Read by Matilda Longbottom

“Gardeners are good. Such vices as they have Are like the warts and bosses in the wood Of an old oak.” —Gerald Bullett

There is an assumption amongst gardeners that Spring was really created either by us or (at the least) for us. Others might have a vague appreciation of it-they do ordinary things like falling in love, cleaning their houses, getting new wardrobes-but unless you’re out there digging and raking, sniffing the soil, frantically planting and admiring, you’re not really in tune with it all. Oh, it’s very nice to fill a vase with daffodils, but he who has also grown his own daffodils will soon let you know about the Other Dimension, the Contact with Reality that you are missing by merely buying flowers. You are not one of the elect.

Ever since Eden, gardeners have had more than a sneaking suspicion that we are better, morally better, than ordinary people. We think of ourselves as peaceful people, in tune with the rhythm of the seasons, full of praise and wonder at creation, “nearer God’s heart in a garden / Than anywhere else on earth.” In most religions the world began as a garden and the final reward for the righteous is the eternal garden of Paradise. Indeed, by aspiring to more than gardening and getting involved with knowledge, Adam and Eve were blamed for most of the subsequent evils of the world. Most gardeners will tell you that 1t s best to go on digging and not ask questions and that if everyone did just that the world would be a far better place.

The prophet Mohammed promised that gardeners would go directly to heaven. The Victorians were so convinced of the moral benefits of gardening that a parliamentary committee could state in 1843 that “the possession of an allotment has been the means of reclaiming the criminal, reforming the dissolute, and of changing their whole moral character and conduct.” Some leaders of the time maintained that the only real social reform necessary was to give the poor an opportunity to garden and they would then cease to drink and to protest the appalling conditions of their lives (whether from exhaustion or contentment we are not told). Even that great social reformer, Charles Dickens, said in his plans for an Asylum for Fallen Women that gardening “has always been found to be productive of good effects wherever it has been tried.”

The benefits of gardening were not only thought to raise the poor from temptation and degradation, but could equally benefit the rich and privileged by putting them m touch with simple nature. Poor Marie Antoinette played with her ladies in the gardens at le Trianon, hoping to find a heaven that all the pomp of the French monarchy could not achieve. Voltaire advocated tending one’s garden, and Jefferson concluded that he would really have preferred gardening to statesmanship. John Claudius Loudon wrote in 1832, “gardening has been the inclination of kings and the choice of philosophers.”

Today, gardening, according to a recent article in The New York Times, is America’s favorite outdoor occupation. Like our Victorian forefathers, we’re on the lookout for a new age of health and innocence in too-industrialized world.

When the lawn mower was invented, it was advertised in the Gardener’s Magazine of 1832 as providing “amusing, useful and healthy exercise,” and one of the attractions of gardening in our present, health-conscious age is that it’s good for you. The industrialized world is clever enough to exploit this. Hence, gardening nowadays is a multimillion dollar industry and almost a religion-and when the two go hand-in-hand things look good in a capitalist society.

“Religion” may sound like an overstatement, but gardening has historically been judged of spiritual benefit. The eighteenth-century poet Joseph Addison claimed that it “gives us great Insight into the Contrivance and Wisdom of Providence and suggests innumerable Subjects for Meditation.” Early Quakers and Shakers were encouraged to garden when music, art, gardens,” wrote confidently of “the removal of concealment of everything uncouth or discordant” to obtain the “Beautiful and the Perfect.” He informs us (in 1841) that “good taste” has only recently come to America-and he is able to explain exactly what that is.

Even Gertrude Jekyll, revered for loosening up garden style, was opinionated and definitely not as relaxed as the kind of gardening she advocated.

She talked about “commonplace gardening” and rejoiced in “a state of mind and artistic conscience that will not tolerate bad or careless combinations or any sort of misuse of plants.”

We aren’t any more tolerant today. I have yet to read a modern garden book that does not refer to Victorian “bedding out” as if it were a religious superstition from another culture. Allen Lacy classes plaster Madonnas, concrete toads, and mirrored glass globes as “tacky.” Eleanor Perenyi, in Green Thoughts, tells us firmly that forsythia is so overplanted that “the discriminating gardener must strike it from his list.” As for myself .. . did I ever tell you what I think about pachysandra? And while not really jingoistic about my native England, I do find myself mentally noting that if you haven’t grown up with the British gardening tradition, well, it just doesn’t come easy. Don’t get me wrong … you Americans haven’t got the climate we have so one must make allowances, as I tell the folks back home. I suppose I’m tolerant by nature-which is saying a lot for a gardener.

