening, just light a bonfire, open a bottle of red wine and try to convince yourself its hard work.

Here’s a fine day — let us kill something

And so on to the Victorians, high-minded and heavily moustachioed exporters of British culture par excellence, and more specifically onto The Victorian Gardening Childhood, one that I missed by only century. Thank God.

I have long believed that the dominance of the British Empire was a not a consequence of industrialisation, navel supremacy or even Allan Quartermain, but was a direct result of the horticultural education of the Victorian young. Children of the nineteenth century were started on their botanical studies early, and their education was a disciplined and rigorous one. Jane Loudon’s The Young Gardeners’ Yearbook published in 1855 is typical in its advise that the principle tool in the young gardeners arsenal should be the budding knife, that beds should be carefully measured out by the child using pegs and string, and that fanciful shapes should be avoided as they hinder planting in straight lines. She informs the lucky recipient of her austere almanac that propagation from bud  is not a technique to be undertaken sloppily, and that the summer months will require strenuous labour on behalf of the child to obtain a neat and therefore perfect garden. With a childhood so overbearingly dull and structured as this it’s no wonder that adult Victorians desired nothing more than to join the army and gad about the world conquering and subjugating and picking up venereal diseases. It’s what I’d have done.

A Jane Loudon Illustration

So it has been refreshing to find a Victorian garden writer who shares the same views I do, the great Samuel Reynolds Hole, Dean of Rochester. This is a man who understands that when a schoolboy wakes up on a balmy summers dawn, he does not gleefully rush down to weed his geometrically correct spinach plantation, but in the words of Charles Lamb, he exclaims: ‘Here’s a fine day — let us kill something’. Children have short attention spans, they had short attention spans before playstations were invented, and they will have short attention spans when all the playstations are recycled and Britain is turned into one giant eco-friendly non carbon emitting bean farm (throwing beans, stealing beans and finding amusingly phallic beans will then become the new childhood plague to worry over-concerned adults who long for the simple halcyon days of their own childhood, where they spent happy days surfing the internet and never threw a bean from year to year – just you watch). Children can’t be forced to garden; they must come to it of their own volition, as an adult and through a series of lifestyle revelations (read disillusionments).

The great Dean knew this well, author of the seminal A Book About Roses, he writes of his own childhood attitude to gardening that:

I recall a period when, in the enthusiastic language of youth, all the recreations which I liked were “ripping” and all those which I disliked were “rot.” The man who ventured to admire such ordinary rubbish as scenery, sunsets, and flowers, was denounced as a “duffer,” and his conversation was “bosh.”

This Dean truly speaks the language of youth!

Reynolds Hole also understands that not everyone will appreciate a garden in the same way writing:

I asked a schoolboy, in the sweet summertide, “what he thought a garden was for?” And he said, Strawberries. His younger sister suggested Croquet and the elder Garden-parties. The brother from Oxford made a prompt declaration in favour of Lawn Tennis and Cigarettes.

Any scorn is reserved for adults who purported to be visiting his garden and then spent their time admiring such things as brickwork, or gossiping about subjects non-floral. One particularly hurtful example is recorded in his book, while  eavesdropping on the conversation between two visitors to his garden,

I heard a lady speaking to her companion of “the most perfect gem she had everseen,” and when, supposing that reference was made to some exquisite novelty in plants, I inquired the name and habitation, I was informed that the subject under discussion was “Isabel’s new baby !” “Ladies,” I remarked, with a courteous but scathing satire, “I have been a baby myself, and am now a proprietor, but I am constrained to inform you that this is a private, and not a nursery, garden.”

I recommend anyone who has an hour spare track down a copy of Our Gardens and bathe in the knowledge of The Dean of Rochester. Some of his ideas on the history of British gardening are questionable (I doubt it was the Romans who first introduced vegetables to the natives of these Isles and weaned them off a diet of acorns) but if his account of the pleasures of returning to tend to your garden after a hard days work was leaked to The City I’m sure we would see almost immediate bankruptcy in all but a few of the capitals bars, nightclubs and brothels. So go, read and when you raise your offspring let them grow as children and not as gardeners, if they are destined to bear the trowel, they will find their own way there.

