A yearning for privacy – ‘During the hot weather, the Smythe-Robinsons of Tiddlington take their meals in a cool and shady spot of the garden’, cartoon by H. M. Bateman, 1913.
Give the English a foot or two of earth, and they will grow flowers in it; they do not willingly let go of the country – as the foreign people do – once they have settled in a town; they are all gardeners, perhaps country gentlemen, at heart. Abroad, the town, even though it is really only a small village, nearly always starts abruptly, brutally, at once cutting itself off from the country and putting on the dusty and flowerless look of a city. Here we take leave of the country reluctantly, and with infinite gradations, from the glory of rosebeds and the full parade of hollyhocks to the last outposts, among them grimy privet and grass where perhaps a sooty aster still lingers.
J. B. Priestley, English Journey (1934)
‘How many kinds of sweet flowers grow in an English country garden?’, goes the old English folk song.
If you’re Jennifer Owen, who has spent thirty years studying her back garden in suburban Leicester, the answer is fairly precise. In that time, she has counted 474 different plant species, 80 types of spider, 183 bug species, 375 kinds of moth and more than 442 sorts of beetle.
Altogether, the retired ecology lecturer and zoology museum curator has found 2,673 different species of flora and fauna. And that’s only a fraction of what’s there – the total number of insect species alone, in the average British garden, is thought to be around 10,000.
Dr Owen’s 1920s house on a busy street corner is unremarkable, as are her typical front and back gardens, laid out in 1927 – with 741 square metres of lawn, rockery, compost heap, herbaceous and mixed borders, hemmed in by a greenhouse, garage and garage forecourt.
From 1972 to 2001, helped by her husband, Denis, also a zoologist, Dr Owen netted butterflies and flying insects, trapped beetles and centipedes in a pitfall trap in the ground, and lured moths with a mercury vapour light trap. She noted down every flower she planted, every self-seeded plant and every weed.
Dr Owen’s garden is more ecologically diverse than the lushest West African, Malaysian or Brazilian rainforest. When she returned from teaching in Uganda and Sierra Leone in the 1960s, she noticed that her back garden in Leicester had more butterfly species than her old tropical home; twenty-three, to be precise, with the small white butterfly the most common visitor.
The ecological variety of Dr Owen’s garden is replicated across the country. The 8,000 square miles of British gardens – more garden per person than any other country – cover more land than all our national nature reserves put together. In Greater London alone, there are around 3.8 million front and back gardens, covering 37,900 hectares of domestic land, with about 2.5 million trees between them.
It’s true that many of those gardens are being paved over – the amount of decking, terraces and paving in Britain increased by a quarter from 1999 to 2011. Trellises, too, have proliferated on top of garden walls over the last half-century, and more day-to-day things, like dahlias, vegetable patches and lime trees, have given way to exotics like gingko, eucalyptus, and fig and catalpa trees.1
Whatever the changes in flora, whatever the threat from decking, gardens remain some of the most diverse habitats in the country; particularly as British wildflower meadows have shrunk by 7 million acres since the war. When we look at the countryside, we think how unmanicured, how blissfully free of the hand of man it is. In fact, it is as far from its primeval, forested state as the city – perhaps more so.
City gardens, treated with many fewer pesticides, are more open to natural development than most farmland. Dr Owen’s back garden is more fertile territory for plants and animals than the fields that circle the fringes of Leicester.
Across the country, the urban garden has evolved into a rare wildlife sanctuary; as agricultural land is increasingly farmed on an industrial scale, with weedkillers liberally applied and hedgerows grubbed up, particularly in the eastern counties. Where farmland is considered less valuable, as in, say, Cornwall, the hedges and the hedgerow trees tend to be left alone.
The older the city, the more varied the habitats, the better for the plants and animals. Railway lines act as green corridors through cities, not only for the seeds of plants like Oxford ragwort and buddleia, but also for foxes. A native English species, the fox arrived in central London only eighty years ago, after first migrating into the suburbs, or having its rural earths absorbed into sprawling suburbia.
A similar effect has produced the suburban deer. They are thriving, particularly around the M25, and in hotspots in East Anglia, East Sussex, Cannock Chase and the West Midlands. The deer population has doubled to 2 million in the last decade, with many of them marching into town along disused railway lines, now turned into footpaths and bike paths. Thanks to the Newlands forest project outside Manchester, muntjac and roe deer are encroaching on the city. And there are a number of recent reports of deer getting all the way into north-east London and the town centres of Stockport and Wolverhampton.
