“The English are all, more or less, gardeners”

Mon 9th January 2012

Gardening may be seen elsewhere as an activity for pensioners, with many mainland Europeans choosing apartment lifestyles over houses with gardens. But not in Britain!! Andrea Wulf, author of ‘The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession‘ (2008), describes her amazement on moving from Hamburg to London in the mid ’90s and finding that everyone seemed to either have a garden, or want one. She was struck by the sheer number of gardening magazines, garden centres, and by her new friends’ gardening obsessions – trendy twenty something Londoners raving about plants, or discussing yields from their vegetable plots!

Gardening has been a national enthusiasm since the 18^th century, when London was a city of gardens, nurseries and seedsmen, with flower sellers on every corner. The English craze for American trees and shrubs approached that of the previous century’s ‘Tulip Fever’, and seeds of rare and new plants gathered from the far corners of the empire were worth their weight in gold. English garden designs were the height of fashion, and English gardeners’ expertise was second to none. Originally a gentleman’s pursuit, as plant prices came down, and manuals and guides proliferated, men and women of all classes learnt how to garden and a nation of gardeners was born!

Apart from our mild climate and fertile soil, which make gardening in Britain so rewarding, we seem to have an inherited national nostalgia for the county way of life that maybe originates in the dramatic social change of 19^th Century industrial revolution, with its huge and rapid population shift from the countryside into cramped and dirty cities.

Because it is not just gardening – Britain is also regarded as a nation of bird lovers!

Thus the Victorians kept caged songbirds in the home, goldfinches and linnets, to remind them of the countryside, whilst the church, believing that birds paired for life, endorsed them as moral creatures that we should learn from. The Humane Movement of the late 19^th Century advocated the compassionate treatment of birds and animals, and Uncle Toby’s Dickiebird Society recruited hundreds of thousands of children to feed wild birds. In 1889 the RSPB was formed to counter the large scale destruction of birds such as egrets for plumes for women’s hats, and today has over 1 million members, receiving over a million hours of annual volunteer support from the British public.

Today’s modern suburban garden came into being during the inter-war housing boom of the 20^th century, when more than 4 million new homes were built, almost all with generous gardens, in the continuing belief that living close to nature was necessary for a good quality of life. Today private domestic gardens in Britain represent aprox. 10% of the available land, fostering the relationship between home owners and their garden wildlife, and providing many of us with our main contact with nature.

So, lets embrace our national sterotype, and go all out to nurture our nature!!