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.

Behold the Monstrous Face of Garden Design 2012

Gardens 2012

I was going to write a ‘Ben’s gardening trends to watch out for 2011’ post. However – ‘there will be a trend towards stuff growing in march, maybe earlier, sprinklers will be big in July and everything will fall over in December’ is even more limp and pathetic than the regular media’s forecasts. So instead I have decided to skip a year and start building momentum for my 2012 horticultural campaign.

2012 is the year of the London Olympics, probable apocalypse, Alan Turing and of The Campaign for Sublime Gardens (CSG).

We at the CSG believe that the modern horticultural industry has lost sight of the sublime in its quest for beauty. A beautiful garden should remind the viewer of his capacity for love,  a sublime garden should remind him of his pitiful and insignificant place in the universe and his own inescapable mortality, in a pleasurable way. Beauty is much easier to sell.

The simplest way to inspire a sense of the sublime is through scale –  think of the world’s largest garden gnome, Giambologna’s Appennino in the Medici garden, or of the land art in The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. But just using size is cheating, everything is impressive when its big, and besides much as I love ha-has I don’t really think we need another gardening trend that is only available to the wealthy.

Giambologna's Sublime Gnome

So, I was musing on how to bring a dash of existential pain to the small urban spaces Bensgarden looks after (maintenance slots still available by the way) and I stumbled across the artist who opened this post, Jason de Caires Taylor. He makes life sized casts of people and drops them to the bottom of the ocean to slowly crumble or become buried under tons of coral. Ozymandias meets Luca Brasi – no better nod to man’s transience and mortality.

Man on Fire

The Garden of Hope

 

To adapt this look for gardens lacking in coral forming organisms is surprisingly easy. Buy a statue, drill a load of holes in it, shove some soil in and you have a humanoid tufa wall for growing alpines. All good, but still a little bit novelty ornamentation; remember the sublime is the terrifying rendered every-day. To really nail the look I suggest  you contact your local bargain ‘antiques barn’ and try to strike a deal for a truck-load of those chipped concrete statues they mass produced in the 70’s.  Dump your figurines in a pile somewhere in the garden, preferably in half shade. Arrange to form a human stumpery, limbs and faces should protrude in places. Spoon top-soil liberally into nooks, crannies and cavities and plant up – the look you should be aiming for is a Jake and Dinos Chapman diorama crossed with a hanging basket.

There we go, my first post in 18months of blogging that contains actual ‘hints and tips for gardeners’ many more to follow as we build towards the 2012 apocalypse.

http://www.underwatersculpture.com/

Winter Cheer

January is a tough time for gardeners. Too much mud, no razzle-dazzle and only bloody snowdrops on the way. So, to buck you all up, here are some of my favourite plants for winter cheer (as seen by Victorian botanist Mr Edward Lear).

Manypeeplia upsidownia

Piggiawiggia pyramidalis

Nastiscreechia Krorluppia

Pied Beauty

As a gardener I know there is more to horticulture than flowers. But, if I’m brutally honest, grasses, foliage and ferns are just so many kinds of exotic foreplay, flowers will always be the money shot.

But why? Why flowers? Why do they hold such an appeal, be they in the garden, on the windowsill or clasped between the teeth? In essence why am I devoting my life to colourful films of water and carbon?

Where to begin.  A mainstay of academic aesthetics over the last century has been the theory of cultural conditioning.  We like flowers because  Shakespeare writes about them, because Wordsworth writes about them, because Blake, Burns and Dickinson write about them; because people have painted them, printed them and pressed them. According to this view, accrued meanings and cognitive habits gave rise to the flowers’ power and, we all go along with it because, like teenage girls at a Twilight premier, we are programmed to fit in.

Programmed to fit in

Cultural conditioning cannot easily be dismissed, after all I remember the early 90’s when we were conditioned to find centre partings and sportswear sexy. But it won’t wash with flowers. Every culture, no matter how historically or geographically diverse, has found flowers attractive. Ancient gods are celebrated with flowers, some of the earliest art is floral and pollen from ornamental flowers have been found (in statistically meaningful amounts) in graves dating from around 10,000 BC. Nearly every insulated tribe discovered by westerners in the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries is recorded as having used flowers as ornamentation, you can bet that none of them had ever listened to Wordsworth’s Ode to a Daffodil or Seal’s Kiss from a Rose.

So is the human attraction to flowers evolutionary, and if so, why? Nicholas Humphrey, in his 1973 essay on the biology of aesthetics, The Illusion of Beauty, argues that the beauty of flowers lies in their huge variety on a limited plane. Most flowers are similar in size, height and location, and they are all easily recognizable as flowers, yet there are almost unlimited variations among them.  As such they invite classification; people like to distinguish, say, an Aconite from a Delphinium or 132 named cultivars of geranium from each other. Humphrey argues that this is not high end horticultural geekery, but a fundamental  evolved human pleasure, as powerful as the drive for food and sex.