Many of the garden plants we think inherently English have even more exotic origins than the suburban deer. It’s only because we’ve got so used to them growing in our back gardens that we forget how far they came to get there.
Runner beans come from South America, sweet peas from Sicily, and spinach from south-west Asia. Dr Owen’s marigolds come from Mexico, her snapdragons from the Mediterranean, her poppies from the European Alps. Ground-elder, the scourge of gardeners, was introduced by the Romans.
Britain’s temperate climate, on the crossing point between Continental and northern floral zones, makes it astonishingly accommodating to foreign arrivals. There are only thirty-three native species of trees in Britain – but its climate can accommodate hundreds more incomers.
There is no part of the earth’s surface as small as Britain where such a diversity of plants can be grown. A garden in, say, Sleightholmedale, Kirkbymoorside, North Yorkshire, lies in the intersecting zone between the northern edge of the Continental flora zone and the southern edge of the northern flora zone. So you get a rare combination of the musk thistle and the heat-loving bee orchid growing next to northern plants like bird’s-eye primrose and globeflower.
The fertile soils of England are unusually well-designed for a vast range of plants. The dry soils of Wiltshire and Herefordshire, meticulously sifted by ants into anthills, support a very precise flora: wall-leaved and thyme-leaved sandwort, the common mouse-ear, common rock rose and wild thyme. In Derbyshire, Lancashire and Cheshire, the sandwort there, known as leadwort, thrives on the lead in the soil.
Even pollution can stimulate the flora. After the heavy salting of the roads in the sub-zero winters of 2009–10 and 2010–11, salt-loving sea spurrey flowers were found as far as 100 miles inland, on motorway verges.
The great variety of our native soils suits not just a great variety of species, but also unusually large populations of individual species. Britain is home to half the world’s bluebells, which can grow in a wide spectrum of our soils – clay and chalk, as well as slightly acidic, sandy loams.
Thanks to our northern climate, the Gulf Stream and our island nature, we are blessed, too, with the right amount of rain to produce England’s distinctive greenness.
Hackneyed as it sounds, England is an exceptionally green country. James Ravilious, photographer, author and son of the artist Eric Ravilious, used black-and-white when he took pictures of Devon because, he said, it got rid of the green which so dominates the English landscape and is such a tricky colour to capture well.2
Nikolaus Pevsner was equally staggered by the effect of the colour on Durham. The green grass and trees, he thought, distinguished Durham from other European cities, like Prague and Avignon, that are also wrapped around dominant castles and cathedrals.3
Because we are so far north, and yet warmed by the Gulf Stream, we also get long, extended springs and autumns, unlike most other countries, which switch between the extremes of summer and winter with barely a season in between. Our subtly shifting seasons give a greater range of growing temperatures over a longer period of time.
In Mary McCarthy’s 1971 book, Birds of America, the narrator, Peter Levi, prefers the extremes of weather in his mother’s New England – its weather an exaggerated version of Old England’s – to his stepfather’s California, with its year-round warm temperatures.
‘He had never liked California; he missed the winter. He hated his stepfather’s garden in Berkeley, with roses and daffodils and tulips and irises all blooming at the same time, so that there was never anything to look forward to.’
In England – with four distinctive seasons, and some now claiming a fifth, in the transition from summer to autumn – there is always something for gardeners to look forward to.
The British character is unusually well-disposed to producing gardeners, too. In a 2010 poll, over 60 per cent of the population said they had done some gardening in the previous four weeks.
That love of gardening doesn’t just come from a conducive soil and climate. It’s drawn, too, from the same source as the love of home-ownership – the desire to own land, a desire more easily satisfied in a country with secure land tenure over many centuries. Why buy land, or a house, if you think there’s going to be a revolution tomorrow?
Still, it’s sometimes easy to get a little too romantic about how deep-rooted our attachment to gardening is. Pliny said the ancient land of Albion got its name from the Latin albus – meaning ‘white’, in turn derived from ‘the white roses with which England abounds’. Some garden historians have suggested that prehistoric plots of land, planted with henbane and opium, were the first British gardens – all a little too far back in the mists of time to be sure.
The oldest-known continuously cultivated garden is thought to be at Arundel Castle, Sussex, where the rose garden below the castle’s south front is on the site of a herb garden mentioned in the twelfth century. Certainly by the medieval period, cottages had back gardens; and the chief characteristics of those gardens – long and thin, with private spaces fenced off from the neighbours – were in place. Early gardens were also relatively large, given the small dimensions of English houses. The typical gardens of classic, early-nineteenth-century cottages were 225 feet long by 45 feet wide, separated by brick walls.
