Human Flower Project

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Front Gardens in Winter (see ‘Attitude’)

On a walking tour of Cambridge, England, John Levett gets down to the bones—and girders and porta-potties—of his city’s gardens. Are we having fun yet?

Essay and photos by

Gimme the facts.

Spending on gardens peaked in Britain in 2003 at £5.9b. Last year it dropped to £5.15b. Hardly free-fall. Growing spending on so-called organic gardening (organic no doubt if using a wooden plough harnessed by sisal to live oxen) plus an ageing population is supposed to boost demand for garden products but the thirty-six hour work-or-die day is sending the tendency the other way. Whatever, there’s still a loada bucks in the thing.

A leading garden centre chain, Dobbies, has adopted the slogan: You don’t have to have a garden to come to Dobbies. Stating the obvious really, seeing that in most centres these days you can get double-latte with mango chutney and a brain transplant while you go through the car wash. Which must account for their annual ten million punters.

And prompts the question: What do they buy and what do they do with it when they get it home? I buy mulch; potting compost; fish, blood and bone; various highly toxic lethal non-organic potions; bulbs; seaweed extract (doing my bit to wipe out whatever essential link in the global food-chain that feeds on it plus the rest of the hierarchy up to the polar bear, panda, lemur, meerkat or photogenic must-save-it-if-it-means-sacrificing-my-own-children endangered species of choice). This combination seems to work. My garden has a brief flowering period from April to early Summer (I’ve never got the hang of the all-year-round-garden much promoted by the TV horticulturalist) then it’s heads down all the way to those Autumn leaves and Winter death. It’s much loved and has magic. And enhances greatly the next door carpet warehouse wall.

Which brings me to my front garden. I don’t have one.

Nor do most Brits. They have front works-in-progress.

The face is the window to the soul (a vomit-inducing thought but a useful sentence-starter) and the front garden is the window to an attitude. There are places to be seen about England where a cottage stands in its own grounds, flowers sprout in curved beds, roses cluster around the front door and vegetables are harvested in seasonal routines; Adam the gardener tamps the tobacco into his corn-cob, adjusts his leather knee-pads, takes off his moleskin jacket and starts his double-digging of the beet bed; Doris, his wife, bakes, scrubs the front step and rushes to pull the plough when called for.

But not hereabouts. Cambridge is worth a trip for at least one apotheosis of late-Mediaeval ecclesiastical architecture but don’t detour for the front gardens. It’s a Sunday close to the fag-end of Winter and I have a theory. Gardens aren’t supposed to be doing much except await the next Great Leap Forward (although on a bike ride out Newmarket way last week I caught a verge of daffodils near Dullingham; must be the horse droppings). But looking at the framework of the garden without the distraction of stuff like flower heads, leaves, blossom gives out an idea of what gardening has been going on; what’s the gardener’s root theory of horticulture; does the praxis fit the theory; is the garden team marching in step or off down the pub. A nation holds its breath. I went for a walk.

First, the building site. Time was when you bought a house and lived in it. Quaint idea that. These days loft conversion, basement irrigation, kitchen and restaurant extension, patio colonisation are the minimum additions. The front garden is the builder’s yard. Ever heard of a tidy builder? Me neither. One satisfied to pee in the cement mixer. Not these sensitive days. Get that portaloo in there. And the builder’s billboard.

Then there’s the concrete solution. Airstrip One. Easy maintenance, doesn’t crowd the neighbours, no overhangs, won’t block the sunlight. Fit the family’s family of 4X4 tractors so essential for the badlands of East Anglia and the High Sierras of the Fens. Building complete. Car park sorted. Get a steel gate. Suits you, sir. Floodlights, porch lights, patio flares, intruder beacons, machine gun nest. Collect the set. You can never have too much security these days.

Next comes the Never-Quite-Got-Started. It’s close to the building site but more progressive. The cupboard that was going to the waste tip but never got that far; the caravan that would have been useful if we’d kept up the payments on the car; the bike I’ll get around to fixing a chain to; the useful-for-Summer-play-days inflatable pool; the fit-for-life trampoline. Promise I’ll sort it after Easter...we’ll get Dave’s pick-up...it’ll all go in there. Promise.

