At the other end of the spectrum stands the gardener, very much a social indicator in the past and indeed today. If you employ garden help, even on a very minor scale, you are displaying a degree of affluence. And in the archetypal Victorian or Edwardian garden, the gardener is an essential feature. Think of Mr McGregor in The Tale of Peter Rabbit: the ominous ‘scr-r-ritch, scratch, scratch, scritch’ of his hoe, after reading of which the sound of a hoe is forever loaded. Mr McGregor wages war on rabbits; Peter Rabbit and his cousin Benjamin Bunny very nearly fall victim to him; Peter’s father had been put in a pie by Mr McGregor.
Now there is an ambiguity, in Beatrix Potter’s work, as to whether Mr McGregor’s garden, as portrayed, is his own or whether he is employed therein. It seems to me that the garden is much too extensive to be a cottage garden: it is clearly a large walled and hedged kitchen garden, with a substantial greenhouse, frames and tubs, and in The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, which continues the engagement between McGregor and the rabbits unto the second generation, there is an illustration depicting the garden path and pergola arch of a considerable flower garden. Mr McGregor’s house is said to adjoin the garden; very likely, if the gardener’s cottage. So I like to see Mr McGregor as the archetypal gardener in literary fiction. When we were serious vegetable growers, and suffered rabbit intrusion, Jack used to say that he considered Mr McGregor to be a much misunderstood man.
Furthermore, Mr McGregor is presumably Scottish. There seems to have been a tradition since the eighteenth century that the significant gardener was a Scot – three of the seven founders of the Horticultural Society in 1804 were that. George Eliot wrote in Adam Bede, ‘a gardener is Scottish as a French teacher is Parisian’. So Mr McGregor fits nicely.
P. G. Wodehouse tuned in to this tradition in Blandings Castle, where his Angus McAllister has to be the archetypal Scottish head gardener. We first meet him as seen by his employer, Lord Emsworth (‘a fluffy-minded and amiable old gentleman’) – ‘bent with dour Scottish determination to pluck a slug from its reverie beneath a leaf of lettuce’. The relationship between the two of them is traditionally embattled. Permission from McAllister is required before any flower can be picked from the gardens: ‘They were bright with Achillea, Bignonia Radicans, Campanula, Digitalis, Euphorbia, Funkia, Gypsophila, Helianthus, Iris, Liatris, Monarda, Phlox Drummondi, Salvia, Thalictrum, Vinca, and Yucca. But the devil of it was that Angus McAllister would have a fit if they were picked. Across the threshold of this Eden the ginger whiskers of Angus McAllister lay like a flaming sword.’ He wants to create a gravel path through the Castle’s famous yew alley, an idea that appals Lord Emsworth, who is constantly on the back foot over this issue: ‘… he was wondering why Providence, if obliged to make head-gardeners, had found it necessary to make them so Scotch’. The trouble is, he needs McAllister, who is the only person with the skill to cultivate a pumpkin of unbeatable quality that will win Lord Emsworth first prize for pumpkins at the Shrewsbury Show. He had once dismissed McAllister, the issue at that point being McAllister’s refusal to send away a visiting American girl cousin of his to whom Lord Emsworth’s renegade son Freddie has taken a fancy. McAllister refuses – ‘He made Scotch noises at the back of his throat’ – and is sacked, but Lord Emsworth is eventually obliged to implore him to return, in the interests of the pumpkin. The relationship is beautifully presented, and you want more of McAllister, who is unfortunately only a flickering presence in the usual helter-skelter Wodehouse narrative. I found myself interested in that plant list, too; did Wodehouse know them all, or did he get them out of a catalogue? Some had me stumped: liatris is a sort of purple bottle-brush, it seems – looks horrible – funkia is another name for hosta, Bignonia radicans – trumpet vine – was new to me. And that, along with several others, just doesn’t sound like a promising cut flower. I suspect a dive into a catalogue by a writer who wasn’t himself an applied gardener.