From early on in the development of English gardens, sturdy walls, high hedges and robust fences were popular. The need for privacy is locked into the English soul, wrapped up with our island status, our damp climate, our long, dark winters – all of them conspire against sociability.
It’s not that we’re not interested in other people. We’re obsessed with them, particularly when it comes to gossip. The number of newspapers and newspaper readers is proportionally greater here than anywhere else in the world. England is one of the first countries to have had a national portrait gallery.
‘I had rather see the portrait of a dog I know, than all the allegories you can show me,’ said Dr Johnson.
But we prefer to keep other people at arm’s length – on canvas, in print, or glimpsed through a chink in the curtains. In Holland, you keep your downstairs curtains open the whole time, or have no curtains at all, to show you’ve got nothing to hide; in Amsterdam, they even install car window mirrors on the outside of their buildings, to watch the goings-on in the streets below.
We have a terrible fear of intimacy or socializing – thus our endless jokes, catchphrases, sarcasm, irony, understatement and banter, all conversational devices that keep intimacy and the serious exchange of private information at bay. Thus, too, our complex codes of manners. As Evelyn Waugh said, the English use manners to keep people away from them; the Americans to draw them closer.
Several years ago, the Foreign Office reported on a disastrous trade mission to Saudi Arabia. The more relaxed Arabs tried to get up close to the stiff English delegates, who then backed away. The Arabs were offended at the supposed rejection; the English were put off by the forced intimacy.
The English love of gardens is closely wrapped up with that desire for privacy, for a stretch of land where you know no one else will appear, where you can keep others at a distance. That desire increases with greater proximity to your neighbours. In the 1801 census, the English lived an average of 153 yards from each other; by the 1851 census, this had shrunk to 108 yards. In London, it fell from twenty-one yards to fourteen.
As we moved closer together, so we built more hedges, fences and garden walls. In 1857, Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that ‘High stone fences, and padlocked garden gates, announce the absolute will of the owner to be alone.’
In Silverdale, Lancashire, and Shepton Mallet, Somerset, there survive several Victorian ‘spite walls’ – solid brick walls, the height of a house, built two feet from the front of a neighbour’s home, to cut off any possible view of them.
It isn’t just gardens that the English designed for privacy. Box pews in Georgian churches, wooden partitions in early-nineteenth-century coffee houses, snob screens in Victorian pubs; all of them were built to provide closed-off spaces. Only recently has all this changed, with the fashion for knockthroughs – sitting rooms leading into kitchens, kitchens opening out into the garden.
This yearning for privacy struck foreign observers early on. ‘Intellectually, they were dead; lived only for their petty, private interest, for their looms and gardens,’ wrote Friedrich Engels of the early-eighteenth-century English working class before the Industrial Revolution.4 In the early nineteenth century, a French aristocrat said, ‘the English detest being seen and will gladly forgo any prospect beyond their own limited boundaries.’
Our obsession with cultivating our own little private spaces explains why our public spaces are so often neglected. In France, there are elaborate public floral displays in summer; in Germany and Austria, perennials are planted on roundabouts and traffic islands.5
But there’s a trade-off between private and public: private gardens in those countries are not nearly as sophisticated as ours, and there are fewer of them, too, with more flats and fewer owner-occupied houses. Increased home ownership over here means greater care of the gardens attached to those homes; but it also means worse care for public spaces.
A yearning for privacy – ‘During the hot weather, the Smythe-Robinsons of Tiddlington take their meals in a cool and shady spot of the garden’, cartoon by H. M. Bateman, 1913.
This obsession with privacy, combined with the English taste for an unmanicured, picturesque look, lent an early individualism to English gardens. While Continental gardens grew ordered and symmetrical in the sixteenth century, mirroring the Renaissance ideals of the great classical buildings they bordered, England’s gardens sought out an ambling, unpredictable line. Those English Renaissance gardens that there were usually had a wilderness in them. As early as 1624, Sir Henry Wotton, the first proper architectural author in English, was writing, ‘As Fabriques should be regular, so Gardens should be irregular.’
‘Old roses should be allowed to ramp away into big bushes,’ Vita Sackville-West wrote of her garden at Sissinghurst, Kent, ‘and allowed also to travel about underground if they are on their own roots and come up in fine carelessness some yards from the parent plant.’
