Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, in their book Edgelands, eloquently site allotments in their subject area: ‘Allotments signal that you are now passing through the edgelands as emphatically as a sewage works or a power station. They thrive on the fringes, the in-between spaces; on land left over (or left behind) by the tides of building and industrial development, in pockets behind houses or factories, and in ribbons along the trackbeds of railways.’ And, indeed, for someone like me, who has never actually worked one, they are inevitably associated with train journeys, that moment of looking out of the window and realizing that this is an edgelands, as the allotments appear, a world of their own, a different, defiant place, both personal and collective. ‘They flaunt their functionality; the domestic garden with its hands dirty, busy and raddled with agriculture’s businesslike clutter. They don’t fit in. Minutes after leaving a central station, and the privatized shiny surfaces of the city, and there they lie, a cobbling together, like a refugee camp for those fleeing consumerism.’ Apparently, after a major report in the 1960s on their use and future, allotments might have been renamed ‘leisure gardens’. What an appalling idea – not that it would ever have caught on. The allotment is not a garden; it is somehow more serious than that. And while I may never have worked an allotment I know very well that vegetable gardening has nothing to do with leisure: it is hard, blistering work. The authors of that report must have missed the point entirely, failing to see that the desire, the need, to work an allotment is something more atavistic than gardening itself, and certainly unrelated to any concept of leisure.
This discussion of the allotment has somehow fallen into a section about town and country; in fact, the allotment belongs properly to neither, a signal occupant of the Farley–Symmons Edgelands, slung between urban and rural as significantly as landfill tips, wastelands, industrial estates. They are tacked on to the town or city, depend on urban servicing, but have also a determined rural flavour, sui generis, a place of their own.
The great, the ubiquitous margin between town and country is of course suburbia. Eight out of ten people in England live in the suburbs; the suburban house has a garden, which accounts for a hefty percentage of consumers who may have some interest in garden-related products. Hence, presumably, the rise and rise of the garden centre. But interest will vary from intense commitment to total absence thereof. The other intriguing train-window study is that slide show of suburban gardens that back on to a railway line: a spectrum of garden practice from assiduous cultivation – shaven lawn, flower beds, fruit trees, a vegetable plot – to careless abandon, with shaggy grass and assorted detritus. And the suburban garden is itself a blanket term, covering another spectrum, in which those slivers of gardens seen from the train are at one end, and at the other the substantial leafy parkland, by comparison, attached to more prosperous suburbias up and down the country; the plump commuter homes in tree-lined roads, each with its own dollop of land behind. Occasionally, some television programme gives you an aerial view of such a landscape and you realize what an acreage of green there is (4 per cent of land area in the United Kingdom), not countryside, not rural, but gardenside, and a considerable area, accounting for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ assertion that suburban gardens are essential to the survival of some bird populations. Half of all garden owners feed the birds on their site, it seems; that’s a serious amount of peanuts and mixed seeds. Plenty of the gardens will be patrolled by a domestic cat, but apparently there is no scientific evidence that cat predation has a significant effect on bird populations. So the suburban garden is not just a potential pleasure for its owner, but is an environmental asset.
‘Suburban’ is a pejorative term, I suppose, precisely because the suburbs are neither town nor country, an interface, not one thing or the other. Suburban suggests a sort of mediocrity, inferiority, which seems a misplaced patronage when you think of the extent and the variety of suburbia. A patronage which derives perhaps from the concept of Metroland, the name given to the areas north and west of London that were developed in the early twentieth century, served by the Metropolitan Railway – the swathes of Tudorbethan semis, ‘stockbroker country’, that came to invite either distaste or the Betjeman affection that is itself a form of patronage. All that half-timbering – but all those gardens, also, one thinks, and generous gardens, back then. Most of them still there, except where infill building has been allowed, and contributing to that great rash of greenery between the city and the country proper.
Having gardened both urban and rural, I fancy the idea of those gardens: not too large, not too small, the sort of space that lends itself to creative design – hence all those television makeover programmes in which startled owners are confronted with a garden that has gone Mediterranean, or sub-tropical, or has been gravelled, paved and prinked out of all recognition. I could do with that, I think, eyeing my skimpy urban patch. It was a splendid concept, the suburban garden, back in its beginnings, the assumption that every home should have its quota of land, the equivalent to those two acres and a cow, and accounting today for this national wealth of gardens. Cause for celebration, not patronage.
This consideration of town and country – apposition, contrast – takes me to some final thoughts about what gardens do to us, and what we have done with them. I have looked at the ways in which writers – and painters – use gardens, at the vicissitudes of garden fashion, at gardening as a social indicator, at the ways in which a garden defies time and order. Gardens are integral to the psyche, it seems to me; even if you are not yourself a gardener, you would be offended if some unimaginably perverse system of the future declared gardens a proscribed asset: there shall be no gardens. Our most central mythology tells us that we began in a garden – and were expelled from it by an authority that forbade the acquisition of knowledge (Eve’s action has always seemed to me both natural and commendable). Maybe that has something to do with the universal regard for gardens, for the concept of the garden: the ideal space where you would like to be. Not necessarily in order to dig and plant (you can leave that to those addicted) but just to be at one with things growing, flowering, with the cycle of the year, with the natural world (in so far as a garden can be said to be natural).
So I like to think there is something primeval about our affinity with gardens; most people appreciate a garden, a few want to get in there digging or weeding or improving, others just want to sit in the shade singing, ‘Oh, how beautiful.’ Maybe we are harking back to the expulsion (‘Here we are, in possession again …’); more plausibly, we just enjoy being out of doors in a particularly beguiling place, and we recognize the creativity that is latent in almost any garden. Someone has manipulated this space, enhanced it, tried to make it beautiful or productive.