My Egyptian childhood was richly populated with gardeners; my mother’s extensive English-style garden required much upkeep. There was Mansour, the head gardener, of whom I was wary, because he was rightly suspicious of some of my activities, which might involve snapping off those intriguing yellow stamens in arum lilies, and would report on me. There was Ali, who was robust, jolly, and in charge of heavy duties like lawn-mowing. And the garden boy, Ahmed, who swept paths, was around my age, and up for games like competitive hopping until chivvied back to work by an irate Mansour.
In the Oxfordshire garden with two streams we had help, but I can’t think of Richard Taylor as our gardener: friend, collaborator. He and Jack would work together, in unceasing conversation; I would come out and find them paused, each leaning on spade or fork, when Jack had challenged Richard’s countryman’s natural conservatism with some radical social or political proposition: ‘Now, Jack, I’m not sure I’m eye to eye with you there.’ Richard loved machinery, and his greatest joy was to find some appliance that didn’t work, and bring it back to life. Jack would be alongside, like the plumber’s mate, or the aide in an operating theatre: ‘The spanner, Jack, please. Now can I have the small screwdriver, and the oilcan.’ Needless to say, he was a connoisseur of lawnmowers, and egged Jack on to acquire a stable of them; the Mountfield for the lawn, a ride-on thing for the paddock, and a fearful implement called the Bushwhacker for any more demanding operation; you could have cleared virgin forest with it. ‘I think we’ll be needing the Bushwhacker for this job, Jack’; and off they’d go, eyes glinting. Most of all, Richard liked some new endeavour: ‘I’ve been thinking, what would you say to a stone arch between the bridge over the stream and the vegetable garden – there could be a rose over it?’ The arch was built, expertly, by him; the rose, ‘New Dawn’. I hope both are still there.
Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing: – ‘Oh, how beautiful’, and sitting in the shade.
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives.
The other garden poem that everyone knows, and in fact a poem about gardeners; it is clear that the sort of garden Kipling has in mind is distinctly upper class, and a garden dependent on the gardener, on gardeners:
For where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red wall,
You’ll find the tool- and potting-sheds which are the heart of all.
The cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dung-pits and the tanks,
The rollers, carts, and drain-pipes, with the barrows and the planks.
And there you’ll see the gardeners, the men and ’prentice boys
Told off to do as they are bid and do it without noise;
For, except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words.
This is the classic Victorian and Edwardian garden with all the accessories, the hired labour being the most critical of all. Kipling and his wife, Carrie, created a garden at Bateman’s, in Sussex, the seventeenth-century house in which the family lived for over thirty years, and which Carrie left to the National Trust. So he was certainly into garden design – an alley with a pergola covered in pears, a walled kitchen garden converted from a stable yard, discrete areas within yew hedges – but you wonder if he did any of that grubbing up with a broken dinner-knife himself. I doubt it; though the reference is perceptive, and accurate – that is indeed a useful gardening implement (unless – perish the thought – the term is there simply for the rhyme). Those thirty-three acres of garden, meadows and woods would have been worked by others, in the early twentieth century – that traditional army of gardeners.
Hestercombe, near Taunton, is a medieval house substantially made over in the seventeenth century, and distinguished now for its gardens, run by the Hestercombe Gardens Trust. The gardens are one of the finest Lutyens/Jekyll collaborations. They were commissioned by the then owners of the house, Viscount Portman and his wife, and the gardens laid
out between 1904 and 1906. They are splendid – very Lutyens, very Jekyll, with flights of stone steps, parterre with Jekyll planting, rills with pools, woodland walks and lakes beyond. But what, for me, evokes that earlier, Edwardian life of this garden – any grand garden, perhaps – is the group portrayed on a postcard you can find in Hestercombe’s shop.
These are the gardeners, posed for a formal portrait – seventeen of them, one row seated, one row standing, and flanked at one side by a lad of maybe twelve, and at the other by a white-bearded figure in his seventies. All wear hats – flat caps for the most part. Shirt and waistcoat seem to be de rigueur; all but one of the seven seated figures at the front wear aprons. Those standing behind are posed with hoe, spade, rake, shears, while the sitters are neatly framed by two long-spouted watering-cans. They inspire confidence, these gardeners; formally dressed, business-like. You feel that Hestercombe would have been well serviced. One of them must be the head gardener, a figure of authority, and who would have had considerable horticultural expertise. Scottish?