Then there’s the ooo-so-easy kooky idea from this month’s Editor’s Choice of the Garden Book of the Month Club. “Now here’s a great idea for that steel girder left over from last year’s loft-to-playroom conversion. Turn it on its side, plug the rivet holes, weld a plate at each end, give it a coat of non-toxic Ocean Blue and you’ve got a home for Koi and lilies Donald Judd style.

A perennial: Let’s grass it over. Easier said than grassed. Most let’s-shop-for-a-garden shoppers don’t suss out that grass (whatever version we’re talking about) is a plant, needs planting correctly, needs feeding, watering, raking, pruning continuously (otherwise known as mowing). Sun helps too. There’s a guy near me with a small front patch that’s peachy perfect. I asked him once if he’d been a green keeper or groundsman at a lawn tennis club. Nope, he just had the time for it. And the lesson is: short of time? Don’t grow grass. Don’t shop for an oak.

Opps. Missed one. Let’s stick chippings down. Remind ourselves of that holiday in a Welsh quarry.

Most front gardens in most modern developments are a joke; a vague nod back to between-the-wars when building land was still cheap, suburban half-timbereds were designed to acknowledge something baronial and a buffer zone between you and the road gave time to prime the muskets when Bolsheviks threatened.

But even the modest Victorian villa was given a space large enough to park a bike (just). In those that aren’t bike parks there’s some success. The single rambler that cascades; the serpentine wisteria that clings; a potted shrub; three potted shrubs. There’s the inevitable water feature with gunge; the beach pebble tessellation; the rock garden; the tufa garden; the sink garden; the sunk garden. And the pram garden.

Dusk came around five. I walked home along the Backs (cunningly so called because they run along the backs of the colleges) and took a short cut through Clare. I like its view of the Cam and it’s got the finest inner quad.

Coming out onto Trinity Lane I noticed the best front of the walk. Cluttered as anything I’d seen, dressed for winter, tended, walled, gated, overlooked and locked, no space to swing a swinging thing but a gem.

There are probably more television progs about gardening on British tv than the rest of Europe combined. Gardener’s World is the longest running from the days of Percy Thrower in the ‘60s when cultivating a plot still leaned heavily on wartime Dig for Victory practice; through Geoffrey Smith in the ‘70s and his As-Tested-On-Vietnam potions for greenhouse fumigation and soil disinfecting; the wonderfully appropriate Clay Jones; the ‘80s and ‘90s and the emergence of the ‘celebrity’ gardener and his (always a ‘his’) sidekick (think John Steed and Emma Peel...never a Cagney and a Lacey). These days everything’s sponsored by, recommended by, as featured in, buy the book of the series, buy the seeds featured in the series, quality loam as scraped from the boots of…

Something gets lost in all this. What I didn’t do (have never done) is ask the front-gardeners: Do you enjoy your gardening? I see so much effort, so much expense for so little effect. That’s OK as long as there’s fun in the thing. Some sort of mentally sitting down in the garden, stopping one’s outer life, not bothering with the plan, creating one’s version of Glastonbury Tor on a spring morning (bad example that..too full of Morris Dancers and would-be Merlins), maybe Walden (as was...without the hot dog franchise as is), maybe a Miss Jekyll and Mr Lutyens cast-off (did they ever?).

Forget all that. What I’m getting at is...I get an impression that gardening, front or back, is now in the league of home decorating along with the fitted kitchen, the bath suite, the games room, the home entertainment centre. Buy the garden. Select a style, choose a price range, decide on a colour scheme, indicate optional extras, specify if fitting is required. Too much quick fix and instant solutions; gardens for this age. It’d be nice to think that gardens could be different; away from the rest of life. But, then again, in the majority world they are. Aspirations are often the same but the rhythms are different, resources scarcer, priorities on a different page, patience a part of being. Or am I just flaffing about nothing?

Just remembered. Every July, Cambridge hosts four weekends of open studios when artists open-up their homes & work rooms to anyone who’d like to pop in. Their gardens get opened too. Do artists let go in the garden? Or are they just a bunch of control freaks like Monet? Is Donald Judd’s girder in a west Texas desert more significant than the bloke’s round the corner?

Addendum Again...remembered Bill Laws’ book on Artists’ Gardens and Artists in Their Gardens by Easton, Laskin and Mandell.