Life in the Garden

by Penelope Lively

  We have an immediate advantage: the climate. The temperate climate that means plenty of rain for those lawns, and for everything else, few prolonged extremes of either cold or heat, a long growing period. If you can’t manage to garden competently with those benedictions you are a pretty duff gardener. A clever gardener can garden anywhere: Mediterranean gardens with that judicious choice of drought-resistant plants. But you don’t have to be particularly clever in this country – just ancestrally attuned to a certain style that is about grass, and lavish, imaginatively informal planting.

  So … From social style to national style. And it is social style that is the more pertinent here, both for the way in which it crops up so aptly in fictional contexts, and the demonstration of it all around, if you do but look. There may be a quintessentially English garden style, but the interpretation of it depends on personal idiosyncrasy, and that in turn is a matter of who you are and, probably, how your parents and grandparents gardened. My personal theory that the urge to garden is genetic ties in with ancestral garden-style conditioning: if your mother and grandmother gardened, you are likely to do so as well, and the way in which you garden owes much to your social context. Patrician gardening is an acreage of pergolas and laburnum walks away from the council-house mixed border and vegetable plot, though today this gradation is complicated by the effect of gardening fashion, by the manipulation of garden centres and television gardening programmes. We garden according to who we are, but also according to commercial enticement and media influence. The garden today is a perilous place, one in which we express our personal taste, which itself derives from our time and our circumstances. And that is what makes gardens so fascinatingly various, and so eloquent.

  Town and Country

  Those familiar with Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse will recall that it is the most succinct literary statement going of the apposition between town and country. Town life, as perceived by Timmy Willie, the country mouse who arrives in town by accident in the carrier’s produce hamper, is alarming (cats, the cook armed with a poker), amoral (the town mice live by pilfering), pretentious (‘the dinner was of eight courses, not much of anything, but truly elegant’) and noisy (dogs bark, boys whistle, a canary sings like a steam engine). Country life is wholesome – Timmy Willie has been reared on roots and salad, rather than pilfered bacon – arcadian (the smell of violets and spring grass), organic (Timmy Willie makes herb pudding and shells corn and seeds from his autumn store), peaceful (the garden in which he lives has roses, pinks and pansies and no noise except birds and bees). Johnny Town-Mouse visits, is distressed by mud and cows, and returns to town in the next hamper, complaining of the quiet. I suspect that all those exposed to this seminal work in formative years are deeply indoctrinated. It is made quite clear where Miss Potter’s preference lies, and the authorial voice is compelling – no sensitive four-year-old is going to do other than line up behind her. Country is good, town is bad; any right-minded person prefers to live in a country garden, eating seeds and sniffing the violets.

  I’m inclined to agree, to some extent, having declined from an acre or so of lush Oxfordshire to a few square yards of London. But that is mere depreciation of resources; what is at issue in the Potter subtext is something much deeper – a moral status. I met that when newly arrived in England from Egypt in 1945, a bewildered twelve-year-old. I had town and country grandmothers, and was shuttled between them. There was no question of who held the upper hand – my Somerset granny with her vast garden and a skyful of fresh air. The Harley Street one could fight back with culturally instructive museum visits and Shakespeare in the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, but must concede smog, smuts and traffic.

  The apposition continues today, of course, and was perhaps epitomized by the demonstrations over the fox-hunting ban in 2004, when 400,000 country-clad cohorts of the Countryside Alliance filled Parliament Square. The law that was passed was a masterly compromise that left hunting both banned and not banned, so that it went on in some form anyway. But the fuss must have baffled much of the urban population largely unaware of fox hunting in any case and with no strong views, except for those suffering from fox depredation of refuse sacks and gardens, who would have seen organized fox control as an excellent idea. The legislation was all about Tony Blair’s need as prime minister to mollify a section of his party, but nevertheless it brought about a nice statement of the divide between town and country. Part of the nation, it seemed, lived in the country and spent its time chasing and slaughtering animals, and the other part hadn’t known much about this but, when enlightened, felt vague righteous disapproval.

