Nature or nurture

Gardening is all about intervention and finding the right balance between effort and reward. It is a personal negotiation with Mother Nature as to where the frontier will lie between us and the wildness beyond, and a determination of the point beyond which we are not happy to allow her fuzzy edges and woolly charms to creep. Inside the house we are safe, in control. Outside, chaos is just a holiday away.

The conflict in our gardens between order and wildness is an historic one, evident in the successive fashions that have stomped through them over the last few hundred years. The English Landscape Movement of the eighteenth century swept away, quite literally, the formal gardens of the renaissance, which had become synonymous, in the eyes of the English at least, with the control freakery of their continental rivals. The idyllic English landscape now was allowed to sweep untamed to the front door without a parterre in sight.

The Victorians had other ideas and brought the pendulum swinging back in the other direction, no doubt aided by some ingenious contraption. For them it was all formal bedding schemes and unnatural colours. The urge to let our hair down though could not be contained and by the late nineteenth century a wilder vision, championed by William Robinson, had become influential. Ultimately this led to the enduringly popular cottage garden style made famous by Gertrude Jeykll.

So where are we now, on this Blackpool pleasure garden ride. Well somewhere in the middle perhaps, although maybe it doesn’t actually matter because the world has changed so much. The political and intellectual ideas that shaped the grand gardens of the past, while still influential, have given way to a garden philosophy that is more based around the idea that gardens are for people. The privilege of gardening for pleasure has filtered down and we are free to shape our own to suit the way we want to use it, subject only to budget and space.

What path to choose then? Personally I am trying to take a leaf out of Mirabel Osler’s book, A Gentle Plea for Chaos, softening my grip on the tiller and making an effort to sit down more in the garden. The mower has been set a notch higher and is released only fortnightly. And the hedges shall get just one clip this year so that all in all the garden will look, in fact already is looking, a bit fluffy (relax, deep breathe and hold your nerve). The birds seem to like it and I’ve even made friends with some weeds, although not ground elder. I haven’t let myself go completely.