The new, green regime of gardening – more is more, even of weeds – can be confronting to long-time practitioners.
The elegant-garden taste leaders of previous decades would scarcely believe that these days, the once-regretted necessity of letting one’s autumn garden “go over” – run to seed, die back and collapse – is regarded as one of the best bits. The perfect green sward mowed in stripes in the backyard is beginning to be a social faux pas akin to a petrol SUV in the driveway.
There’s little of the old Yates Garden Guide sensibility recognisable in today’s progressive shrubberies. Among the gardening world’s most prestigious standard-setters, the Chelsea Flower Show made all this semi-official in 2021, with yet more of its winning displays featuring wildflower-based plantings.
These drifts of recurring, low-maintenance plants can be left to do their own thing without pampering, trimming or, heaven forbid, mowing. Traditionalists might think: “weeds” and “what’s it going to look like in winter?” But the growing practice is to let dead and hibernating plants overwinter without interference to feed wildlife – and to provide “architectural” skeletons and seed heads that look terrific posted on Instagram after a decent frost.
Water conservation and forage and shelter for wildlife are overtaking hard landscaping and even colour palettes as the elite design criteria.
This emerging ethos is increasingly a climate-change and conservation imperative. However, the green dimension is fanning controversy in a firmament already highly competitive just below its genteel surface. Gardening long ago transcended its nana-ish connotations, and is known to be a seething battleground of fashion, etiquette and social-signifying.
One of Britain’s most-beloved garden celebrities, Monty Don, who presents the BBC’s Gardeners’ World, was widely pilloried as woke and virtue-signalling for his advocacy against lawns and bedding plants.
Legions of gardeners still harbour a personal grievance against the late Christopher Lloyd, whose Great Dixter is one of the world’s most-admired gardens, for his binning of all his roses, calling their shrubby bush forms “ugly”, and deeming them too disease-prone to be garden-worthy.
How different the “rules” are now from those of the cottage-garden craze of the 1980s and 90s when James Bartholomew wrote his seminal, tongue-in-cheek taste guide, Yew and Non-Yew: Gardening for Horticultural climbers. The stars were subtle, acquired-taste plants such as euphorbias, which are mostly different iterations of green, and hellebores, which keep their pretty, often greyish faces pointed to the ground. If a flower was bright, it had better be a gentian or a vireya – fiendishly hard to grow, highlighting one’s discernment as an expert gardener. Yew and box hedging were compulsory – best if one inherited it rather than growing it from scratch oneself.
Dahlias, whose fanciers typically grew them hugger-mugger in all sorts of shouty colours, were beneath one’s dignity. Hanging baskets – bright busy lizzies in hoydenish shades of pink and orange, and clashing petunias – were scarcely to be mentioned. There was no such thing as an “ironic” garden gnome. Now, dahlias are fashionable, as influential florists have discovered their virtually limitless colour and form range, and their easy cultivation. Aesthetics have loosened up, so that the “hot” colours once decried as garish are now enduringly fashionable – a legacy of the rose-shunning Lloyd’s boisterous plantings. Old roses with French aristocrats’ names and discreet colours have been outperformed by modern, disease-resistant varieties, often with such inelegant names as Disco Dancer and Tequila Sunrise.
The truly discerning who have favoured all-green gardens – flowers being a bit common – are now reproached for giving insects and birds such lean pickings. Even the deathless taste sanctuary of white standard Iceberg roses and buxus hedging is under threat. Buxus has acquired its own special blight, which can be resisted but not cured, and clipped topiary is no longer compulsory or even covetable at the cutting edge of gardening.
Neat and linear have given way to naturalistic. The highest-status garden is now planted expertly in sustainable prairie-like “drifts” of perennials, generally in a tightly restricted palate of fewer than a dozen plants, sewn in multiples. Popularised by skilled horticulturists such as Piet Oudolf, Henk Gerritsen and Noel Kingsbury, these are not easy plantings for amateurs to replicate.
Bedding plants, the cheap and cheerful flowers that anchor summer gardens, are starting to be frowned upon as generators of single-use plastic pots and punnets. Most are annual – dying after their flowering season – and few are self-seeding, which means further black marks.
Use of peat is an environmental no-no, as it’s a valuable carbon-sink that ought to be left undisturbed in the ground.
And if the noise and air pollution of lawn mowers are a Grade A transgression, the deafening hornet pestilence of leaf blowers is an outright act of civic aggression. To manicure away fallen leaves is to deprive the soil of decomposing material vital to its microbial health, and insects and other small creatures of potential shelter. The only possible atonement is to set aside an area devoted to rotting wood, piles of sticks and leaf mould for insects, birds and fungi. But redemption is withheld in this new ethos until the leaf blower is permanently replaced by a rake.
Poem in October
(with shades of Dylan Thomas)
It was my 90th year to heaven
woke to my hearing from Hobson Bay neighbourhood
signals of early fruit on grape vine and plum tree
and down on the mudflats our migrant seabirds returning
while in nearby gardens blackbird and thrush were harassed
from nests in carport and hedge by their thankless offspring,
my morning walk
to take me abroad in a shower of all my days –
Becoming, Being, and then Fading
thirty years each, but the Becoming had been slow
(‘Don’t peak too early’) and overlapped with Being
as Being slid into the Fade.
It was the Wintergarden glass-houses taught
what Gaea might make of moisture and of heat
such flowers and leaves, extravagance of colour
a dance, an abundance of vividness and texture
Colombian, Amazonian
and scent, and size! Global warming it seemed
might be beautiful if that meant anything
with few or none of us human left to watch
its vegetable amplitude, its fires and floods
and tooth and claw.
At ease around ponds the daffodils praised Wordsworth
and trees in imperial uniform saluted
while up on the hill a Cenotaph and guns
told us a war had made us what we were
and bound us together. I used to walk there
after a day at work to look down at the port
and across North Shore and out beyond Rangitoto
hungry for another taste not – no not at all
of war but of the world.
It was a happy place, a space in my head
where Heaney and Heidegger could argue over God
while I looked out and listened or didn’t listen
to the city’s indignant rumour
and thought about Zen and how it might conjoin
mind and matter into the shapes and movement
of the atom, but also of the stars.
It was my 90th year to heaven
and the weather turned around
only a pale grey cloud and a pearly shower
but I saw in the turning so clearly
a boy’s visits to that place climbing with his sister
on the guns and hearing how great-uncle Owen
would ‘grow not old’ (a mysterious locution)
because at the going down of the sun and in the morning
a brass plaque would remember him who ‘Died
for Freedom and Honour’.
It was the first day of my 90th year
stood there then in the promise of another summer
the English trees reforming in October green
knowing that humanity was no more than another
passing thought, a brain-storm of Gaea our mother
all-powerful and lovely and now demanding a cull.
No I did not want these hard truths still to need telling
on that small hill in a year’s turning
nor forgiveness for past mistakes but only to say to my world
‘Kia ora for having me. Stay safe. Go well.’
CK Stead, Tāmaki Makaurau.
