Gardens and the Great Disconnect

You may be aware of a term that’s doing the rounds – the political ‘disconnect’ in this country.  With the media and politicians on one side of the divide and the ‘ordinary’ public on the other. The people on each side of this inviolable divide inhabit different worlds, they come from different backgrounds, they have each been through educational establishments so different there is no way on earth they can really understand each other.

A hundred years ago you had a party on one side whose spokespeople were drawn from the great mass of the working class. The other party was of and for the property owners, the landowners. It was a class based divide but each side was represented in Parliament.  And in the media there were plenty of people who had worked their way up through apprenticeships and local papers who could call themselves working class.

The class divide has gone and with it almost any remnants of the representatives of ‘normal’ people.  ‘Normal’? ‘Ordinary’? This is one of the problems there’s not even really a word for us.

This great majority, this huge middle mass (we’re not working class or middle class these are too specific and nowadays middle class tends to mean very well off) is not represented. The people in parliament and the people running the media have no idea what we want, what we aspire to, what we fear. We are ruled but not represented.

When Gordon Brown called Gillian Duffy a ‘bigot’ it wasn’t a seismic moment because he was rude, it was seismic because it showed this disconnect, this lack of understanding, it showed with crystal clarity the two worlds – the rulers and the ruled.


So what’s this got to do with gardens? Well in some ways gardens are different, the world of gardens has always been run by the toffs; the Gertrudes and the Christophers. The working gardeners were happy to doff their caps and never thought to try to take over.

But the world’s not divided into upper and working any more and gardens haven’t caught on yet. This middle mass now has the means, the time and the wish to create their own gardens and outside spaces.  The old advice, the old books, the old programmes, based on the idea of large gardens, time-rich, cash-rich, horticulturally inclined people looks increasingly out of touch and disconnected from reality.