  I am concerned specifically with gardens, but the wider issue of rural-versus-urban is relevant. The two-million-plus gardenless households are more likely to be urban than rural; it was ever thus, at least since towns and cities became more densely populated. For country people, a garden is assumed, pretty well; in the city you may be blessed with your own patch, but quite likely not. The suburban garden is another matter entirely; more on that later.

  It was in the early 1940s that town and country became most conscious of the divide. Those who took in evacuee children from London and elsewhere were made aware for the first time of the nature of urban poverty; the evacuee children, in turn, found a world they had not known existed, in which there were animals they had never seen, such as cows and sheep, and in which people had gardens. Some city children would indeed have had a back space of some kind, but it would have housed the coals, and in many cases an outdoor toilet. The country garden was an eye-opener. My grandmother had Stepney evacuees under the age of six throughout the war; her house was a classified war nursery. One five-year-old boy discovered the Cedar of Lebanon on the lawn within a day or two of arrival, shinned gleefully up it, and had to be recovered by the local fire brigade.

  Town and country gardens are differently composed, as I know well, having gardened both. The country garden consists of soil, acid or alkaline according to region, nicely populated with worms, perhaps with some intriguing garden archaeology by way of broken clay pipes, fragments of pretty blue-and-white china, the occasional little old bone spoon or tiny glass medicine bottle (thus, my Oxfordshire garden). The city garden has bricks, cat shit, lengths of rusty barbed wire, nails, lumps of coke and crisp packets, all encased in perfunctory black earth that the worms have long since abandoned in disgust. I felt instant empathy when reading Karel Čapek’s account of his Czech town garden. The archaeology is more disconcerting than intriguing: the occasional bundle of plastic that you prefer not to investigate. My present London garden wasn’t quite as dismaying as this, and we addressed its deficiencies at once with paving, raised beds and an onslaught of topsoil and chicken manure, but the first one certainly was. Our next-door neighbour there had dug up the carcase of a London taxi in his, complete with seating and steering wheel.

  There is a stark apposition between town and country garden marauders. In the town, it is foxes and other people’s cats. In the country, a fine range of wildlife: rabbits, moles, badgers, pigeons, pheasants. The country fox has better things to do. In the Somerset garden, we have had hare incursion – three leverets found under a lavender bush, presumably the progeny of an inexperienced mother not aware that hares are supposed to park their offspring in a field. The town gardener can wage war on foxes and cats, up to a point; the country gardener is on the back foot, unless sufficiently cold-blooded to resort to mole traps and a shotgun. My own view, country gardening, was that the wildlife was there first, as it were, and can be said to have certain rights of occupation; the gardener is the incomer and must expect to pay a price. Except for pheasants, which are not native, are going to be shot anyway and should keep to their target areas and leave the hellebore buds alone.

  City gardening is not for the faint-hearted, but the committed urban gardener will achieve wonders: I have seen more imaginative and resourceful gardens in London than anywhere else. Moreover, there is that urge, on the part of some, t
o make something out of the most unpromising circumstances. I live in a part of London awash with early-nineteenth-century terrace houses. So, houses with a basement and an area (possibly mine is the last generation to know that the sunken space outside the basement window, between that and the pavement wall, is called the area; I have had young builders look at me in bewilderment when I asked them to bring things in by way of the area, and they weren’t Polish builders either). The basements round here are often separate flats, and I think it is most likely to be the flat-dwellers who create an unexpected little sanctuary below ground level. You look down, and discover a blaze of geraniums, a Trachelospermum jasminoides covering a carefully constructed trellis, a clematis, tree ferns, bamboo, an array of cactuses; a place, often, in which every inch has been made use of for a pot of something or a tray of something else, all thriving away in the microclimate down there. Since I have the garden, my own area is rather under-exploited, but I make sure that there is always a pot or two of ferns, and that the iron trough basket fixed to the wall is planted up with diascia for the summer, and bulbs for the spring – ‘Tête-à-Tête’ daffodils, or I shall try ‘Elka’ for next year, which sounds like a satisfactorily miniature daff for that position. Oh, the annual treat of poring over the Avon Bulbs catalogue, trying to decide between one alluring offering and another. Shall I have ‘Purissima’, or ‘Calgary Flames’? Plant names are a minefield. Those who name can be disastrously overinventive. Tulips seem to have been named with relative restraint; a rush of poetic description is acceptable – ‘Apricot Beauty’, ‘Grand Perfection’. But as a fuchsia lover I wince at the unfortunate trio named ‘Shrimp Cocktail’, ‘Pink Fizz’ and ‘Icing Sugar’, let alone the equally put-upon dahlia called ‘Badger Twinkle’. David Austin’s determinedly prosaic naming of my ground-cover roses is preferable: ‘Hertfordshire’, ‘Cambridgeshire’, ‘Worcestershire’.

