Gardening in Britain is big business. In 2023, UK households spent around £13.2 billion on garden goods, and another £5.8 billion on gardening and landscaping services. As the sector’s premier meetup, the Chelsea Flower Show is therefore an ideal opportunity to reflect on the latest trends. We will see a lot of hardy Mediterranean plants amid rammed earth brick work this year, and plenty of sustainability gubbins too. Rainwater harvesting will become a celebrated feature, replacing the battered plastic tubs under gutters.

Yet there will also be deeper developments: evidence of the ever-evolving relationship between man, technology and nature. That’s clear enough in the form of the Avanade Intelligent Garden, a particularly British expression of a wider global trend. Avanade, the sponsor, is a Microsoft-owned consultancy hawking their AI and business analytics skills, and its show garden will explore how monitoring soil moisture, pH, temperature, air quality, wind, and rainfall can help gardeners. With all those buzzwords floating about, it’s tempting to be cynical. But Je Ahn, principle of architecture practice Studio Weave, who designed the project with the gardener Tom Massey, insists the garden isn’t just a gimmick. As he says, 30% of trees planted in cities die within a year, and 50% within a decade. By monitoring their needs and their performance, we can ensure they survive.

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Is your garden imperialist?

By Giles Fraser

We should remember, here, that British gardens are very often laboratories. We have a rich history of applying technology to gardening in a way that has fundamentally determined the direction of social change. This is true in an age of mass migration and with a housing crisis as it was in times of yore. It may have been Louis XIV that built the “Machine de Marly” on the Seine — to supply the fountains of Versailles, itself the greatest piece of technology before the Industrial Revolution — but it would be the great estate gardens of Britain that actually fired modernity.

Consider, for instance, a technique like “puddling” — the compacting of clay to form an impermeable layer. It was vital in the building of our canal network, in the 18th and 19th centuries, but was ultimately borrowed from the “canals” and ornamental lakes of country gardens. Another good example is the orangery designed by Joseph Bramah for Windsor Castle in the early 19th century, and perhaps the first hot-water central heating system ever made. Joseph Paxton’s vast 1840 greenhouse, the Great Stove at Chatsworth, used hot-water heating: conducted from eight underground coal-fired boilers, all through a seven-mile maze of six-inch pipes. Steam engines were used in gardens years before their use in the manufacturing industry for pumping purposes. British gardens have always been busy.

Nor is it simply that gardens were testbeds for industrial development. When we look at the glass and steel structures that dominate our cities, we are looking at the end point of a technique first used for plants. The greenhouses of the 18th century first deployed uniform systems of glass panels and metal mullions — iron as opposed to its successor steel — to maximize light. The Hackney camellia house for the nurseryman Conrad Loddiges, completed in 1819, was one of the first to use standardized curved wrought-iron sash bars to hold curvilinear glass, all linked together and supported on cast-iron columns.

Yet technology also helped popularize gardening among the masses — and not just the greenhouses we inherited from those grand country houses. Until the Fifties, explains Fiona Davison of the Royal Horticultural Society, seeding plants required reserves of skill and patience. Plants were given as cuttings, shared between families and friends, severely limiting the range and possibilities of gardening. To do anything more adventurous, you would need a potting shed, heated somehow, to grow plants from seeds which you would buy blind from specialist importers, often by mail-order. It was a serious, almost agricultural, activity, for dedicated hobbyists, rather than part-timers.

But then, after the Second World War, came the popularization of plastic, meaning seeded plants could now be bought in cheap pots from new stores called garden centers; places of spectacular color and exotic choice, cribbed from the USA. Another important innovation was the television. Gardeners World premiered in 1968, six months after color was introduced to British TVs. For the first time, that allowed enthusiasts to convey the vibrancy of horticulture to millions of people in the comfort of their own homes. All that helped put gardening within reach of the wealthier working classes, especially as the suburbanization boom of earlier decades meant that around 70% of all Britons now owned land, up from just 5% in the 1870s.

Now, though, these dynamics are shifting. Though the portion of our housing stock that has gardens has been stable for many years, that could soon change as the housing crisis demands that ministers are under ever-more pressure to build more flats. In practice, that could soon mean that gardening increasingly becomes a middle-class pursuit. And though Labour has promised new urban apartments will have mandated green spaces, the Avanade example suggests these places are likely to be cared for by technology rather than serried ranks of gardeners.