No, we don’t agree on exactly how to garden. Perhaps we shouldn’t agree on its virtue, either. Although Bacon called gardening the “Purest of Humane pleasures,” some motives for making gardens are anything but pure. The great avenues of Versailles stretching out into the countryside were made purposely as symbols of domination-to show that the king’s power stretched as far as the eye could see. It was no accident that the army was used to create the gardens and the military engineers helped design them. The famous English landscape gardens with their gentle hills and groves and pellucid lakes include avenues of trees from the previous era, as well as demolished villages which had interfered with the bucolic views and had been “moved.” The charming shepherds and hermits in the new landscapes had sometimes been dispossessed of their houses before finding employment as part of the scenery.

The fabulous Chinese Green Mount which Marco Polo described was created by the Kublai Khan and “wherever a beautiful tree may exist and the Emperor gets news of it, he sends for it and has it transported … and planted on that hill of his. No matter how big the tree may be, he gets it carried by his elephants.” Marco Polo goes on to describe the beauty of the hill-but naturally does not include a description of the sites where the trees originally were.

Almost all great gardens were built by the sweat of the underprivileged, and many of them were on land taken from the underprivileged, too. Even the history of plant introduction is one of stealing and subterfuge, envy and greed. No, the passion for gardens can be as ruthless as any other.

But surely the beauty of the garden, once it’s made, compels us to be the kind of people we admire? Certainly when I stand in my garden in spring, surrounded by cherry blossoms and daffodils, I feel all’s right with the world and I am a fit inhabitant of heaven. There isn’t a mean thought in my headunless you count comparing my daffodils (favorably) with my neighbor’s (which she really should thin) as mean. But surely no gardener would judge me that harshly since I’m only thinking of how she could improve her garden. I’m trying to help her, really I am ….

Actually, as the Bible tells us, you can be naughty in a garden as easily as anywhere else. Sad but true. Consider the Assyrian King, Ashurbanipal, who was a wo~derful gardener and brought trees from all over the known world to plant in his garden. He added to the pleasure by hanging his enemies’ decapitated heads from their branches. Consider Hitler, who walked round and round the “narrow tile paths” of his garden at Haus Wachenfeld, discussing with Goebels how many death warrants they had just signed. He wore Lederhosen because of the “feeling of freedom” they gave him and every day walked 20 minutes to his tea house and back. Consider Frederick the Great of Prussia, whose famous garden included a vineyard in the form of a labyrinth centered round a statue of Bacchus. He studied botany, as well. One of his scientific studies included feeding two men a big meal and cutting them both open afterwards to compare their digestive processes. King Henry VIII, when not busy divorcing or beheading one of his six wives, was a keen gardener: He took Hampton Court from Cardinal Wolsey so he could care for it properly. He asked Wolsey why he had made so great a garden, and Wolsey replied tactfully (and just in time) that it was in order to present it to his king. Fouquet was not so quick or lucky-and was imprisoned by Louis XIV for making too great a garden at Vaux. Nero’s Golden House was surrounded by a beautiful and extensive garden which Nero appreciated as much as he did fiddle music. No, unfortunately history does not prove that gordening makes you good.

But at least it makes you feel good. In 1762, the Scottish philosopher, Lord Karnes, wrote in Elements of Criticism that “rough uncultivated ground, dismal to the eye, inspires peevishness and discontent; may not this be one cause of the harsh manners of savages?” Certainly there’s nothing like a rough piece of ground to make a gardener want to clean it up and plant flowers, and certainly by so doing we feel as virtuous as the pilgrims who came to America to clear the wilderness and make a garden for God. They justified taking the land from the Native Americans by pointing out that it had been neglected by them and left as a “howling wilderness.”

There’s nothing like cleared wilderness to make us feel in control of our lives. Spring is one of the best seasons for this. At this time of year, even if our gardens are not completely under control, at least they are still relatively chastened by the rigors of winter (and the rampant growth of summer is yet to come). The leaves are tender and innocent and the flowers assert rebirth and beauty and all that makes life worth living. It’s too cold still for the serpent to come out of the woodpile, so we can believe the flowers and believe the tender leaves. They are telling us that gardeners, like everyone else, should never lose hope. That it’s possible this year the serpent may decide to stay in the woodpile and not come out at all. Maybe this time, in spite of all that’s gone on before, our garden-and its gardener will remain unspoiled and pure. ❖