  Gardeners are a community – there should be some sort of Masonic handshake. As it is, when you sniff out a fellow gardener there is instant communion, and I particularly like the presence of these invisible, unknown, surrounding neighbours, who have seized the day in the sense of exploiting the unpromising. Two or three square yards of concrete, six feet below the pavement, and you can create a personal display.

  Perhaps the gardening urge is innate, present in most of us as a legacy of humanity’s move from hunter-gathering into settling down and growing stuff to live off. The throwback hunter-gatherer part of us sends us off to the supermarket; the innovative streak drives us outside to dig and plant. Not an explanation to press too far, but it would put a certain kind of gardener firmly into the Neolithic revolution category, as the archaeologists like to call it: the vegetable gardener, above all the allotment gardener.

  I have never had an allotment, but I have grown vegetables in a double-allotment-size kitchen garden, so I can feel a certain empathy with the committed allotmenteer. I know what it is to be digging the potato trench, planting out the onion sets, nipping the tops off broad beans before the blackfly get there, cursing carrot fly, harvesting courgettes before they turn into truncheons. The vegetable gardener is an embattled figure (Mr McGregor, again …) and vegetable growing is hard work. But many people want to do it. There are long waiting lists for allotments, countrywide. In London, you can wait years.

  The history of the allotment movement goes back to the early eighteenth century, but today’s allotmenteer can be rather different from those for whom the original allotments were designed, the rural poor – and, later, the urban poor too. Valentine Low has written of contemporary London allotment life in his book One Man and His Dig, which contrives to be both entertaining and nicely informative, and describes his own allotment site in west London as providing allotments for an Afghan, a Pole, Moroccans, West Indians, a Goan, Irish, and ‘Guardian-reading middle-class types’. The adjoining main site could boast Iraqis, Portuguese, Italian, Libyan and Spanish. The twenty-first-century allotmenteer is quite likely to be middle class or from an ethnic minority. And while these last may well be not at all well off, the allotment population, at least in London, would seem to be a far cry from the labouring poor for whom the allotment movement was devised.

  The creation of the original allotment spaces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was intended as a way to alleviate poverty and also to stem the mass exodus from the countryside by rural labourers on subsistence wages hoping for a better life in the cities. By 1890 there were 445,000 allotments across the country, and laws were passed obliging local councils to provide allotments if there was a demand. By then, the demand came just as much in urban areas – the tradition of the town allotment was under way. And then came the First World War, which sent the demand for allotments into overdrive, both on the part of those who wanted one, and the government, desperate to increase the supply of home-grown food. Every spare bit of land must be turned into growing space; free gardening advisory pamphlets were distributed. By 1917 a further 12,000 acres had been turned into allotments, but even so, the supply never kept up with the demand, though by the end of the war there was one allotment to every five households, providing eight to ten million people with food. Parks and playing fields were turned into allotments; in South Wales miners were provided with allotments by the collieries.

  Indeed, it could be said that the concept of the allotment as both a right for all and a distinct need for many was set firm in the First World War. The demand for allotments continued after the war, but there was a huge need now for land for housing, at the expense of the provision of allotments. Allotmenteers organized themselves into the National Union of Allotment Holders, and pressured government into passing the 1922 Allotment Act, giving allotment holders better security and requiring councils to provide allotments under given circumstances. Later acts defined statutory allotment sites and made allotments a part of every town-planning scheme. The allotment site was now pretty well entrenched as a part of the landscape, and then received a tremendous boost with the outbreak of war in 1939.

