Day 17 - It's all in the Detail

Gardens are not a person's lasting legacy. When you leave one behind, it changes. Even the gardens of the famous names through history are no longer as they were created. There may be an attempt to preserve what they made, but our understanding of their creations, the methods we use to look after them, our sense of their value, all these change. Their gardens become a product of the people entrusted with them in the present. Their future history becomes a series of different presents, presided over by a sequence of people with different abilities and outlooks. Even the great gardens are no longer the gardens they started out as.

A garden is well suited to the bridge-burning lifestyle. If subsequent gardeners don't change it for reasons of their own, then its very life force will systematically dismantle it. It will destroy itself through the eternal power of nature, which although we harness it to grow our gardens, when left to its own devices, is the enemy of them. Nature fights art.

I am not concerned with the arguments of nature's apologists. I understand that the wild landscape is/can be beautiful. But it does not mould itself to what we create. It has its own agenda. Once we set out on the road to arrange our landscape on aesthetic grounds and to create our interpretation of how we would like it to be, we have departed from nature. We have moved into the realm of art. No other species does this. We do it because we are human. We reject the immutability of natural law and we assume the role of god, whether we believe in one or not. That is our goal. We want to be god.

Now, I know that by saying this I am going to win no fans amongst the environmentalists or the ramblers, whose greatest pleasure is to roam the countryside, taking in what the natural world has to offer. Nevertheless, it has to be said. None of what we see in our little overpopulated islands has much to do with nature. Our landscape is the product of social history. It has arisen from power struggles over millennia, from the class structures of our society as it has developed over time. We no longer live amongst the naturally occurring swamps and forests that our ancestors had to endure. Our land is parcelled up into packages large and small according to our social status. It is scarred with fences and walls, barriers declaring ownership, and the plants we see are products of our need to feed and clothe ourselves. Even the rolling grassy hills on which our beasts graze are there as a result of our doing. And gardens have played their part in this. I will have a major rant later on the subject, some way down the line, when I have indulged my customary digressions to the full.

So this is how it functions with gardens. We need to put aside the idea of nature as being the object of our labours in our patch. We are creating something artificial, to our own specifications, that nature will destroy when we stop working to keep it at bay. I will have much more to say on this subject in other contexts later on.

On the other hand, don't get the idea that I don't respect nature. Nature is the force that drives the growth and decay within our gardens and we must manage it to achieve the best results. We must also strive not to sabotage it on the way. We must not strip the earth of its natural resources or pollute it with chemicals to achieve our ends. We must work in a partnership. Without nature, and without us, we have no gardens. Take away either one, and in the long-term, the same result will catch us up.

As a consequence of all this, the photographs I am posting today reveal that sixteen years on, my first garden looks rather different to the one I left behind. And that is only right and proper. I do not know the reasons for some of the changes, and some I would happily have incorporated myself. Here goes.

Clearly some of the rose beds had failed over the years and had been replaced with more labour-intensive bedding. However, the curiosity of standard Rosa mundi seemed to have lasted.

Along the way, they had been allowed to plant a few simple bits and pieces, ferns etc. in the daft rockery, which has to be better than the managed weeds that were all I was allowed.

A new seating area had been laid out in a corner of the walled garden, which was a definite improvement, which I would have welcomed in my time too.

And finally, it was very good to see the pear trees fully trained into espaliers, although, come on, let's have another row of wires and one more tier, why not? And shift the bloody 4x4 ruining the vista. It's all in the detail.