Napoleon labeled the English “a nation of
shopkeepers.” But he was wrong – we
Brits are a nation of gardeners.
Gardening’s in our blood, we love it and we’re good at it. Ask any group of
Americans which nation they associate with gardening, and more often than not
the English and the Italians will be way up there in the poll.
True, I may be a trifle biased about
the Italians. I’ve seen their gardens, and they’re nice enough, so include them
if you must, but they don’t quite match up to the Brits’. The Italian talent’s
limited to gardens in the villas and palazzos of the wealthy, while in England
the passion transcends wealth, class and social status, which I have to admit
is a paradox in the world’s most snobbish and class-conscious country.
There are several reasons why we rate
so highly in the gardening stakes. The first is that it rains a lot, and this
is what makes the British Isles and Ireland so startlingly green, lending a
chocolate-box beauty to even the humblest back yard, and making village cricket
pitches look like pool tables. Perhaps this is God’s compensation for dealing
them some of the world’s most depressing weather.
Two other reasons are history and
good soil. The British have been on their knees and up to their elbows in rich
brown earth, sowing and planting and weeding their plots for at least two
thousand years. The Romans, originators of the Italian garden, knew a thing or
two about horticulture, recognized good soil when they saw it, and so became
the founders of an ancient tradition in Britain. This was later nurtured by the
lords of the manor and the aristocracy, and perfected by such gardening giants
as ‘Capability’ Brown, once a gardener’s boy who, in the mid-1700s, rose to
become the greatest landscape gardener of all time. It was he who created what
the world chooses to call ‘The English Garden.’
So what’s all the fuss about? What is a typical
English garden, and exactly what
distinguishes it from those of other countries? Primarily it’s the antithesis
of the great formal, geometric gardens
at the Palace of Versailles, or the lavish and incredibly beautiful spreads of
the great Russians, Peter and, later, Catherine the Great near the Neva river
in St. Petersburg. To begin with, there are no straight lines in the English
garden, no neat rows or circles of identical plants, no disciplined box-tree
hedgerows, and no rigid pathways. If you like, it’s the art of deliberately
creating a disorder that is at the same time orderly -- a natural but
deliberately balanced contrast of ying and yang.
If that’s too esoteric, here’s Dan
Pearson, a London gardener quoted in an article in The New Yorker, who describes the English garden style with crystal
clarity. He calls it “a juxtaposition of formality and informality . . . a
controlled chaos, all tumbly and jumbly, where one plant is spilling and
spraying over into the next.”
In the same article Vita
Sackville-West, author, poet, wife of writer Harold Nicholson and Virginia
Wolff’s lover (and also, for decades, the gardening editor of Britain’s Sunday Times) explained the difference
in just ten words when writing years ago about her own famous garden at
Sissinghurst Castle. “If roses stray over the path,” she said, “the visitor
must duck.”
The British are pretty good at grass,
too. As the originators of tennis, cricket and soccer, they became masters of
growing the perfect lawn, which is evident not only in sports fields all over
the country, but also in city parks and on village greens, and in every
dwelling place from hundreds of stately manors and mansions to millions of
modest suburban homes. You’ll find none of that bright-green plastic stuff on
the pitch at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London, or at the stadiums of top-class
soccer teams such as Chelsea and Manchester United.
It should be said that gardening’s a
great deal tougher in America, and even the most passionate and persistent
American garden-lovers are up against natural forces about which their British
counterparts know nothing. To begin with, there’s hardly a single four-footed
species of plant-eating predator in England. True, there are wild deer in the
national parks from the Lake District in the north to Salisbury Plain in the
south, but they’re nowhere near as numerous or as voracious as their once-colonial
brothers and sisters. They don’t sneak around the suburbs and open countryside
by night and in broad daylight, gobbling up every new seedling and emerging
shoot, or munching on hibernating flowering shrubs and newly-planted trees. The
only groundhogs the English have ever seen were in a silly movie with Bill
Murray, while rabbits have never proliferated in England since an outbreak of
myxomatosis years ago. As if all this weren’t enough, American gardeners fight
a perennial battle with the weather. It’s either too hot , too dry or too cold.
Real droughts are commonplace over here, but rare in England.
There’s a story about an American
tourist who stood amazed at the lushness and perfection of the lawns at King’s
College, Cambridge. An aged gardener stood nearby, leaning on a fence, and the
visitor turned to him.
“Gee, that’s mighty fine grass you
got there, sir! I never saw anything like it. How do you do it?”
The old man took his hat off and
scratched his head.
“Well,” he said, “There ain’t much to
it, really. First you rakes it well and puts down some seed. Then you spreads
‘orse manure and bone meal on it, and waits for a bit of rain. Then you rolls
it . . .”
“And then what?” the visitor asked.
“Well, it’s easy after that. You
just go on rollin’ it an’ rakin’ it
every day for four or five hundred years.”
And that says it all.
