OK sitcoms are a bit cosy and smug, but what about garden programmes?
Garden magazines, newspaper articles and TV programmes aren’t just cozy, they’re so snuggled down in their own well-padded, self-centred world they lost sight of daylight a long time ago.
They aren’t just middle class, they’re stuck in a 1950’s Miss Marple parody of middle class. They’re up to their Guardian-reading, organic-muesli armpits in middle class attitudes and assumptions.
Taking their intellectual creed from the upper class Victorian plant collectors, they spout Latin with ease, and the garden they hold up as ideal is so far from the sort of garden most people have it’s unrecognisable; it’s not a small square of outside space that’s crying out for a bit of a attention – no, their gardens are large enough to require several servants – and you suspect that’s exactly what they have.
The Chelsea Flower Show and the Royal Horticultural Society are the epitome of this upper class strangle-hold over what should be a fairly mass market subject. At Chelsea they actually wear straw hats and speak in a manner I haven’t heard since radio presenters shook off their dinner jackets. It’s a festival of manners that has so very little to do with ordinary people’s gardens, ordinary people’s aspirations and needs, I’m surprised some enterprising museum hasn’t tried to buy it up as a living exhibit.
Why does this matter? Oh it matters. This matters more than the sitcoms. Sitcoms hold up a blurry mirror to society for 20-odd minutes a week and then we move on. Gardens… gardens are outside your back door all the time. And millions of people are being deterred from enjoying their outside space because it doesn’t measure up to this ridiculous, joy-less, overpriced, outdated ideal.
Why is no one talking to the masses? Why are gardens being kept in the preserve of the small clique? Why limit your audience?
