Class Indicators and the Eccentricity Clause

Our taste is influenced by what we see in the gardens of our friends, family and neighbours. In England, you grow up learning to find some flowers and arrangements of flowers �pretty’ or �tasteful’ and others �ugly’ or �vulgar’. By the time you have your own garden, you will, if you are from the higher social ranks, �instinctively’ turn up your nose at gaudy bedding plants (such as zinnias, salvia, marigolds and petunias), ornate rockeries, pampas grass, hanging baskets, busy lizzies, chrysanthemums, gladioli, gnomes and goldfish ponds. You will, on the other hand, be likely to find box hedges, old-fashioned shrub roses, herbaceous borders, clematis, laburnum, Tudor-revival/Arts-and-Crafts patterns and York stone paths aesthetically pleasing.

Garden fashions change, and in any case it would be a mistake to be too precise and attempt to classify a garden socially on the basis of one or two flowers or features. The �eccentricity clause’ applies here as well, as Quest-Ritson observes: �Once a garden-owner has acquired a reputation as a general plantsman, it is quite permissible for him to express a tenderness for the unfashionable, the plebeian and the naff’. I would say that being firmly and unequivocally established as a member of the upper- or upper-middle classes would be enough, with or without plantsmanship, but the point is much the same. The odd garden gnome or zinnia does not necessarily result in automatic demotion, but may be tolerated as a personal idiosyncrasy.

To gauge the social class of a garden owner, it is therefore better to look at the general style of the garden, rather than becoming too obsessed with the class-semiotics of individual plants – particularly if you can’t tell an old-fashioned rose from a Hybrid Tea. As a rule-of-thumb, gardens lower down the social scale tend to be both more garish (their owners would say �colourful’ or �cheerful’) and more regimented in appearance (their owners would call them �neat’ or �tidy’) than those at the higher end.

Higher-class gardens tend to look more casual, more natural, less effortful, with more faded or subtle colours. Like the �natural look’ in make-up, this effect may require a great deal of time and effort to achieve – perhaps more than the pastry-cut flower-beds and disciplined rows of flowers of the lower-class garden – but the effort does not show; the impression is of a charming, uncontrived confusion, usually with little or no earth visible between the plants. Excessive fretting and fussing about the odd weed or two, and over-zealous manicuring of lawns, are regarded, by the upper classes and upper-middles, as rather lower class.

The wealthier uppers, of course, have lower-class gardeners to do their fretting and manicuring for them, so their gardens may sometimes look rather too neat – but if you talk to them, you will find that they often complain about the perfectionism of their gardeners (�Fred’s a dreadful fusser – has a fit if a daisy dares to rear its ugly head on “his” lawn!’) in the same patronising way that some businessmen and professionals mock the tidiness of their super-efficient secretaries (�Oh, I’m not allowed near the filing cabinet – I might mess up her precious colourcoding system!’).

Дата добавления: 2015-09-06