The Iceni Rebellion - Fuelled by acorns.

Great Gardeners of History #1

The Early Middle Ages are widely reviled in gardening circles (I have found out at great cost). Spiteful criticism by rent-a-gob garden polemicists of the 1300’s has lead to an ill-thought-out, but almost universally swallowed consensus, that this was a period barren of any insightful design, lazy in hard landscaping, and slapdash in its planting. Curmudgeonly critic Petrarch sums up the establishments entrenched ideology best when he says:

Each famous author gardener of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and another cause of dishonour to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings gardens that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage.

Not so Mr P, not so. Today I am strapping on my revisionist armour and sallying forth to pull the Dark Ages and their accompanying ancestral heritage out of the compost bin. So without further ado I bring you the stinking, naked and well rotted, St Fiacre, Patron Saint of Gardeners.

Well Rotted - St Fiacre

That’s right the patron saint of gardeners is not Percy Thrower. It is an Irish monk born circa 595A.D. The Hibernian Monks are most famous for protecting Christianity and western learning from the rampaging barbarian tribes that toured Europe after the fall of Rome, and for drunkenness. They are less famous for their protection of tasteful gardening from the thuggish pagans (who liked playing football and having barbecues in their gardens). St Fiacre was one of those roguish Irish charmers, endowed with the wealth of the worlds gardening knowledge. Like any moderately talented Irishman Fiacre realised that the Emerald Isle is far to small to effectively propagate ambition. Unlike the modern day Irishman he did not flee to London, Sydney or New York, but went to France, to an area of woodland near the Nore River. Here he built a simple cell to live in, and started to do some serious gardening: he grew herbs, he grew vegetables, he grew fruit and he grew magic ivy, he also grew marrows to gigantic sizes and made them into chutney to serve in his hospice. As a kitchen gardener he was superb, as a show gardener he was better than average (bronze medal standard), but it was for his garden clearance ability that he was sainted, told by the local bishop he could have all the land he could clear in a day he simply walked around with his crosier uprooting trees and thundering through brambles like a huge great tonsured flail mower. Here is gardener of huge talent ambition and diversity willing to travel the world in the services of gardens, insufferable neglect this is not.

The monastic strain

‘So what!’ I hear you cry ‘One swallow does not make a summer’ ‘I’ve studied for RHS level 2, I know my syllabus, Dark Age gardens are “squat, bulbous, boggy, choleretic, and aesthetically bankrupt”. Boggy they may be, but it is from this unappealing bog that today’s garden movement springs. Lovers of antiquity such as Petrarch can delight in gardens, but they will never be a part of a garden in the way that St Fiacre was. For the gardeners of antiquity, their high medieval followers and their renaissance offspring to be in a garden is great – to be a gardener is to be uncultured poor and servile. It is with the separate historical strand of monasticism that we see the garden interacted with and the physical connection celebrated in a way that anyone with an allotment will recognise.

So all you small holders, allotmenteers and grow-your-owners, the next time a stranger at a dinner party tries to spend an entire evening talking to you about Gardens The Dark Ages, please to not guffaw derisively in their face, for I am talking about your forefathers.

WHN6ERVWYHB2

London’s Blighted Heart

As my confidants know all to well, I have deep and fond feelings towards Fulham Palace. My girlfriend and I once crashed an art opening there and spent a fine evening wandering around late medieval galleries while drinking as much free wine as our stomachs could  stretch around, it was blissful.  Now, it is a self evident truth that the only thing that can possibly give more joy to a good Christian than a belly full of purloined wine is a well maintained botanic garden, so I expected my visit to the palace grounds last week to bring me the same feeling of exuberant exhilaration that took me to the point of nausea that night. My friends, I was not sick once, not even off the bridge on the way home.