‘Fine carelessness’ implies less lazy neglect than the studied, artful creation of neglect. And it doesn’t come cheap: when Vita Sackville-West died in 1962, she left hardly anything in her will – she had spent all her money on carefully producing the fine, careless look. You can relate that fine carelessness to a national gift for creation without prescription; to a common law built on a million instances of judge-made law rather than Parliament legislation; to an unwritten constitution and an undefined yet established church.6
It’s only because we’ve become so used to English back gardens that we notice, and exaggerate, small differences between them; rather than appreciate their considerable similarities. The exact arrangement of a garden’s features may vary, but it usually approximates to a version of the classic English back garden. The ground plan is usually a loose collection of rectangles: a fairly neat lawn surrounded by borders on all sides, with a shed and a stretch of terrace incorporated into the plan.
The lawn is at the heart of the English garden. And, if there is a single most influential lawn in the country, it is the one at Chiswick House, in west London. After Lord Burlington finished the house in 1729, in collaboration with William Kent, he turned his eye to the garden. Clearing the stiff, formal lines of the old baroque garden, Burlington and Kent transformed the straight canal into a lake with serpentine banks, an early taste of the Picturesque. By the lake, in front of the villa, they planted a new, celebrated lawn (restored in 2010), with immense consequences for other country houses across England.
Those effects spread to back gardens across the country, spurred on by the invention in 1827 of the cylinder lawnmower, by Edwin Budding, a foundryman from Stroud, Gloucestershire.7 The new lawnmowers were often pulled by ponies that wore leather boots on their hooves to protect the lawn.
Before then, scythes had been used to clear grass, roughly, slowly and expensively – meaning lawns were largely confined to the rich. The new machine cleared large areas of land cheaply and quickly, leaving behind neat, even lines.
Vegetable patches in rural cottage gardens were now opened up, with a lawn at their heart. By 1841, the American landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing was saying, ‘The unrivalled beauty of the “velvet lawns” of England has passed into a proverb.’
The lawnmower didn’t just popularize the lawn – it also helped to produce the modern urban park, and lay the ground for the Victorian boom in the national sports: rugby, football, cricket and tennis.
A border-fringed lawn also made a snug fit for the rectangular plots laid out behind millions of English terraced houses from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The fashion for borders deepened with the introduction of carpet bedding – elaborately patterned, highly colourful floral displays, beloved of seaside esplanades – dreamt up by Cliveden’s head gardener, John Fleming, in the 1840s.
This battle between the neat, ordered world of the carpet border and Vita Sackville-West’s fine carelessness still rages in the modern English garden. A recent survey declared that the ten most attractive features in an estate agent’s photo of a property were a mixture of the ordered and the wild: tree-lined drive (ordered); perfect lawn (ordered); terrace (ordered); cottage planting (wild); wild meadow (wild); walled garden (ordered); romantic walk (wild); orchard (wild); kitchen garden (ordered); courts and pools (ordered).8
That conflict between ordered and wild often has unspoken class aspects, too, buried just below the topsoil. Over-neatened gardens, built on strict geometrical lines, are the antithesis of fine carelessness, as becomes clear in South Riding, Winifred Holtby’s novel about Yorkshire municipal life in the 1930s. Greenlawnes, the Harrogate home of William Carne, a bloodless, soulless chiseller of an architect, is the archetypal neat garden.
The house stood back from the road in a smart, prosperous, geometrical garden. The lawns had been mown, the hedges clipped, the begonias planted in unhesitating rows. There was a cubist bird-path, a crazy-paved sunk garden, a rubble tennis-court, a grass court, a rose-garden. The house was all white and chromium, and rectangular, with windows cut out of the corners.9
Holtby’s intention is clear – the garden isn’t just ugly; it’s also not comme il faut.
When the BBC did a programme on Sissinghurst in 2009, the unsaid battlelines were laid between Vita Sackville-West’s grandson, Adam Nicolson, and his landlord, the National Trust. Nicolson’s bohemian taste for ‘filth’, as a term of affection, and ‘admired disorder’ – another euphemism for fine carelessness – clashed with the National Trust’s desire for neat, ordered perfection.10
The battle flared into life when Nicolson woke up one day to find, to his horror, that a crumbling, antique stone statue had been replaced by an immaculate modern copy. Fine carelessness had lost out to untainted newness, thanks to the National Trust’s obligation to preserve its houses and gardens in perpetuity; an obligation that militates against a gradual, pleasing crumbling into dust.