  Dig for Victory. The cheery posters and the vigorous exhortations were prompted by a very real potential crisis: food imports were drastically curtailed because all shipping space was needed for war supplies. Before the war, Britain had imported two-thirds of its food needs; in December 1939 it was considered that food supplies could last for another three months. If there were not to be disastrous shortages, or starvation, the country was going to have to provide for itself.

  And it did, more or less. The objective was another 500,000 allotments, mainly in urban areas, and the pre-war total of 740,000 leapt to 1.75 million by the end of 1943. An immense swathe of potatoes and cabbages and peas and beans and onions and leeks up and down the land, and, indeed, rabbits and chickens as well – they were lumped in with vegetables. The families thus provided would have eaten well, compared with the rest of the population. And they would have been a small minority; their surplus – you always have a surplus, in some areas, as a vegetable grower, a runner bean mountain, or the lettuces gone mad – must have made them highly desirable friends or neighbours. Much land was requisitioned for allotment use – parks and playing fields, again – and by March 1944 domestic agriculture accounted for 10 per cent of all food produced in Britain. That means a generation who learned to garden in the 1940s, for whom the activity had become a necessity, and saw to it that there would always, in some quarters, be a demand for a few rods of land and the freedom to grow whatever you wanted in it.

  The demand has continued: witness the lengthy allotment waiting lists today. I suspect that were I forty years younger and living where I am now with just my small paved back garden I would have my name on my local council’s waiting list. As it is, I am still nostalgic for the satisfactions of vegetable growing – that plunge of the fork to turn up the first new potatoes, getting a pick of French beans for supper, riffling through the seed catalogues for something new and interesting. Vegetable variety is endlessly fascinating, not least the naming thereof,
and it was ever thus; a 1920 pamphlet called ‘The Allotment’, I discover, had eighteen kinds of potato, including ‘Sharpe’s Express’, ‘British Queen’, ‘Great Scot’ and ‘King Edward VII’ (would the king have felt entirely honoured to have a potato named after him? A rose is another matter), six kinds of onion, various carrots including one called ‘Red Elephant’.

  Furthermore, judging by the forensic account given by Valentine Low in his book, I would have found allotment life something of a revelation. He describes the camaraderie, the sense of community, the tendency for people to help each other out, with advice or equipment. Where this last is concerned, he is specific about allotment etiquette when, on one occasion, he considers buying a strimmer, and realizes that that ‘just wasn’t very allotment. People on allotments solve their problems with old bits of junk, with tools they have been using for decades or – if they are absolutely forced to spend money – with equipment they have bought from the Poundstretcher for an absolute pittance … It is not so much penny-pinching as thriftiness … how much more satisfying it is to solve your problems with a bit of artful make-and-mend than by just driving off to B&Q and waving your credit card around the place.’ Accordingly, carpet off-cuts are acquired from an Allied Carpets skip to cover a compost heap, sheds are built from old doors and lengths of salvaged wood, fences made from discarded central heating pipes and nylon string, corrugated plastic becomes a polytunnel and an old pram is revived as a wheelbarrow. I like this – the lateral thinking, the talent for innovation – and it explains that always arresting impression of individuality you get when your train slows down as it passes an allotment site, and you glimpse dozens of plots doing dozens of different things, and those architecturally challenged little shacks with a folding chair outside. Low is illuminating on allotment culture of today, and, having investigated the history of his own site, the change from the relative formality of dress fifty years ago (‘I think that if I wore a tie to the allotment someone would have me sectioned’), and in social composition from the entirely white population of the allotments back then to the multicultural group of the twenty-first century. He is intrigued by this taste for gardening among immigrants, and wonders if it may have something to do with an ancestral memory, for many, of what their parents and grandparents did, even if they have never before got their hands into the soil themselves.