Taking back the Suburbs

In an entertaining piece of midweek filler the Evening Standard’s ‘Voice of Youth’, Rosamund Urwin, recently outed certain of her friends as having matured faster than others. Apparently over recent dinners Rosamund and her young, sparkly, drunken girls of summer  have stared in bewilderment at their dour, prematurely middle-aged acquaintances and wondered ‘how these fun sponges morphed into our parents and predict that they’ll soon be no-shows if the meal clashes with Gardeners’ Question Time.’

Oh the indignation! Gardening as by word for past-it! Well brace yourself Rosamund, I’m afraid that as newly minted Dalstonite, and an avid spectator of people and flowers, I can tell you that gardens are now considered cool. Pop-up-gardens are even cooler. Permaculture gardens are practically the coolest, beaten only by pop-up-roof-top-permaculture gardens, which are impossibly tautologically cool. All us unemployable bloggers Out East know dirt is where it’s at. The only people who think gardening is still stuck in the 1970’s are Laurie Taylor from Thinking Allowed  (see last week’s program) and the rest of the country; and they’re wrong – it’s actually stuck in the 1820’s.*

I suspect that the whiff of the naff that Rosamund detects lingering around gardening comes not from the superannuated, but from the suburban. My dear, bearded, tattooed and pieced twin brother, fresh from life in the squat as he is, will happily spend hours talking about growing pak choi or coppicing hazel, yet accuses his housemates of being ‘bourgeoisie provincials’ if they even mention spreading lawn seed or putting the sprinklers on.

As a jobbing gardener this revulsion to suburban gardens has a particular impact on me. The nature of my game means a large portion of my time is spent in the suburbs – for there be gardens. Yet on arriving at a garden for the first time client will often say to me “I don’t want it looking suburban”. So I find myself stood in an 8m x 25m rectangular garden, shed in one corner, three sides in larch panel fencing, with neighbouring houses just removed enough to qualify as detached peering from the sidelines, wondering how on earth to use a planting budget of £200 to disguise it as a penthouse roof garden.

That’s why I have decided to break with tradition and give some gardening tips. This week 5 hints on Urbanising the Suburbs.

1)      Community gardens are big in the city right now. Give your garden the community feel by converting the entire space to raised beds. For extra authenticity after the first summer make sure you never carry out any maintenance ever again.

2)      Pots, pots, pots, pots, pots. It’s all about container growing, and don’t think that means putting a few pansies around the bottom of your Cordeline australis. In the last few months I have seen a semi-mature holm oak and a grove of silver birch growing on balconies, think big!

3)      Nothing says suburban like a barbeque. Why not build a tandoori oven? For extra points get local members of the long-term unemployed to do the actual construction work as an ‘empowerment exercise’.

4)      If you must use a sprinkler ditch the plastic Hoselock and go for a Conmoto outdoor shower. The lawn will love it and friends who drop by unannounced will assume it’s part of your extra-room-for-natural-living-masterplan.

Urban Living

5)      Pop-up is in. Pop-up bars and restaurants have been sweeping the capital lately. Short term venues that do the biz for a few months and then disappear. This season I will be making pop-up borders, areas of the garden that burst into vibrant life for a season and then disappear leaving no trace of their existence. Rosamund’s dour friends and the terminally suburban will probably refer to them as bedding, but remember, it’s a pop-up horticultural event.

I hope this helps.

*I know gardening is stuck in the 1820’s because this week I have been reading a 200 year old edition of The Literary Gazette, and Journal of the Belles Lettres in search of the Garden Report and Kalender columns . Years ago in a smoky pub in Hampshire a wizened old gardener told me the secret of charming moles by the light of a full moon, and I was hoping unearth more semi-mythical garden lore.  Unfortunately what I found could have been printed in any of last weekend’s broadsheet gardening columns. “Soil preparation is key, watering is to be undertaken whole heartedly or not at all”. Though interestingly it seems even then gardeners were paid “less by three or four shillings a week than what is paid to common Labourers.”’

Also

“Slovenly gardeners leave their Dahlias, Marvel of Perus, Nasturtiums, and the like, for days and weeks after they are frost bitten. The gardener pleads want of time, doing something else… These are slovenly excuses, quite inadmissible… Slovenliness is the unpardonable sin of gardening: a sloven among gardeners ranks with an coward among soldiers and sailors.” – take note permacultural gardeners, we all know what happens to cowardly soldiers.

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