 Without the ability to classify the world, eg dangerous tribe, friendly tribe, humans would not have managed to reach its sophisticated social heights – to appreciate flowers is to assert what it is to be human (this also explains the appeal of music, or classifying sounds and rhythms as I like to call it)

O.K, sounds slightly farfetched, but it would explain why horticulturalists never want to stop learning, and why they never have a ‘favorite flower’ for more than a few months. There are a plethora of other evolutionary flower theories out there. Flowers represent genitals – think baboons. Flowers are tasty – think Nasturtiums. Flowers signify a land of fertility and plenty – think any Edenic vision. My personal favorite is that any hunter gather who can spend his time foraging around for flowers has obviously got his shit together and is definitely shag-worthy.

Others ignore evolutionary theory and focus on symmetry and scale. The old ‘Golden Ratio’ theory crops up again and again in forms of nature we find attractive. That flower in your garden is not just a pretty collection of petals, it’s the Acropolis, The Parthenon, Vitruvian Man, and Le Corbusier – all rendered in carbon, water and pretty shades of pastel.

Man in full bloom

 The young Gerald Manly Hopkins discussed the nature of symmetry and asymmetry in nature in his essays, diaries and poems. In an early undergraduate essay he forms a platonic dialogue between an undergraduate and a professor. They sit in a college garden debating whether a six or seven fanned chestnut leaf is the more beautiful, a scene I wish I could recognize from my undergraduate life. Eventually they decide the 7 lobed leaf is the more pleasing, because the leaf is ostensibly asymmetrical yet its internal structure shows an almost perfect symmetry.

This speaks to me. Most of my favorite flowers have an uneven number of petals, yet all contain symmetry in the petals, sepals, carpals and stamen. Later in life Hopkins, now a respected poet,  writes: ‘I have particular periods of admiration for particular things in Nature; for a certain time I am astonished at the beauty of a tree, shape, effect, etc. Then when the passion, so to speak, has subsided, it is consigned to my treasury of explored beauty, and acknowledged with admiration and interest ever after.’ If this isn’t Nicholas Humphrey’s biological aesthetics writ poetically large then god knows what is.

Young Gerard

So if it ever comes down to the crunch, and I am forced at knife point to confess just exactly why I like flowers, and why I have chosen them over more conventional goals, such as one day being able to afford a house, I will say with confidence “because I am a poet, because (1 +√5) ÷ 2 is finest ratio going, but most of all BECAUSE I AM A MAN.

Garden Museum Blog

I have starting blogging for The Garden Museum. This is the address. Bensgardenblog shall remain c0mpleatly unaffected, so have no fear sporadically-updated-cod-historical-garden-blog-fans. The new site is slightly better grounded in reality, and I shall be using to it do prosaically garden blog things, like talk about plants.

Anyone who thinks the tedium of me writing about plants might be too much to bare - read my friends comics blog instead.

The Road to Hell is Paved with Fancy Flowers

Continental drift is unarguably impressive, and really can’t be rivalled in the field of volcano creation, but as a method of pan-national plant exchange it is inefficient to the point of redundancy. So, international plant fans, give thanks for today’s horticultural hero, the man who saved us from the caprices of tectonic tango and gave flora the freedom of the globe. Father to a thousand botanic gardens, husband to a million bastardised ecosystems, step forward Dr Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward!

Dr Ward: Dreamt of Moss

Nathaniel Ward was a simple man with a simple dream – to ‘possess an old wall covered with ferns and mosses’. A mossy wall is a modest dream to most of us spoiled future dwellers, I once lived in a flat that even had a mossy ceiling, but given the fuliginous atmosphere of early nineteenth century London he might as well have wished for moon beam tea – ferns and mosses just do not  grow in air thick enough to support weight.

One mid morning in the sticky summer of 1829 the disconsolate and fernless Doctor was sitting in his study, peering at a bottled Sphinx Moth and thinking about moss, when he noticed something strange about the bottles substrate, something had germinated. There, nestled in the mould, on a windowsill in filthy East London, was a tiny seedling of Dryopteris filix-mas, the Male heart fern.  If you dare to dream nothing is impossible! Within half a decade Ward had his mossy wall, albeit a wall behind glass. He also had a fern-covered soapstone model of the west window of Tintern Abbey  – sometimes it’s hard to stop at a plain old wall.

A Wardian Case Yesterday

But you all know the story of the Wardian Case. This post is not about Hooker, Kew, Rubber plants and sailing ships, you can read about that far more exiting world here. This post is about horticultural signposts on the road to damnation. You see, this morning I was reading Ward’s On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Case (its pissing down outside), and found a chapter where the author ruminates on his terrarium, and its possible impact on the impressionable souls of the lower classes:

But I must here caution the poor against indulging a taste for what are called fancy flowers… Believing that all human pursuits ought to be estimated in exact proportion to as they tend to promote the glory of God, or the good of man, let us for a moment compare the empty chase after fancy flowers with the legitimate pursuits of horticulture and floriculture. So far from the love of god, and the good of his fellow creatures, being the end aim of the fancy florist, he values everything in proportion as it is removed from Nature, and unattainable to mankind.

