Review of Willes "Gardens of the British Working Class" (original) (raw)

The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times

2019

During a continuing and long-term viral pandemic, we might 'turn to the garden (as shelter, refuge, or productive space)' (1), especially in the UK, where 'haves' are those with a garden, and 'have-nots' live in apartments and estates; a block, a scheme or a high-rise. The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times, edited by Naomi Milthorpe, landed on my desk just before the world ground to an economic and social halt, excellent or unfortunate timing depending on your viewpoint. The book's premise is that 'austerity' creates different attitudes to the value of gardens, to their creation and productivity-'austerity studies' (1) is a research area unknown to me before reading this book. Of course, Covid-19 has given us even more reasons to extol the virtues and glories of gardening (fresh air, exercise), but for many families suffering from the hardness of a viral onslaught, gardens are luxuries. The kind of austerity featured in this slim collection was much in evidence, in the UK, during the twentieth-century war and inter-war periods, and then more recently enforced by government edict for dubious economic benefit-both these areas are addressed in parts 1 and 3, 'Roots' and 'Paths'. In 'Roots', Rebecca Nagel and Naomi Milthorpe address the actual austerity of early twentieth-century England and the 'fantasy of austerity' (19) as demonstrated in Vita Sackville-West's writing about Sissinghurst and her loving creation of the gardens there with Harold Nicolson. Nagel points out that Sissinghurst was and continues to be a product of comfortable hobbyist passions-once begun by Nicolson and Sackville-West, it has been continued by The National Trust along with other Nicolson family members. So, where is the austerity? It appears to be the lack of hired labour, so one has to wonder whose austerity this is: the men were at the front; then the land-girls took over much of the farm work for the war effort. Cottage garden plantings look romantic and conveniently hide a multitude of bare spaces (26) when there is less money for more elaborate schemes that require gardeners. Nagel notes a middle-class nostalgia for 'simplicity' (30) from Sackville-West and Nicolson yet the Sissinghurst garden of the 1930s was a 'make-do version' (26) of their dream, not the productive cornucopia they aspired to (grandson Adam Nicolson worked hard to reactivate farming at Sissinghurst and Perch Hill). Nagel's reading of the 'seasonal austerity' of Sackville-West's Garden (1946), in which she dreams of the garden via her seed packets makes it clear that this garden is 'a translation of the war's energy', into 'endless effort and failure with the odd unpredictable and temporary victory over weather, soil and pests' (27). At this point, I asked myself where the missing word was, that word being 'georgic'. It is possible that none of these writers have read Virgil's Georgics. It is equally possible that they are under a common misconception that 'gardens' are not georgic. Yet the phrases I have just quoted-including the war reference-sum up the georgic endeavour, especially when coupled, as in Naomi Milthorpe's essay, with 'digging for victory'. Milthorpe takes an intriguing line in her exploration of Beverley Nichols' Merry Hall (1951) as a 'fictionalised memoir, novel and gardening advice compendium' (35) that 'queers' the notion of austerity through Nichols' exposition of how middle-brow parsimony sabotages pleasure. The country house garden in Merry Hall is excessive, expressive and random. Nichols rejects 'a popular feminized austerity culture' in favour of an 'active construction of a masculine garden' (42) complete with two idealised GREEN LETTERS: STUDIES IN ECOCRITICISM

Dig for Victory! New histories of wartime gardening in Britain

Journal of Historical Geography , 2012

Prompted by the curious fact that both progressive environmentalists and Conservative Party politicians have recently drawn on popular understandings of austerity associated with Britain's wartime domestic gardening campaign, this article broadens the range of histories associated with Dig for Victory. It suggests firstly that far from simply encouraging self-sufficiency, the government conceptualised Dig for Victory as requiring the extension of order and control into the domestic sphere. Second, it shows how the ideal figure of a national citizen digging for victory elided differentiated gender and class experiences of gardening, and finally the article demonstrates that statistics of food production were more about fostering trust than picturing the realities of vegetable growing. By so doing the paper illuminates the particular ways in which present-day articulations of Dig for Victory's history are partial and selective.

Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism & Rebellion in the Garden

2011

In the common public perception, contemporary gardening is understood as suburban, as leisure activity, as television makeover opportunity. Its originary narratives are seen as religious or spiritual (Garden of Eden), military (the clipped lawn, the ha-ha and defensive ditches), aristocratic or monarchical (the stately home, the Royal Horticultural Society). Radical Gardening travels an alternative route, through history and across landscape, linking propagation with propaganda. For everyday garden life is not only patio, barbecue, white picket fence, topiary, herbaceous border.… From window box to veggie box, from political plot to flower power, this book uncovers and celebrates moments, movements, gestures, of a people’s approach to gardens and gardening. It weaves together garden history with the counterculture, stories of individual plants with discussion of government policy, the social history of campaign groups with the pleasure and dirt of hands in the earth.

The private garden in England and Wales

Landscape Planning, 1982

The belief that England is a garden in which the English gracefully idle away their leisure hours may now be somewhat tarnished, but the representation of the English as a nation of garden lovers, and each Englishman as the proud possessor of a suburban plot still lingers-This paper sets out to test the validity of this image of the English, by a survey of the type of housing which currently composes the English stock. It seeks to discover whether the desire for a garden is peculiar to the English, and if so why ; and finally conjectures on the future of the private garden in modern society .

William Kent’s “Notion of Gardening”: The context, the practice and the posthumous claims

Garden History , 2016

Conscious of greatness having been thrust upon William Kent by Horace Walpole and his generation, twentieth-century historians have pored over Kent’s own drawings and searched into the literature of the time – principally Alexander Pope’s poems, Joseph Spence’s anecdotes on painting, and Horace Walpole’s ‘On Modern Gardening’ – for the reasons why. They often look back at him from his later reputation. This article looks at Kent instead from the standpoint of earlier and contemporary practice both in the formal garden tradition and at Chiswick House. The themes examined are maxims concerning prospects and garden layout, Antique gardens, the rhetoric of the Rural, and history painting and theatre scenery in the design of gardens. These are followed by Kent’s appreciation of parkland scenery, because he moved on from working ‘without line and level’ in the early 1730s to enhancing the sensual experience of the wider landscape in the 1740s. Finally, the retrospective claims made on behalf of Kent, who actually left very little indication of his design thinking, are addressed.