So what was lacking? Well,  Fulham Palace’s website (www.fulhampalace.org) says that it boasts ‘a relaxing café-bar within a graceful drawing room which overlooks the extensive botanic gardens’. This is a misleading statement, ‘botanic gardens’ is a gross misnomer, ‘gardens’ is a great misnomer. I have written to the palace suggesting they change the copy to read ‘Fulham Palace boasts a relaxing café-bar within a graceful drawing room which overlooks the outside’

Extensive botanical gardens

I have not been gardening as long as some, and like all mortals I am fallible, but to me that does not look like a view of extensive botanic gardens. It looks like a view of a lawn and some brambles; it looks as though as they’ve hired my father as head gardener.

On seeing this woeful vista I did not despair; yes the borders leave a lot to be desired, but what kind of man goes to his nearest Bishop’s garden for the borders? A fool! Visitors of inquisitive mind will naturally be drawn to the more expressive areas of his local Grace’s gardens, to the areas that demonstrate the torment of balancing  secular governance with spiritual shepherding, in short, to the 18^th century walled kitchen garden with Buxus knot. Here lies the soul of the garden, and I’m afraid that this garden has bared its soul to sin.

Enter

The Knot garden comprises of a series of low box hedges enclosing all the herbs a bishop of refined taste buds in the1760’s would have ever needed. The sign at the entrance promised me Feverfew, Sage, Hyssop and Tansy. It promised me Ladslove and Lemonbalm Sorrel and Pansy. What it delivered was Rosemary, a monstrously overgrown Golden bay and an even more outsized Green bay. The Box hedge was under attack from some of the worst box blight I have ever seen, and the whole thing was topped of with a thoughtless piece of modern art from the airport foyer school. (But broadsides be damned, the whole garden is almost redeemed by the magnificent wisteria pergola that surrounds the Knot garden. The plants look around150 years old and are as gnarled as one could wish for.)

Wisteria sinensis

A knotty problem

So who is to blame for the state of the gardens? Fulham palace is owned by the Church, but (and this might be the first time anyone has ever put these words on the internet) the Church is not to blame. The building and grounds are now jointly leased to Fulham palace Trust and the council. If I know my Trusts, they are likely to be a deeply earnest and fanatically dedicated group, willing to throw their own bodies into the path of (slowly) oncoming ivy rather than see surface damage to a single brick of their sprawling 515-year-old baby. That leaves only one candidate for this serious horticultural crime, Hammersmith and Fulham Council. It is they who must shoulder the horrible guilt that accompanies neglecting a garden, and if the world was a fairer place it is they who would do the time for it.

dejected and despondent, on leaving the grounds ground I passed the below propaganda box and was left almost incandescent with gripe.

‘Services rated amongst the best in the U.K’?  Tell me what is of higher service to a community than a well stocked botanic garden full of wonderful and exotic plants to interest the young and delight the old? ‘Our street are getting cleaner’? Well maybe, but that is probably because residents are fleeing the borough in embarrassed droves, appalled about their governors’ seeming inability to clip a hedge, Fulham will soon be clean in the way the Arctic tundra is clean. ‘H&F parks amongst best in the U.K.’ Yes, H&F is bordered by Kensington and Chelsea and Richmond, so this one they can keep. But council tax down 3%! Four years in a row!!! With gaping holes in the council’s botanical garden infrastructure, and an almost non-existent medieval gardens portfolio, H&F council have been cutting taxes! For almost half a decade! Are they mad? Do they think that plants grow themselves? If I was a resident of H&F I would certainly have been jailed for councillor battering years ago, and I would be  proud of it.