If you don’t believe me, just visit the Bosco Verticale in Milan. Designed by the Italian architect Stefano Boeri, his project started as a single plant-clad high rise in the Italian city. Now, though, Boeri’s vision is being applied as far afield as Cairo and Nanjing. He explains that the plants themselves must be nurtured by a central control panel rather than neglectful humans. Planners and architects definitely want to green our ever-denser cities. But what we are beginning to see are plans for a technologically managed layering rather than the messy process of bringing together dirt and water and plantings to make life and color.

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Just as urban roads and social spaces are destined to become more regulated through technology, so will our relationship with nature. Not that the British suburban garden is destined to be subsumed by machines. That’s clear enough at the Chelsea Flower Show. The show garden of the great Japanese designer, Kazuyuki Ishihara, shows how British tastes are invigorated again and again by the exotic, with irises strewn among the maples.

Britain’s suburban gardens endure, from the thin tithes behind Victorian terraces, through the neo-Elizabethan patches of the garden cities, to the overlooked patch of the modern estate, invigorated by tips from Garden Rescue or Real Gardens. They’re all different, of course, but together evoke an older kind of gardening. For planners and politicians pondering how to hit housing targets, they’re also a reminder that what makes suburban living attractive is the imminence of the natural, the opportunity not just to watch plants passively, but to get our hands dirty and help them bloom.

Yet London’s density of people has led to a density of competing interests. Northumberland Estates, the duke’s development company, were refused planning permission for the flats in October 2021. A subsequent appeal is ongoing and has attracted media interest. All this because the proposed location is currently the site of Park Road Allotments.

Park Road Allotments have existed since 1917, when the 7th Duke leased a parcel of land to the local authority. The plots were primarily used by soldiers returning from the battlefields of the First World War. However, Hounslow Council did not refuse planning permission because of this evocative history. Their reasoning was far less romantic. The council’s main objection to the flats was due to the loss of what is known, in the comatose lingo of government, as “Local Open Space”, not the loss of the allotments. But there is no doubt that the attention lavished on the case by various media outlets is precisely because plots are at risk. They make for emotive copy, especially when a wealthy duke is involved.

When I first got wind of the story, my sympathies automatically aligned with the plotholders. My grandfather spent summers nurturing marrows on his plot. In early September, he would deliver a colossal green shell casing, which had the heft of a wet sandbag and tasted faintly of methane. Grandad would suggest stuffing it with mince (people who grow marrows always suggest stuffing them with mince). I used to wonder why such a practical and thoughtful man would raise a Herculean fruit only to put 90% of its mass straight on the compost heap. Now I understand that consumption was never his chief concern. The growing was all.

I briefly tended an allotment as a teenager, though I never bothered with marrows. Most of my time was spent digging up couch grass and then squatting to remove each fleshy white root from the heavy clay. “I’d spray that off if I were you,” the old gent on the neighbouring plot advised. “Never get on top of it otherwise.” He was right, I never did get on top of it. But I cleared enough earth to cultivate rows of garlic, broad beans and leeks. I ridged up the soil and planted potato sets (Pink Fir Apple, Charlotte). Best of all, I erected a tiny plastic greenhouse to shelter my tomatoes. The brawny, pubescent stink of leaping growth stays with me.

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Odours aside, my lasting impression of allotment life was the work required to bring even the smallest piece of neglected land into cultivation. Digging up weeds, digging in manure, removing stones and potsherds. And that’s before you plant anything. A plot must be visited every day in the growing season. There are always vegetables to be watered, pests to control, and yet more weeds to pull up. You spend so much time with your face in the muck that it becomes a kind of acquaintance. I suppose this feeling is the dimmest echo of what it must be like to spend a whole life on the same patch of ground. Humans imprint on the land they work. To take that land away from its custodians means the loss of much more than outdoor space. For many, it is the severing of a relationship.

