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Gardening (like politics) is the art of the possible
Since this has been the week of the Chelsea Flower Show, and since this has been such a very depressing week in politics, I have decided to cultivate my garden, like Candide.
What else can one do? It certainly has needed cultivating. Until recently - perhaps there are portents here for the political future - my garden has been ugly, unsuccessful and much argued over, until a sudden triumphantly brutal apotheosis, a radical, elegantly simple change of direction.
I am now, suddenly, almost proud of my garden, and could almost have entered it at Chelsea, had it not been for the resistance there to anything truly contemporary. As in the political parties.
Enough of politics. Gardening is supposed to be a consolation and a distraction. My garden is small, shady and not well proportioned. It is not much more than a small weathered brick patio at the back of a Victorian terrace house, surrounded by flower beds on all four sides.
Its great beauty is that it leads out on to a mature communal garden. However, in this big garden and just outside our gate is a very large and lovely weeping cherry tree, which casts dappled and uneven shade all across our little garden, and makes it entirely gardener-proof.
I have ignored this obvious fact for years. I have planted all the wrong things and watched them bolt, wilt or blanch. Some have grown leggy, others have died. Others still have stifled their more delicate neighbours.
This has infuriated me, because I know quite a bit about plants, learnt from my mother. But I have been quite unable to accept the real constraints of my garden - politics again - and have insisted, against all the evidence and against nature, on elaborate romantic schemes that were completely unworkable and worse than useless.
I have not been alone in my folly. In despair I have consulted all sorts of garden designers, some of them rather grand. There is a particularly charming sub-species of the breed roaming our area - the amateur gentleman gardener, often an Old Etonian, who dreams up, at astonishing expense, nostalgic schemes, reminiscent of some long-forgotten herbaceous border in some probably imaginary country seat - and wholly unsuitable for a small city garden. They have been even more unrealistic than me.
Forced back on my own resources, I have welcomed any plants and climbers that have thrived. Hydrangea petiolaris, honeysuckle, Confederate jasmine and the rampant, scented Clematis Armandii have provided us with profuse screens from our neighbours. At one time, I used to grow hardy old fashioned roses over this thicket of climbers.
Nothing else much thrived for long, except uninvited and very welcome weeds, cascades of blue and yellow, and forgotten mint all summer long. I take the view that a weed is merely a plant in an unexpected place, and might well be a good thing. Like the entrepreneur, the weed creates unexpected added value, if not ruthlessly and immediately destroyed by those whose plan does not include it.
To me, this encroaching wildness seemed beautiful, but I understand that others saw it as a mess. In particular, my husband found it unacceptable; hence years of argument. I have come to the view that men are slashers and burners at heart. Where a woman welcomes a new shoot, a man feels an urgent need to cut things back. A man has only to see a tendril of a creeper hanging below the level he had in mind to snip ferociously; nothing must soften the lines of a brick border, or entwine itself somewhere without previous planning permission.
That is why the vandals who call themselves arboriculturalists go about hacking and lopping away, quite unnecessarily, at the form and beauty of trees. Snick snack snorum, high cockalorum, as we used to say as children. Confronted with greenery, a man is not a man, apparently, without a strong pair of secateurs or a chain saw.
Contemporary man is not only an instinctive slasher and burner; he is also aesthetically repressive. A post-modern garden cannot be a pleasant muddle; it must be exclusive, disciplined, thematic. This is hard enough in full sun, but in semi-shade it is a recipe for divorce.
Suddenly, however, all this chaos and confrontation has come to an end. Recently I consulted an Australian gardener, who listened kindly while I listed all the plants that won't grow in mixed shade, and all those that will that I don't like. Finally he asked me what actually does grow there. "Ferns," I replied, grumpily. "Well," he said, "why don't you grow ferns, then?" "Have a fern garden, you mean?" I asked. So we did.
This is about as good as it gets in making a virtue out of necessity; like politics, gardening is the art of the possible. Apart from our screens of clematis, jasmine and hydrangea, we have rooted everything out. No lingering mistakes from the past, no dead weight or dead wood. A new beginning, with what actually works.
Every flowerbed is now full of beautiful ferns. And only ferns; some are our old weeds, others are chosen, and many of them evergreen. We also have three very tall tree ferns, in large metal containers, with delicate 4ft fronds arching in all directions; at this time of year their huge new shoots unfurl themselves exotically. The small ferns below are growing lush new leaves in sharp acid greens, and spilling over into the cracks in the brick work to meet the bright Alchemilla mollis, which has drifted in from somewhere else.
The general impression is a modest, Pooterish echo of Andrew Marvell's great poem about a garden, "annihilating all that's made/ To a green thought in a green shade". Even politics.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, May 26, 2001
