How the garden gnome beat the Italian renaissance for my landscape affections
Introducing a newsletter that will entwine garden and landscape with culture, politics and journalism like honeysuckle on a pagoda.
So I’ve become the trillionth person to try their hand at Substack. Yet another journalist fleeing from a collapsing industry. Except I got out a few years ago. Went into Comms (didn’t we all) and then took a Masters in Garden and Landscape History at the Institute of Historical Research in London.
My grandfather was a minor municipal landscape gardener so I suppose I could say I was channelling family history. His Gravesend council house garden was a marvel of immaculate exactitude. A typical suburban garden of the first half of the 20th Century.
Truth was I wanted to take myself way out of my comfort zone doing something that I had absolutely no background in…oh and I was working full time as well.
Like most people on that degree I was fascinated by the gardens of antiquity, the bonkers grottoes and waterworks of renaissance Italy (see anything by the fontaniere Maccarone), the sweeping landscapes of Brown or Repton and the 18th century picturesque movement with its newly created ruins in the landscape harking back to a mythical golden age.
Instead I think I found a better story. My Pop (grandfather) would not be denied and I was lured back to the privet hedge, the crazy paving and the garden statuary (including gnomes) of the British suburban garden.
For there was a lost origin story buried under piles of snobbish ridicule. Back then critics really did think the explosion of suburbia (and the attendant gardens) in the interwar years and beyond meant the vulgarians were taking over Britain’s Elysian Fields.
Nothing has really changed but the truth was the birth of the working-class suburban garden gave rise to one the greatest (and completely unheralded) opportunities for individual cultural expression of the last century. That small garden was a powerful symbol of a huge social upheaval led by those seeking a more egalitarian nation. Possibly why it was sniffed at by those with much to lose.
My book Behind the Privet Hedge published to great (and unexpected) reviews last year tells this story in greater depth. See the About section for more details.
As we seek to build more houses to alleviate a crisis for younger people in Britain today, the present government is in danger of failing to learn from the progressive ideas of almost exactly a century ago. A planning free-for-all with beauty and open space missing from the programme will store up untold problems for the future.
More of this later. For now I intend at least once a week to attempt to weave garden and landscape stories through cultural, historical and political issues in much the same way the honeysuckle flourished on Pop’s homemade pagoda.
I hope you will enjoy and join in the conversation.