We like gardens, we need gardens, whether private or communal. The public garden, large or small, park or village green, has not been included in this discussion; I have been concerned with the personal aspect of gardens and gardening. But the public garden – the park – is the expressed recognition that available outdoor space is a requirement for all. Cities, towns, must have green spaces – look at any urban map and you will see them. London is speckled all over with green, from the great expanses of Hampstead Heath and Richmond Park through the smaller parks and commons to the many garden squares, that perfect architectural concept, on one of which I live. And as I look out at it today, on a cold, crisp, sunny winter afternoon, it is being made use of by two small boys kicking a ball around, someone airing a baby in a buggy, an elderly man, well wrapped up, reading his newspaper on a bench. Maybe the primeval need is just that: the urge to be outside. We are not bred to be perpetually under cover; our Palaeolithic ancestors retreated to the cave at night, a refuge and a base. Whether hunter-gathering or the first farmers, we have been more out than in; we are prone to cabin fever and claustrophobia. Though the essential salutary benefit of ‘fresh air’ is a relatively modern cult; in earlier centuries the average labourer wouldn’t have see
n it quite like that. It was certainly a twentieth-century phenomenon; my grandmother would bundle me outside, as a teenager, if spotted lurking indoors with a book on a fine day. And it was into the garden that I was bundled; that was what it was for.
Along with much else. We cultivate our gardens for different reasons – to pick it, to eat it, to keep up with the neighbours, to get into the pages of the Yellow Book and open up in aid of charity. But the prime reason, the significant reason, is because we want to – because we have the gardening instinct, we are part of the community of gardeners. I am that, and probably you are too, if you have stuck thus far with this book. Those of us that way inclined would be severely deprived without a garden.
When you find that you are a gardener, things change; this latent addiction does not take over your life – it can’t, you have other commitments – but it gives it new direction. Not just in terms of spare-time employment, but you now have extra vision – gardening vision. All right, this may sound extravagant, but I think it is true; you see the world with gardening eyes, you see what is growing where, you appreciate and assess and you wonder what that is if it is unfamiliar, and furthermore your situation in time is subtly changed, part of you lives now in garden time; you project forward, and back, you are no longer stuck always in the here and now.
A murky January day, and the green nubs of bulbs are poking up all over the place when I go out into the garden: snowdrops, narcissi, even the early tulips. Aha! Spring is not just a calendar promise, it is fact. It will happen. And I have jumped ahead; in the mind’s eye, I am anticipating all that colour and variety, wondering if Tulipa ‘Prinses Irene’ will be as handsome as the Avon Bulbs catalogue suggested.
I am only the most amateur gardener, and have felt some temerity in writing a book about gardening. But I have written here not so much about gardening as about the effect that gardens and gardening have: their charisma. And to know a little about something is also to be able to recognize the depth and complexity of the subject; my own limited experience has fostered my admiration for the great gardeners, the garden writers, the botanists. I have learned from them, but most of all I have discovered the extent of gardening lore, its history, its infinite variety, the wonderful possibilities of growing what you want where you want. I have tried to explore that here, to look at gardens and gardening as directives, to focus on the impact that they have, on how gardening people behave, on how gardens affect us.
Personal experience comes into it – a personal experience that I suspect most gardening people will recognize. My own life in the garden has been a particular, and special, aspect of life in general: the activity, the preoccupation, to which I have retreated both in practice and in the mind when everything else permitted. Get out there and dig, weed, prune, plant, when stuck with whatever was being written. Escape winter by swinging forward into spring, summer: maybe try those climbing French beans this year, what about a new rose, divide the irises, the leucojums are crowded – put some under the quince tree. The gardening self becomes a separate persona, waiting to be indulged when possible, and never entirely subdued – always noticing, appreciating, recording. This will be the case for anyone with a consuming interest (I hate that term ‘hobby’) but gardening has this embracing quality in that it colours the way you look at the world: everything that grows, and the way in which it grows, now catches your attention; the gardening eye assesses, queries, is sometimes judgemental – quite opinionated, gardeners. The physical world has a new eloquence.
Whether gardening a window-box or a swathe of Gloucestershire, you have acquired a gardening persona, and the vision that goes with it. For me, life in the garden has been both formative and essential; it has given me gardener’s eyes and an extra way of looking about me, and an abiding and enriching engagement, whether I have been out there and hands-on in the garden, or just gardening in the mind, planning for the future, conjuring up virtual gardens.
THE BEGINNING
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FIG TREE
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First published 2017
Text copyright © Penelope Lively, 2017
Illustration copyright © Katie Scott, 2017
Cover illustration by Katie Scott
The moral right of the copyright holders has been asserted
The publisher is grateful for permission to quote from: ‘The Mower’ from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin (Faber and Faber, 2003), reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber and Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (Virago, 2003), reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of The Chichester Partnership. Copyright © The Chichester Partnership, 1938; selected works by Elizabeth Bowen, reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, London; Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce (OUP, 2008), reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press; The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (Fourth Estate, 1994), copyright © Carol Shields, 1994, reprinted by kind permission of the Carol Shields Estate; Green Thoughts by Eleanor Perényi (Vintage, 2002), copyright © Eleanor Perényi, reprinted by permission of Penguin Random House; The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot by Angus Wilson (Faber and Faber, 2011), copyright © Angus Wilson, 1958, reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber; Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber and United Agents; ‘Burnt Norton’ from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot (Faber and Faber, 2001), reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company; ‘Seven Types of Shadow’ from Selected Poems by U. A. Fanthorpe (Enitharmon Press, 2012), reprinted by kind permission of Enitharmon Press; One Man and His Dig by Valentine Low (Simon and Schuster, 2008), copyright © 2008 Valentine Low, reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future editions of this book
ISBN: 978-0-241-98217-4
Life in the Garden Page 16