The Friday debate: Don’t let the garden pundits push you around

Anne Wareham is sick of people sucking their teeth at her “untidy” topiary

I think it’s time to break out of the conventions about what we are supposed to do with our gardens and how. We are ordered about by garden writers and television presenters, telling us “how to” and “where to” and we follow like sheep. We have wonderful materials – but we use them in completely banal and stereotypical ways because that’s what we’re told gardens are like.

Let’s forget about “raised beds” or “colour borders” or “prairie gardens”. Our gardens could be so much more exciting if we can liberate ourselves from the pundits and the boring clichés. Let’s begin using our gardens as a means of expression and leave painting by numbers behind.

Last time I wrote a Friday debate someone took a look at the picture of the yew pillars in my garden and commented: “They’re untrimmed and scruffy, and I wouldn’t dare charge anyone anything to see them.”

Now, what on connector made him think he knew what my yew pillars are supposed to look like? Or indeed the “not very good Elizabethan-style formal garden” which he also complained about and which is nothing of the sort? *

Some of the plants I use make some people suck their teeth and state “weeds!’ They no doubt adopt I haven’t tidied up enough. But it’s deliberate. I use what works and if ground elder makes a beautiful slab of foliage when a beautiful slab of foliage is what I want then I will use ground elder. (And it is a wonderfully simple plant to care for – no ‘expert’ advice needed there.) I love all the varieties of willow herb which I have managed to acquire, and that includes rosebay willow herb. More tooth sucking.

Who states topiary has to be cut crisp and “tidy”? It’s a look, but there are other looks, like fuzzy and cuddly. Or a mix of tight cut with a loose cut?

And what if plants and gardens can ‘talk’ to us? I once gave a lecture about gardens with meaning, and I left rejoicing because someone “got it”. They came to me afterwards, really excited, to declare their intention to grow a bramble patch to represent Gordon Brown. I wonder how they introduced David Cameron or Nick Clegg? But I envision any visitors he has will view his bramble patch with better disdain for the untidiness of it.

Germaine Greer said of the “not very good Elizabethan-style formal garden”:

“When, at Veddw in Monmouthshire, Wareham replants the lines of vanished hedgerows with box and fills the enclosed spaces with grasses and hardy perennials, she is linking the land-use of the past with the aesthetic of the lordly parterre. By giving expression to contemporary sensibility about conservation, she invites intellectual engagement. Gardening can be – should be – conceptual, which is simply a way of saying that gardens should have ideas in them and the ideas should be perceptible.”

Our familiarity with all the boring stereotypes of what a garden should be and look like does have a bonus – it bequeaths us rich reference points which we can play with and reinterpret. The possibilities are so rich and wonderful if we can just liberate ourselves from all those ideas of what a garden ought to look like and what plants are for and let our imaginations rip.

*However, in this case he was quite right about our yew pillars. They were still growing to size….

Anne Wareham is a garden writer; maker and designer of garden at Veddw in Monmouthshire; founder member of thinkingardens

Read more:
The Friday debate: Don’t let the garden pundits near you around