Life & Society
Class conscious - Andrew Martin digs deep for horticultural irony
Published 01 March 2004
Buddleias, fuchsias and garden gnomes are fit only for plebs. Or maybe ironists
Spring is approaching, and with it my second year as a gardener. The great success of my first year was a shrub called a buddleia, which I planted right outside the kitchen window. It gave long spikes of purplish flowers, and seemed to grow very fast.
Having planted it, I began to see others all over. "That's a nice one," I'd say to the wife, pointing at a buddleia in a park. "Look at all those buddleias!" I'd exclaim, spotting them growing by the sides of railway lines, growing on the grass reservations of roundabouts, out of cracks in walls, amid rubbish dumps. Then the penny dropped, and the difficult silences that had followed my mentions of buddleia to visiting gardeners were suddenly explained. A buddleia is not a smart flower.
It was my introduction to class consciousness in gardening, an education that continued throughout last summer. I bought some bedding plants in assorted colours, and planted them all together in a nice big clump. After I'd spent a hard afternoon doing this, the wife came back from somewhere and pronounced: "It looks like an old lady's garden, or a flower bed in a municipal park." Yes, I thought, and who do you think does the planting in municipal parks? Professional gardeners, that's who. But she argued that bedding plants ought to be used to complement longer-term plants in a carefully colour-coordinated fashion.
I also began to notice a lack of enthusiasm for my red fuchsia among visitors to the garden. To me, this was a beautiful thing (I say "was", because I think it died over the winter when the wife asked me to move it to a less conspicuous place). It flowered continuously throughout the summer and needed no attention. But, again, that's part of the trouble. It's rather vulgar in its fecundity. And even I began to go off fuchsias when I realised that, at many summer fetes, there'll be a trestle table at which sits a group of boring, suburban men - members of the local fuchsia appreciation club. Also, the flowers of the fuchsia do look a little like the Christmas tree lights you can buy at Woolworths.
I began to put together a list of acceptable plants snooty people approved of. It included any decent, rich-red rose; magnolia trees, bay trees and lilac trees. Herbs are also considered smart, especially if you cut them and hang them inside the shed to dry. Incidentally, nobody should ever have a humorous weathervane on the top of their garden shed, or own a coffee mug bearing the slogan "Head gardener".
Thinking of garden snobbery while I was at my local garden centre this week, I went up to the manager and asked: "I don't suppose you sell garden gnomes, do you?" "Well now," he said, sitting down on one of the garden benches he has for sale, "it's interesting you should ask." He told me that, 20 years ago, he knew a man whose mortgage was paid for by garden gnomes. Not literally, obviously. The man was a garden equipment sales agent, and shifted hundreds of gnomes a week. "People used to buy whole groups of them," said the manager, adding that he believed the correct term for a group of gnomes to be "a collective". "Then they went out of fashion . . . too many people taking the mickey out of them. But they're coming back, and we've ordered some this year for the first time in ages."
This being a very middle-class garden centre, I was suspicious. "Brightly coloured plastic garden gnomes?" I asked. The manager nodded. "With little fishing rods and things?" He nodded again. "And you won't be calling them garden statuary or anything like that?" "No, no, we'll be calling them gnomes. Of course, it's a jokey thing now. Ironic."
"I see," I said. "So they'll be bought by people who don't like them?" "That's it," he said.
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