A garden of that order will not be serviced by seventeen men today. But one must remember that garden work, just like housework, has been turned on its head by modern appliances: the strimmer, the electric hedge-cutter, the rotovator. Hestercombe might have had one of the early petrol-driven lawnmowers, but that was a paltry affair compared with today’s powerful products. Half of those seventeen Edwardian gardeners could probably be dispensed with by reason of technological advance; and, indeed, I learn that in 2016 Hestercombe employs just six gardeners; three with horticultural training and three trained in countryside management.
Today’s gardener is much more likely to be seen as a professional – graduate of a horticultural college like Capel Manor in London, and elsewhere. And television – the Chelsea and Hampton Court flower shows, Gardeners’ World, and other television gardening programmes – have promoted the concept of the gardener as celebrity, all those celebrity presenters, clearly knowledgeable, clearly professional, all those designer gardeners with their show garden that you either covet or loathe but know that either way you are never going to rise (or sink) to anything like that. These people are a far cry from the lowly gardening labourer of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though of course these are still there but likely now to be interns, apprentices with an eye to a future in the profession. Every week, another card drops through my door alerting me to the arrival of a new garden services firm – maintenance, landscaping, any work undertaken. These will have been set up and are managed by someone with plenty of horticultural qualifications and – in my experience – the labour force is likely to be Czech, Polish, Bulgarian, possessed of rather fewer of those, if any. I always need a firm to do the autumn clearing-up work, and high-pressure hosing of the paving, and am still grumpy about my experience of Czech Tom, who hacked my Hydrangea petiolaris right back, evidently ignorant of the fact that it flowers on the new growth. But I have had excellent experiences as well, and one has to admire the versatility; Polish Marek, here for a morning, was really an engineer, he told me, marking time until he found more appropriate work, but he efficiently cleared away the intrusive polygonum from over the wall without molesting the hydrangea.
This topic of the gardener seemed relevant to a discussion of the garden as social indicator, but what is clear is that the status and persona of the gardener has changed radically over time. The grubber-up of weeds from gravel paths has given way to, at one end of the spectrum, the television personality, and, at the other, most likely, the employee of a small business. A bit different in the country, where the jobbing gardener is still around. Nevertheless, to be a user of garden services of any kind implies a certain affluence; the serviced garden puts its owner in one category rather than another. The other being, as always, most gardens up and down the land where the only service is likely to be a press-ganged child, or that useful neighbour who happens to own a strimmer.
Interestingly, gardening as an activity has not been seen as socially demeaning. The upper-class lady has always got her hands dirty – look at Vita Sackville-West, let alone Gertrude Jekyll and her many followers. My grandmother – solidly middle rather than upper – gardened for several hours every day of her life, but she was aghast when obliged occasionally to wash up, in the post-war years of domestic labour scarcity, while to scrub a floor or operate a vacuum cleaner would have been out of the question. Gardening was one thing, housework quite another. For Elizabeth von Arnim, of course, Prussian etiquette in the early twentieth century forbade her from getting stuck in with a trowel – evidently perceptions were different over there. But when I doubted if Kipling himself ever grubbed out weeds it was because he had the labour force, and would have seen himself as more usefully occupied at his desk; nobody would have raised an eyebrow if he had chosen to do a bit of recreational gardening. It does seem odd now, this early-twentieth-century view that social status made one kind of physical activity – work, you could call it – acceptable and another very much not. Gardening, you get a lot hotter and dirtier than you do dusting a room or washing a floor. But gardening was a genteel occupation, housework a demeaning task that you paid someone else to do. I can understand to the extent that I enjoy gardening and don’t particularly relish housework, but my grandmother’s view, and that of her generation and beyond, wasn’t much to do with the pleasure factor, it was an entrenched position: gardening was constructive, requiring skill and knowledge, whereas you never involved yourself with housework because that could perfectly well be done by others, and always had been.