In 1979, the writer Philip Toynbee, a friend of Vita Sackville-West’s son, Ben Nicolson, dreamt up the ideal practical joke to explode the aesthetic values beneath Sissinghurst’s shambolic artfulness.
‘The plan [was] to load up a lorry with hundreds of garden gnomes, drive down to Sissinghurst one night and plant them all over the famous and much-viewed garden of Ben’s formidable mother.’11
A similar class battle over the shabbiness of the English garden takes place at Blandings Castle between Lord Emsworth and his Glaswegian head gardener, Angus McAllister. McAllister wants to build a gravel path through the yew alley at Blandings.
‘Gravel path!’ Lord Emsworth stiffened through the whole length of his stringy body. Nature, he had always maintained, intended a yew alley to be carpeted with a mossy growth. And, whatever Nature felt about it, he personally was dashed if he was going to have men with Clydeside accents and faces like dissipated potatoes coming along and mutilating that lovely expanse of green velvet …
‘Most decidedly not. Try to remember, McAllister, as you work in the gardens of Blandings Castle, that you are not back in Glasgow, laying out recreation gardens.’12
We do allow a few carefully contrived spots of scrubbed-up gentility in our gardens – however unfashionable neatness is considered to be.
Nothing is more genteel than the conservatory – close to English hearts because it is so well adapted to deal with that peculiar English obsession, the weather. We are a nation of people who live in glass houses.
Of course conservatories crop up abroad, too, but it’s striking that the word conservatory, or conservatoire, is normally used in Italy, France and America to mean a musical academy. The desire to bring the outdoors indoors, to make the most of the daylight hours and to maximize the time spent gardening and looking at the garden is not stitched into their DNA the way it is in ours. England led the world when it came to developing the first conservatories, and taking the chill off the outside air while letting in as much of that precious northern sunlight as possible.
The first mention of conservatories is in the late seventeenth century. Glass was getting cheaper, thinner and finer, and people were beginning to understand the implications of the greenhouse effect, i.e. that glass allows heat to pass quickly through it and warm the room it encloses.
Conservatories were originally places for tender flowers or plants during the winter – literally a place to conserve them. They weren’t quite the same as greenhouses, though: in those early days, conservatories tended to have beds of plants; greenhouses were for movable pots.
The race to build bigger conservatories heated up during the nineteenth century; a race led by Sir Joseph Paxton (1803–65), who in 1837 built the Great Conservatory for his patron, the Duke of Devonshire, at Chatsworth, Derbyshire – then the biggest glass building in the world, with specially customized panes, the largest ever made, at four feet long. He based his ground-breaking glass-and-metal-rib design on the strong engineering of the water lily leaf, after he saw that one of the duke’s lilies could comfortably support his one-year-old daughter, Annie.
Paxton’s success at Chatsworth won him the commission for the largest conservatory ever built – the Crystal Palace, built in 1851 for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, later transferred to Sydenham in south London. With 900,000 square feet of sheet glass, it required a third of Britain’s annual glass output. The most famous building of the Victorian age, the palace had a huge influence on domestic fashion. Conservatories, mini-crystal palaces of iron and glass, cropped up across the country in the late nineteenth century.
As they became more popular, conservatories grew more integral to the house. Ornamental plants, once hothoused in greenhouses, were now brought to the conservatory to be shown off. Sir Walter Scott was astounded when he visited a house where ‘the present proprietor had rendered the parlour more cheerful by opening one end into a small conservatory. I have never before seen this.’
Conservatories remain in Sir Joseph Paxton’s image today. Some of them are topped off with spiky, decorative finials that recall the Paxton age of ornate, high-Victorian, Gothic architecture. They appeal to the English love of small, quirky buildings – reflected, as well, in our taste for follies.
The idea of sticking a little Gothic glass building on to the back of our classically inspired, brick, terraced houses would strike an Italian or French purist as being ludicrously chintzy.
But oh, how ludicrous and chintzy things appeal to the playful – especially the historically playful – parts of the English heart; particularly when you can stuff them full of flowers.
The conservatory is purpose-built for the English obsessions with gardening and being outdoors – or semi-outdoors, at least. As Jennifer Owen showed in the academic study of her Leicester garden, nowhere else on the earth’s surface is there an area as small as Britain where such a diversity of plants can be grown. The extra few degrees of heat that come with glazing expand that diversity even more.