As well as imprinting on that land, we inhabit it. Every allotment has its old shed. Mine was a slouching grandee of impossible antiquity. It was filled with — and possibly supported by — 50 years of detritus. Sticky tins of bitumen lurked behind rolls of rotting carpet, broken tool handles were packed into every crevice. There was a genuine stratigraphy to all that crap. I discovered cigarette cartons belonging to brands long deceased, and I dated some sodden lumps of newspaper to the early Eighties. There was a history in that shed, the small leavings of other lives.

Although allotments are not unique to the United Kingdom, they do seem to exert a special tug in this country. These scruffy, exciting parcels of land are among the most familiar markers of our landscape, and particularly of the awkward spaces where city broadens into countryside. Allotments glimpsed from a train window are a sign that you are on your way, or nearly home.

Their significance is brilliantly described in The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture by David Crouch and Colin Ward. First published in 1988 and recently reissued by Little Toller Books, the book describes how the freedom that comes with working your own ground allows us to “make our own geography” and, like the Diggers of 1649, to dream our own little Utopias in suburban Sheffield or Belfast. They are also levelling places, boasting an unforced diversity of class, race and sexuality that would make any corporate recruitment consultant weep with envy. As J.C. Niala writes in her afterword to the new edition: “Allotment sites are a typical example of English material cultural heritage, yet at the same time they are more diverse in people and plants than the cities that surround them, and have been for over three-quarters of a century.”

My own attachment to allotments is personal as well as cultural. So I was surprised, and a little discomfited, to find myself beginning to side with the developers as I learned more about the Isleworth scheme. The Northumberland Estate’s proposal would retain 38 plots, though at a reduced size of 60 square metres. Those who lose their allotments would be offered alternative sites elsewhere. This is far from ideal, of course. Allotments are not parking spaces; you cannot simply move from one to another without a sense of loss. For many, they have all the weight of meaning that is traditionally attached to a home. And yet homes are at the heart of this whole mess. A city with a desperate shortage of them would gain 80 more. My heart says Nimby, but my head screams Yimby.

There are two possible outcomes to the Northumberland Estate’s appeal. One, planning permission is granted, and the flats are built. Two, planning permission is denied. The second outcome will not maintain the status quo. It is unlikely that Park Road Allotments will be allowed to remain on the site. A spokesperson for Northumberland Estates has said that they would explore other uses for the land, “like using it for biodiversity credits”. This is a deplorable display of petulance, but it does follow the logic of modern Britain, a country in which “No” seems to be the watchword. In the end, only the lawyers get what they want.

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Dukes and allotments might feel like outposts of a vanishing Britain, as remote from our daily reality as the crenelated frontage of Syon House. But this small spat in Isleworth exemplifies a very contemporary problem: our density of competing interests leads to stalemate. No new flats, but no more allotments either. If the land is given over to the harvesting of biodiversity credits, an existing community of growers will not be replaced by a community of residents. There will simply be no community worthy of the name left on this little pocket of land.

It isn’t all doom and gloom in West London. A new allotment site has just opened in Ealing, providing 35 generous plots of 125 square metres. There are still 40,000 plots in the city, spread over more than 700 sites. Perhaps they will be chipped away over the coming decades. I hope not. We need houses, but we need other things too. Places where hard work is not measured in cash. Places that delight for the sake of delighting. Despite my treacherous inclinations toward the Park Road case, my money is still on the growers. After all, ingenuity has always been an essential quality for any plotholder — they go together like marrows and mince.

Or perhaps it’s the danger of freedom. The thrill of becoming lost. The imperfections of nature that cannot offer complete, bubble-wrapped security and comfort. But wherever imperfection exists, there is someone out there to sell you the dream. Why submit to the chaotic, beautiful imperfections of nature, when you can have a “forever flawless” artificial lawn?

Advertised by their promoters as the perfect solution to gardens bronzed by the unrelenting warmth of climate change, time spent outside mowing and weeding, burn marks from pet urine, and dirty shoes, the artificial lawn market has expanded rapidly in the last decade. There is money to be made — with industry forecasters predicting that global demand for artificial lawn will reach $7 billion by 2025. They’re not cheap either — Which? magazine advises that a fake lawn is comparatively expensive, especially if landscapers or specialists are employed for its installation, which is important for preventing visible seams, wrinkles and having a properly fitted underlay: “The prices quoted for fitting a 50m² area ranged from £1,000 to £2,700 — double the price of the artificial grass alone.”

