The Back-garden Formula

The back garden, the one we are all allowed to enjoy, is often relatively scruffy, or at least utterly bland, and only very rarely the pretty, colourful, cottagey profusion of roses, hollyhocks, pansies, trellises, little gates and whatnot that everyone thinks of as a typical English garden. It is verging on blasphemous to say this, but I have to point out that the truly typical English back garden is actually a fairly dull rectangle of grass, with some sort of paved �patio’ at one end and a shed of no particular aesthetic or architectural merit at the other, a path down one side and perhaps a bed of rather unimaginatively arranged shrubs and flowers along the other side.

There are variations on this theme, of course. The path may run alongside the flower-bed, or down the middle of the grass rectangle, with flower-beds along both walls. There may be a tree or two. Or some bushes or pots, or maybe climbing-plants on the walls. The edges of the flower-beds may be curved rather than straight. But the basic pattern of the conventional English garden – the вЂ?high-walls, paved-bit, grass-bit, path, flower-bed, shed’ formula – is reassuringly unmistakeable, instantly identifiable, comfortingly familiar. This pattern must be somehow imprinted on the English soul, as it is reproduced faithfully, with only minor twists and variations, behind almost every house in every street in the country. ²⁸

Tourists are unlikely ever to see an ordinary, typical English back garden. These very private places are hidden from the street behind our houses, and even hidden from our neighbours by high walls, hedges or fences. They never feature in glossy picture-books about �The English Garden’, and are never mentioned in tourist brochures or indeed in any other publications about England, all of which invariably parrot the received wisdom that the English are a nation of green-fingered creative geniuses. That is because the authors of these books do not do their research by spending time in ordinary people’s homes, or climbing onto roofs and walls at the back of standard suburban semis and peering through binoculars at the rows and rows of normal, undistinguished English gardens. (Now you know: that person you thought was a burglar or a peeping tom was me.) Aesthetically, it must be said, the duped tourists, anglophiles and garden enthusiasts who read this English Garden stuff are perhaps not missing much.

But I am being unfair. The average English garden, however unoriginal and humdrum, is actually, on a mild sunny day, a rather pleasant place to sit and drink a cup of tea and chuck bits of bread about for the birds and grumble quietly about slugs, the weather forecast, the government and the neighbours’ cat. (The rules of garden-talk require that such moans be balanced by more cheerful noticing of how well the irises or columbines are doing this year.)

And it must also be said that even the average, bog-standard English garden represents considerably more effort than most other nations typically invest in their green bits. The average American garden, for example, does not even deserve the name, and is rightly called a вЂ?yard’, and most ordinary European gardens are also just patches of turf.²⁹ Only the Japanese – our fellow crowded-small-island-dwellers – can be said to make a comparable effort, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the more trendy, design-conscious English gardeners are often influenced by Japanese styles (witness the current fashion for wooden decking, pebbles and water-features). But these avant-gardeners are a tiny minority, and it seems to me that our reputation as a вЂ?nation of gardeners’ must derive from our obsession with our small patches of turf, our love of gardens, rather than any remarkable artistic flair in garden design.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-06