My grandmother, like most women of her kind and her time, couldn’t cook. A minor aspect of the social revolution of the last hundred years is that today all middle-class women can cook, most of them with great competence. All cook, while probably rather fewer garden with enthusiasm. Cooking could be said to have usurped the role of gardening, for the middle class; a person who is a good cook (men can step forward here too) is respected for being so, cookery skill is seen as admirable. Again, television probably has had an effect on this attitude, affording more airtime by far to cookery than to gardening programmes, but the change seems to me to do also with enhanced expectations about food, deriving from foreign travel, and a perception that to cook well needs skill and application. And to the fact that a paid cook is no longer affordable for the vast majority.
So, among the various social reversals of the last century is that that has made competence at cookery a desirable attribute. And while gardening was always seen as a genteel activity, the garden is perhaps now regarded as an extension of the house, a property asset that should be kept in good order. What kind of order will depend on the inclination of the owner, on gardening style. And style is of course a broad church, with ankle-deep grass, washing line and child’s rusting tricycle at one extreme, and at the other the Chelsea-inspired curving paths, water feature with fountain, patio and pergola, fastidious planting. Some of us garden, some are gardened, others get out there once a year with that borrowed strimmer.
Foreign travel has affected our approach to food, in this country, but I am doubtful as to whether the same thing can be said about gardening. I am going to get xenophobic here: we garden rather well. I am tempted to say we garden second to none. There have been, there are, many notable, unrivalled, individual gardeners – designers, writers – from elsewhere, but in a general, homely, back (and front) garden way I think that we Brits do a pretty good job. We have our grand gardens, the landscaped gardens inspired by the eighteenth-century picturesque taste that identify English gardening: every language has the term, it seems – jardin à l’anglaise, giardino all’inglese, Englischer Landschaftsgarten. This is Rousham, Stowe, Stourhead – your lakes, bridges, temples. That bold new concept of garden landscaping is entirely English. But that is not really what I am thinking of. Most of us do not have a landscape to garden – we manipulate a few square yards, or rather more if you are lucky. But there is still something essentially English about that m
anipulation. And what is that? What swims before the eyes when you think of an English garden? Grass, most definitely – the lawn, from the rolling expanse to the carefully tended back-garden pocket handkerchief. Paths – our gardens offer journeys, long or short, paved, gravelled. Water – we love a pond, anything from the generous lake with willows and carpet of water lilies to the membrane-lined hole in the ground, now teeming with tadpoles and water boatmen. But, above all, texture, colour and informality. English gardens do not wear a straitjacket; they are lush, exuberant, expansive. Richly planted – the old concept of the herbaceous border. We like size and emphasis – where would we be without the hydrangea, the buddleia, the shrub rose? Roses, roses, all the way. Roses up, as well as roses down – up the house, up the walls. We garden in every dimension, subsume our houses into our gardens. The English garden is about colour, variety – the exploitation of seasonal change, the continuity whereby spring segues into summer, summer dies away into autumn – and about the iconic plants without which we could not do: the rose, the rose, and clematis, fuchsias, lavender, pansies, narcissi, tulips, peonies, irises – all these and more. How they fit together is where the lack of the straitjacket comes in, the element of careless abandon, not untidiness but a knack of siting this where it would complement that, creativity with shapes and colours, not so much design as a shrewd approach to plants and what can be done with them.
Elsewhere, when it comes to gardening, there is of course French style – Le Nôtre and all that geometry, straight lines in every direction – or the Italian Renaissance gardens with their terraces and fountains. Distinctive enough but of their time; I do not think there are other gardening styles current today that are as immediately identifiable as our own is. Japanese, perhaps, with their addiction to rocks and swept gravel, but this impression comes from images of show gardens; do ordinary Japanese gardeners do that sort of thing in their back yard? I am short on evidence here, but it does seem to me that the English garden stands alone when it comes to that quality of being instantly known.