So what is the appeal of artificial grass, and why is this such a rapidly expanding industry? Clues are abundant in marketing pitches for the product, citing low maintenance burdens and year-round “flawless” green lawn. One advert for New Lawn promises to “give your family the perfect, safe and mud-free garden year round”.

But this vision of perfection is, frankly, chilling. Can you imagine any child delighting in the artificial crunch of plastic under their feet over the sensory stimulation of real, natural grass in its resplendent, fragrant verdancy? Artificial lawn gardens are fundamentally sterile. The removal of nature goes well beyond the blades of grass. To install outdoor carpet, plastic membranes must be laid down to ensure that plants are unable to take root and grow among the artificial fibres. This means no clover, no buttercups, no daisies. None of the invertebrates and other insects that feed on pollen and decomposing matter. No birds, either — what are they to feed upon in this barren wasteland?

Perfect Grass Ltd. offers this dystopian advice for preventing the simple pleasure of watching birds enjoy a source of food during a long, cold winter: “Keep bird feeders well away from your artificial grass. These will only encourage droppings to build up and rodents to dig at the grass below the feeder.” Grim. The desert conditions persist below ground too — without a source of grass cuttings and other organic matter breaking down into the soil, detritivores like earthworms are starved too. Instead of decomposing humic matter and aerating the soil, without food, they themselves decompose. And deprived of oxygen, the conditions underfoot offer forth the foul odours of the anaerobic rot of whatever organic matter remains, often amplified by pet urine, a known problem for artificial grass.

But worry not, the purveyors of perfection have another solution: chemicals. We’re not just talking about vinegar, washing up liquid and detergents, soaking into the groundwater. There are companies out there to sell you the smell of real grass for your fake grass. Perfect Grass offers this advice for brushing perfume into your plastic:

“If you want your artificial grass to smell like the real thing then add some artificial grass cleaner to it and brush it in… This compound is a colourless liquid that has an intense smell of freshly cut grass. Mixed with other ingredients and bingo – you are able to deliver that freshly cut grass smell.”

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But it’s not all heavenly in plastic paradise. The very same website advises against using lawn fragrance to mask odours that are inherent to artificial grass: “We don’t recommend using these products to cover up the smell of dog wee for example, as we have found it results in a “dog wee grass smell”. It is best used like a perfume; you wouldn’t apply perfume or aftershave without washing first!”

Avoiding maintenance is said to be one of the key advantages of artificial lawns. Yet here again the dream is a failed one. If they are to fulfil their promise of perfection, outdoor carpets require vacuuming to remove debris such as leaves, blossom and twigs. The fibres also require regular agitation to remain firm and upright. Many of the outdoor vacuum cleaners for this purpose (such as the “Lazybrush”) even bear a striking resemblance to… a lawnmower.

Even regular brushing and vacuuming in colder, wetter climates will not be enough to prevent the build-up of moss and moulds, which darken the lawn, break down the plastic fibres and end the fake perfection. Again, artificial lawn chemicals can come to the rescue — or, if all else fails, you can pressure wash your plastic grass clean again. In the summer, moss and mould give way to intense heat, because artificial lawns absorb and radiate much more heat than natural grass. Aura Landscapes tested this with an infrared thermometer, finding that artificial grass in the sun reached over 60ºC — enough to cause thermal burns to human skin.

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So, given how awful artificial lawn is, how easy is it to dispose of it? In fact, artificial lawns dispose of themselves, shedding mass as microplastics into the air and watercourse. Research on microplastic emissions from domestic artificial lawn is limited, but playing-field astroturf has been estimated to be the second-largest source of microplastics in the environment after road wear and tyre abrasion. The remainder, once it reaches the end of its useful life of potentially less than ten years, is very hard to recycle, owing to the sheer variety of polymers involved to achieve the “right” texture, ultraviolet light resistance, colour and general durability. Thus, it ends up in landfill.

