Britain's gardens: A private passion and a public disgrace

A Harvard professor has attacked the British for paying too much attention to their gardens and too little to their parks - but the fault is not the people's but the government's.

Picturesque - a perfect example of the British gardening aesthetic
Picturesque: a perfect example of the British aesthetic Credit: Photo: JULIETTE WADE

Hang on to your hollyhocks – someone's having a go at our gardens. An American academic, if you please, is saying that we are making too much of them; that the energy we put into our own patches is sapping our attention, "holding Britain back" from concentrating on its public spaces.

True, Martha Schwartz, a landscape architect and Harvard professor, is right when she says that all too many public parks are litter-strewn wastelands, about as horticulturally interesting as boxes of paperclips. But for this, blame years of council-budget capping, not the lupins and lilacs we grow at home.

Gardening is an iconic activity in Britain. It defines us. We do more of it than any other nation on earth, except perhaps the floriferous Dutch and bonsai-minded Japanese. Search for our soul, and you will find it among the flower beds and potting sheds.

Of course, ideas have changed over the years. British gardening began as a deeply private passion. In The Canterbury Tales, the garden in which Chaucer's May cuckolded her husband was an intimate space, walled off from the outside world. Gardens of this kind were as secret as the courtyards of the Middle East, seen by knights on the Crusades. In some ways we are coming full circle: as we withdraw from the economic storms outside into our domestic fastnesses, the garden is valued as a place of retreat. Privet hedge, wooden fence or – if you're lucky – topiaried yew form a barrier suited to our traditional sense of reserve.

In the Tudor period, when most people only had access to medicines they made themselves, it was the herbs that mattered. Again, this is a theme to which we are returning: one friend swears by the health-giving properties of carrots juiced from his allotment, and drunk by the litre. Under a Dutchman, William III, we prized the formal garden, characterised by avenues of pleached or pollarded trees, and inspired by the palaces of Louis XIV, where stone deities looked coldly on to the waters of canals and ponds. Even these grand effects can be translated into the language of today – look at Sir Roy Strong's intricate Baroque caprice at The Laskett, his home in Herefordshire.

But in 1708, Britain hit upon its most distinct and most lasting style, when the wit, playwright and architect Sir John Vanbrugh coined the term "picturesque". Forced to justify the restoration of Woodstock Manor, near Blenheim, which he had undertaken at the Duke of Marlborough's expense, but for his own occupation, he suavely explained to the Duchess that old buildings improved the view, making the parkland resemble a picture and inspiring "lively and pleasing reflections" on persons and events.

This inaugurated an entirely new aesthetic, based not on geometry or formal principles, but the associations that scenes evoked in the viewer's mind. It bore fruit in a thousand gentleman's parks – Chiswick, Rousham, Stowe and Stourhead, to name a few – which have been described as Britain's greatest contribution to the visual culture of Europe. John Ruskin, the great Victorian sage, was imbued with this ideal: a lover of the Alps, which he often visited, and the Lake District, where he lived, he preached natural beauty as the antidote to the misery of industrialisation.

So, while French theorists admired medieval architecture for its engineering, Ruskin valued the stones from which it was made, seeing them as evoking the craftsmen who had made them. William Morris, one of the many inspired by Ruskin, added a dash of utopian socialism to the mix: rather than the mountains, he revered the old-fashioned gardens that went with the ancient manor houses of the countryside. Some of his most famous wallpapers were inspired by the view from his window at the Red House, in Bexleyheath. His followers in the Arts and Crafts movement idealised cottages, and the free-blowing gardens that went with them.

It is thanks to this pervasive influence of the picturesque that, at the dawn of the 20th century, we had the Garden City and Garden Suburb movements, with their belief that ordinary people should have the chance to live and work in healthful, green communities, away from the noisome city. This gave rise to the green suburbs beloved by Betjeman, but now hated by both architects (for their looks) and environmentalists (for their inhabitants' dependence on the car).

Even our city centres were constructed according to picturesque principles: where Paris is a rigidly controlled city of radiating boulevards and symmetrically placed monuments, London's greatest planning achievement – John Nash's Regent Street and environs – begins and ends in a public park. And only in Britain could the greatest gardening show in the world take place not in the country, but in the centre of the capital, bringing the streets around Sloane Square to a halt every May when it opens at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea.

To put it another way, we Britons garden on balconies and windowsills, in dank basements and on scorched roof terraces. On Ramsgate beach the other day, I talked to a man who was rescuing a van-load of wood that had washed up on to the shore: he wanted to make decking out of it. The fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy is one of the great gardeners of France, inspired by the example of his English friends; but you don't see any dirt under his fingernails. In Britain, duchesses garden, with their own hands, as vigorously as dinner ladies. We are supposed to be a class-ridden society, but horticulture is a freemasonry that cuts across any other social division.

So where did things go wrong? Well, when the first municipal park appeared in Birkenhead in 1843 – designed by the Duke of Devonshire's head gardener, Joseph Paxton – it was a scene of lakes and temples, much as you might find in the vicinity of a country house. The philanthropic value was appreciated. Campaigns began to establish parks in all the great cities of the land.

By 1890, Bradford, Bolton, Huddersfield, Nottingham and many other towns and cities had acquired their patch of green; Victoria Park was opened in the East End of London (though the area would remain scandalously short of green space in comparison to the fashionable West End).

But in the course of all this activity, something had happened. Naturalism gave way to vivid, geometrical displays of bedding plants. It was partly a symptom of municipal pride, whose apotheosis was the floral clock, or borough coat-of-arms made out of flowers. It was eye-stopping, magnificent – but extremely expensive to maintain.

And this, rather than any increased focus on our private plots, explains Prof Schwartz's criticism of our public spaces. From time to time, a brave local authority will put on a display at Chelsea Flower Show, and it is a wonder to behold. But the Treasury now has local government finances in its fist, and the gardeners and hothouses necessary to produce carpet bedding have been an easy cut. Deflated, the councils did not come up with anything creative to replace the floral style they could no longer afford.

So we are left with a tale of private affluence and public squalor. Look at the square gardens in London: those that are kept behind lock and key are immaculate; the rest are skateboard rinks. Not even that, perhaps, given that their by-laws are likely to stop children playing football.

Why do we put up with it? Britain has some of the most imaginative gardeners in the world: why aren't they leading a revolt against the bureaucrats who want to deny ordinary people the natural beauty they are programmed to enjoy? Rise up, I say. If councils aren't prepared to look after public parks, it is time they handed them over to garden co-operatives, formed by local residents.

It wouldn't be difficult to find people to fulfil these roles: this very thing has happened, to wondrous effect, in the Kitchen Garden of Chiswick House. The results might not be masterpieces in the picturesque tradition, but Ruskin and Morris would certainly have approved.

• Clive Aslet is Editor at Large of 'Country Life'