An excellent sentiment, for the road to hell is indeed paved with fancy flowers. But It seems no-one is concerned about the horticultural predilections of the lower classes anymore. The latest issue of Horticulture Week, for example, reviews gardening utility vehicles, and focuses wholly on superficial categories such as; ‘weight including fluids’ and ‘ground clearance’. Truly important specifications such as ‘most likely to see its owner living in a garret with a common prostitute’ and ‘most likely to see its owner grown rich and sheriff of London’ are ignored. Gardening it seems has sadly lost its perceived right to comment on the moral status of the working class, and without this it’s really just a load of boring old plants.

A Misguided Gardener Living in a Garret with a Common Prostitute

So, how’s this for my new-latest-doomed-to-failure-television-pitch/saving-horticulture-from-its-self-project: Soul Digging – Lionel Blue, Archbishop Rowan Williams and I travel middle England in a three seat transit performing two day ‘miracle makeovers’ on  gardens and gardeners. Think Thought for the Day crossed with Groundforce. I’ll take control of the heavy landscaping work and play the part of blundering sinner, always being rescued on the verge of covetousness or simony. Rowan can be the plant man and give the scriptural reasons why hybrid lilies should be uprooted (Gen 1:11) and why God Hates Figs (Mark 11:12-14). Lionel can be in charge of wise cracking, sucking up to the common man and champagne opening.

With the success of this program gardeners should once more be able to take up their places in the moral pantheon, somewhere between County Coroner and Secretary of State, we can stop all this trendy getting muddy and wet and miserable business, and resume leading people back into the vegetable kingdom of heaven. I’m sure Dr Ward would approve; television is nothing but a glorified Wardian case, and Soul Digging its Tintern Abby.

The Financial Times I am a Changin

I’d like to dedicate this post to Robin Lane Fox of The Financial Times. A horticultural pundit whose writing I have always respected, and often enjoyed, but who I am now going to overthrow in a  brutal electronic coup d’état. If you cherish the old horticultural order I’d stop reading now (you can watch this instead).

The eminent Mr. Fox has just celebrated 40 years at the FT, and to commemorate his impressive staying power he’s published a new gardening book; Thoughtful Gardening (précis: Three cheers for Dahlias! Down with designers! Two fingers to ornamental grasses!). Plugging the book in a recent column he reminisced  on his early days at the paper, and wondered:

Where will it go from here? Is there a 23-year-old waiting to brighten the FT on a Wednesday and then stuff me in the dustbin? I have one advantage. I teach the under-23s in my other role as Oxford tutor and garden master of the great gardens at New College, Oxford. The young ones keep me fit, but throughout the past 40 years I have been painfully aware of a gap in their knowledge of the natural world. I am not afraid of a new upstart. When you read Thoughtful Gardening I hope you may smile and see why.

[Full article available here]

Robin Lane Fox - unafriad

Oh how I spluttered in consternation! I considered writing an ‘outraged of Tunbridge Wells’ style letter listing many, many Latin plant names, but as satisfying as that would have been, it would not have pulled out the infected root of the problem. So I’ve decided to use the internet as god intended, to conduct a spiteful and semi anonymous campaign that may cost a man his job. But first, some justification!

 Mr Fox illuminates his thesis by revealing that none of his Bright Young Tutees can describe a primrose. I doubt he’s lying, none of my friends can describe primroses either, I’ve been testing them all week (one of them even had a primrose growing in his garden, he thought it was ‘a baby cabbage’). But these are the same people who have set up a beehives in their Camberwell gardens, who have been thinning and pruning forgotten plum trees behind a Sainsbury’s Megastore, and who grow climbing roses and ramblers up derelict buildings in Hackney.

 Take a stroll through the shoddier parts of London, where out of necessity or affectation the young live in stacked flats, and you’ll see countless tomato plants, bean canes, nasturtiums and sunflowers, all poking out of windows, balancing on balconies and cluttering up doorsteps. There is a primrose shaped gap in the young’s knowledge of the natural world, but this should not be mistaken for a lack of interest or interaction with nature. It’s cool to grow.

Robin Lane Fox has developed his idea of gardening to such a highly refined level that these urban gardens are effectively invisible to him. Like ants to a giant. His gardening, thoughtful gardening, is about flowers; it is about the right plant for the right place and companion planting. It is explicitly and proudly not about saving the planet, feeding the 5000 or recreating a wild Britain. These are the areas that excite my peers. They may have stupid, vaguely left-wing and suspiciously vegetarian ways of gardening, and scoff if you like Robin – but it’s all gardening.  

So I suggest we march on Moscow. Lets mobilise the bloggers and start stuffing dustbins. Robin should be taken up on his challenge and made to see the error of his ways. We may get nowhere, we may get a new columnist, we may just get a ‘why it’s Christmas day!’ style revelation and an article on climate change gardening. Anyone who would like to be the new Robin Lane Fox should email a couple of speculative articles to the editorial team at the FT, use replacement Robin Lane Fox as the subject and email bendark@hotmail.co.uk if you need the addresses. As Barack Obama almost certainly famously once said ‘Robin Lane Fox is a fine columnist, but he’s slightly out of touch with contemporary horticulture’.

The audacity of hope