Already, hundreds of fields that were installed in the mid-2000s in the US are at or beyond their estimated eight-to-10-year life spans. Now these fields are being torn up, en masse. In one 2017 report, the Synthetic Turf Council projected that by the end of the decade, at least 750 fields will be replaced annually. The average field contains approximately 18 tonnes of plastic carpet and 18 tonnes of infill, according to the report. This means that as much as 150,000 tonnes of waste could require disposal every year. The problem is not unique to North America — one Dutch report on how artificial turf is disposed of at the end of its useful life found that recycling facilities often do not follow through with their promises, either taking the money and storing the turf instead of recycling it in reasonable time, or even selling it abroad. Storing large volumes of flammable plastic and rubber is inherently risky, too. The very same facility featured in the Dutch report later suffered a large fire, which took days to put out, releasing toxic fumes into the air.

All of the above said, the most fundamental reason to despise artificial lawns, is that they look shit. Tacky, lifeless green carpets don’t look like a perfect lawn; they look like what they are — as fake, plasticky, and artificial as an American newsreader. Outdoor carpet follows the “uncanny valley” model of emotional response to likenesses. That is to say, it looks unnatural and dystopian precisely because it is so close to, and yet so far from, the natural thing it is trying to emulate. Artificial lawn installation companies often share before and after comparisons: before, the perfect imperfection of nature — a garden habitat for invertebrates, hedgehogs, insects and birds; after, a sterile, fake perfection — devoid of variation, devoid of life. Fake turf is the manifestation of a deep cultural weakness, expressed in short-termism and a distaste and disrespect for the wonder, variety, and temporality of the natural world. Artificial lawns are the “Live, Laugh, Lobotomy” of gardening.

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It’s time to go to war against plastic turf. Some municipalities already are: Boston has banned artificial lawn in its city parks. Professional societies are also weighing in — the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) recently declared: “We launched our sustainability strategy last year and fake grass is just not in line with our ethos and views on plastic. We recommend using real grass because of its environmental benefits, which include supporting wildlife, mitigating flooding and cooling the environment.” The RHS’s flagship event, the Chelsea Flower Show, introduced a ban for artificial grass in 2022.

Even if we can’t ban it nationwide, surely the civic minded among us can take the initiative in filling watering cans with acetone and paying a visit to our dear neighbours’ artificial lawns? And if that doesn’t take your fancy, do what you can. If you move somewhere with one, or if you have one already — rip it out, and restore the hum, buzz and chaotic beauty of nature to your surrounds. The planet will thank you, and so will your discerning neighbours.

***

An unabridged, illustrated version of this article first appeared on the writer’s Himbonomics substack.

Then, last year, it gave up. By February the buds which had begun to swell along the branches turned brown and desiccated, like abandoned chrysalises. After the blossom failed, a few leaves unfurled, then dropped early. On a gusty day last spring, a main branch fell, cleaving the privet hedge below it in two.

As the gardener charged with pruning that tree — having shaped its canopy and enjoyed its blossom for a decade — I felt bereft, in that pull-yourself-together way one might experience at the demise of an aged pet. But I’m not sure I was mourning the tree so much as lamenting what it symbolised.

“Of course the trees are dying,” I thought, when I arrived at work to see that bough nestling in the hedge. It was just more fodder for my personal spiral of climate anxiety.

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Any gardener will tell you that one of the great pleasures of the pursuit, whether amateur of professional, is the sense of connection it engenders between you and the seasons. Stewarding a patch of ground from spring to winter and back again plugs you into something ineluctable and constant.

In the decade or so that I have been doing it for a living, I’ve come to understand why people often talk of gardening in therapeutic terms. Once stricken with Seasonal Affective Disorder when the clocks go back, I now reconcile myself to winter as a necessary stage in the wheel. Most of what we do at this time of year involves “putting things to bed”, chopping back the wilted summer growth. But this isn’t death so much as dormancy, a prelude to inevitable rejuvenation. Spring rolls around like a gift. Whatever clamorous stupidities might be afflicting the human story, the garden, this earth, moves to organic rhythms deeply etched in time. Gardening, then, becomes an act of self-reassurance.