So why do councils think they can get away with this abhorrent behaviour? I think the reason for the neglect lies in the recently reported decision to award Fulham Palace lottery funding for the restoration of the grounds and gardens. The lottery has done a great deal for the heritage industry, but it has also fostered an unwillingness to face up to the financial responsibilities of looking after publicly held properties. Hammersmith and Fulham council knew all along that they would be able to get funding for this project; it is after all a hugely important national garden, so where is the incentive for them to maintain the garden using their own ample resources? It is almost beneficial for them to let the garden fall into ruin, so that the lottery commission will say, ‘Oh golly, you’re right! What a mess! Here have a cheque’ rather than ‘oh will you please stop moaning on and on and on about that bloody hedge, honestly, you can even buy electric clippers now’. Without the safety net of the national lottery I feel that councils would take a lot less risk with future of our great gardens.

It seems that I’m going to have to run for bishop of London again.

In Praise of Folly

Contrary to the popular opinion, mans greatest asset is not his ruthless ambition, nor his dexterity, nor even (dare I say it?) the ability to garden. No, mans greatest wealth lies in his capacity for happiness. There is no commodity that spreads so widely or so quickly as happiness, or that brings so much good with it. As my old friend Robert Louis Stevenson often remarks ‘A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into the room is although another candle had been lighted.’ Quite so Robert. Who cares how talented you are? How many millions of pounds you pocketed last month? How magnificent your beard is, and how well you wear it? If you spend your life radiating misery you are of far less value to mankind than the common or garden grinning dolt.

Happiness spreads

Now I realise that shouting ‘come on be happy!!’ into the electronic void is not the answer to the world’s problems. People need to be made happy, and people are made happy by different things. From a vigorous and empirical period of self-study I have discovered these different things are follies! Lots of different types of folly! Can there be any greater joy than in planning a Greco-Roman Temple to go next to the tool shed? Or sneaking a 100ft pagoda-cum-vulture-house past the planning officers? Could there be any better or happier way to spend your retirement and all your savings than on a three-quarter-size replica of a ruined medieval castle for your front garden? I genuinely think not.

I plead with anyone who is reading this and feeling slightly miserable, unloved or pointless to start planning a folly. You will be doing yourself a huge favour, but more importantly you will be doing me a favour by making the world a slightly more cheerful place.

A folly in the ruined vein

But where to start? Hard landscaping is something that has come to the fore in garden design recently, sleek materials and stylish surfaces abound, take a look round Chelsea Flower Show and you will see that there are a lot of talented people taking great care over shiny finishes, but these features are just the fodder of the hard landscaping world, they are its lawns. It is important to have a nice lawn, a bad lawn can even ruin your garden, but no ones going to come round just to look at your lawn, no one is going to sit for hours writing poetry about your lawn, no celebrities are going to name their children after different varieties of your lawn, we’re in it for the flowers!! It is the flowers that bring us happiness, and the folly is the flower of the hard landscaping world. It has no purpose but beauty, there is no vulgar practicality about the structure to sully it with worldly concerns, it is a monument to the imagination alone. Don’t look to the gardens shows for inspiration on what folly to use and what to build it with; instead look at your own secret and probably quite embarrassing perversions.

Similarly when planning your garden folly make sure you do not simply run out and buy an off the peg folly, that will not make you happy, that is not even a folly, its a stone Wendy House. Your folly must be yours and yours alone. It must be a testament to your own quixotic obsessions. Like Man United? Then build a replica of Old Trafford. Like Spinal Tap? Then build Stonehenge. This must be something that you can spend decades pottering about in, modifying and muttering about, to the eternal despair of your family. Your models in this endeavour should be Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim from Laurence Stearn’s Tristram Shandy who spend their dotage happily building replicas of great European fortresses of the 1680’s on a bowling green behind their cottage.

I myself do not even have a corporeal folly; I have nowhere to put it. But have a mental folly (several mental follies) and it is in these that I delight. Join me as I wander around with an idiotic beam, my head lost in the forests of Renaissance Germany and I can guarantee the world will soon be a slightly better place.

The world delights in a well constructed folly