At least, that is how it used to feel. As the years pass, the drumbeat of alarm around climate change has begun to shake the foundations of this happy psychological refuge. The meteorological cues which dictate the behaviour of our garden plants and wildlife have gone haywire. The energy that plants expend on negotiating weather patterns for which they haven’t evolved is making them more vulnerable to blights and pests. The first frosts land later, which means the window for the spread of fungus and foliar pathogens has widened. There are fewer insects, meaning less pollination. There is, too, just a general tenor of capriciousness — the sense that conditions are less hospitable, more violent, and incrementally less predictable. The rain falls in torrential bursts. The summer sun feels that bit too harsh. The garden’s cheering constancy has been fatally disrupted.

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At a practical level, this demands certain adjustments. The wealthy homeowners who comprise the majority of our client base, fluent in western guilt and self-exonerating gestures, are starting to think about ways to make their gardens more environmentally friendly. Add some wildflowers for the bees. Let the grass grow longer, acknowledging the writer Michael Pollan’s colourful assertion that “a lawn is nature under totalitarian rule”. Like many landscaping firms, we wait impatiently for the performance of battery-run tools to catch up with our current petrol-driven machinery, and calculate how much to increase our rates by to cover the outlay (around three grand, in case you’re wondering). These transitions are fine and good. Gardeners, like people generally, are an adaptable species.

What is less easy to process, however, is the impact this horticultural uncertainty might be having on our wellbeing. It is increasingly clear that the kind of discourse we have seen around COP26 in Glasgow is precipitating an epidemic of “eco-anxiety”, especially among the young. That this anxiety is prompting me and others to draw alarming extrapolations upon witnessing the struggles going on in our herbaceous borders reveals something profound about the impact of climate change — not so much the terrifying existential threat of it, but the proximate emotional cost.

Of course, we continue to take solace in whatever mitigation we can find. I can’t be the only person who found a guilty, and frankly perverse, respite in the recent study which claimed that the UK ranks among the five countries best placed to ride out “societal collapse”. (Hooray?) Maybe, we think to ourselves, maybe my little corner will escape the worst of it. Perhaps my kids will be OK.

Meanwhile, and perhaps ironically, growing awareness of our unsustainable relationship with nature has only increased our recognition that communing with nature is good for us. Such old wisdom, as no end of recent self-discovery memoirs detail, has come to be seen as an antidote to the artifice and alienation of the western lifestyle.

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But anyone who spends a lot of time among the shrubbery will tell you that what we are faced with, at minimum, is a world so discombobulated, so shorn of its old certainties, that contentment itself becomes forfeit. A world in which gardening — the uncomplicated pleasure of cultivating a plant from bulb to flower, stem to trunk — becomes freighted with the very temporal and political concerns that its practitioners are trying to escape.

On the spectrum of climate change’s ramifications, this might seem like trifling stuff. Amending a planting scheme because the flowers aren’t unfurling at the expected time in the calendar is self-evidently not in the same league as a million-hectare wildfire, or a hundred contiguous miles of coral bleaching. And I’m the first to admit, as someone inclined to believe that climate change is every bit as bad as its most adamant Cassandras claim, that this reflex is toxic for the soul. In this way, it is a microcosmic analogue of the apophenia we now see pervading so much of our political culture.

For the climate change denier, this tendency to connect the dots in support of pre-existing convictions can mean that the sight of some snow appears as categorical proof of the great global warming con. Conversely, for the accepter, it becomes tempting to see evidence of accelerating catastrophe in every incongruous sunburst and drop of rain. Corroboration has largely been supplanted by intuition. Gripped with this tendency, the skeleton of a once-bountiful cherry tree becomes a portent of doom.

The truth is that I don’t know whether it was climate change that did for the old cherry or whether it is simply a tree whose time has come. But the owners have opted to leave it standing in the vain hope it will reanimate next year. It stands there now, a shadow of its former self. I’d swear it is trying to tell me something.

It’s never been high up on the to-do list. But the fine weather of late has made me look for an excuse to spend some time outside. And so I have been to the garden centre to buy manure, and I have started to break open the shell of hardened ground and feed it with sweet smelling, life giving fibre. It’s a strangely satisfying thing to do. Hands filthy, I’m feeding the dead earth with biological energy in order to return it to life.

A few miles from here, over the river, the Chelsea Flower Show is in full bloom. I have been a couple of times, but it’s become a bit too corporate: this year’s Gold Winners include the Morgan Stanley garden and the M&G Investments garden – M&G also being the sponsors of the whole event. And at £107, ticket prices are steep. I think I’ll stick with B&Q rather than M&G.

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I also find that the themed gardens at Chelsea strain a little too much for social relevance. The pictures of the CAMFED Campaign for Female Education garden did indeed look splendidly colourful, recreating a Zimbabwean schoolyard in the heart of SW3. But it struck me as more of a sermon than a garden.

Of course, there is nothing at all wrong with a sermon on the subject of women and education in Africa. Far from it. And I also do think that gardens have long been places of moral edification. But there is a crucial and telling difference between the way our own gardens work on us morally and the sort of moral instruction that is being offered by a themed garden in SW3.

In the morally-themed garden, the flowers and planting are being used to illustrate a moral concern, like a poster or a promotional film might. But the really important moral point of gardens is not that attractive flowers and planting are used to illustrate some important wider cause, but that the very act of being in a garden – tending to it, playing in it, eating in it, weeding, watering, walking about in it – all contribute to our moral formation. And a roped-off, do-not-touch garden in Chelsea just cannot achieve that.

In other words, to borrow an idea from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, some virtues are ‘internal’ to certain practices. And the morally-themed garden is not virtuous in this sense – the morality it illustrates is not the morality internal to the activity of gardening.

The philosopher David Cooper makes a similar point about morality and gardens in the context of a much wider discussion of moral philosophy’s history. Cooper rightly regrets that moral philosophy has moved away from the Aristotelian idea that our moral take on the world is bound up with the sort of life we live as a whole – with our friendships, our jobs, our lived environment.

Morality is not a separate compartment of ourselves – a stern-faced bit, only concerned with important things like human rights and vulnerable people. Morality is not just for when we are ‘on duty’, as it were: it involves cultivating virtuous habits of the mind that are always in play, including in our ‘off duty’ activities.

Morality is everything: it is the whole of our lived life, including the bits that we have mistakenly come to regard as private and morally neutral.

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My soil is a case in point. Working the ground, feeding it manure, involves a form of care for the natural environment that is not all about some immediate advantage for me. Yes, I and others will hopefully benefit from the beauty of the delphiniums I imagine one day growing there. But that’s only half the story. Because the very act of pottering about in the garden establishes an increasingly fond alliance between myself and the forces of nature, which sets my own life in a wider perspective.

To put it in Christian terms, it feels like a mini collaboration between me and God. Success is only party in my own hands. When it comes, I am thankful. So, gardening teaches dependency: the idea that life is a gift, and that the gift itself should be gratefully received.

Why do my own tomatoes “taste better” than the ones I buy from Sainsbury’s? Objectively, they don’t. But it makes perfect sense to say they taste better than shop-bought ones because taste, here, is not just a matter of sensory experience: it has a much more expanded sense of what the tomato means.

A garden is, of course, part nature, part human artifice. At times, garden fashions have emphasised the latter – straight lines, geometric planting, topiary. At other times, a more ‘wild’ look has been in vogue, as with the Romantics.

But whatever one’s preference, the garden is always an intersection between nature and human activity. And so the garden always feels to me like a sustained meditation on our human place within a world that does not do our bidding. A world in which the weeds will always finally win.

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By Giles Fraser

Over the coming summer, the garden will be a place of great joy. Laughter, barbeques, den-making, lawn-mowing contemplation. For Aristotle, being good is always an aspect of the good life – of a life well lived. From this perspective, morality and personal happiness are not set against each other as if being good always involves a sacrifice to one’s personal happiness. That is more a Christian perspective – always more concerned with the emergency ethics of dramatic situations. And from this Christian perspective, the ethics of Aristotle’s Eudemonia can feel a little too complacent – in danger of being conscripted by what one might call bourgeois complacency.

Well, I will bear that in mind. But for now, I will linger in my garden. Drink tea with friends. Fight the weeds. Play with my children. Host parish parties. Watch the delphiniums grow. In terms of modern culture wars, all this might be called a sense of place. And the garden might therefore be regarded as the spiritual headquarters of the ‘somewheres’ as opposed to the ‘anywheres’.

But the great thing about the garden is that when I’m in it I don’t much care about such matters. Feeding the ground with life, hands stinking of the farmyard – that feels so much more important.