Please shut the gates

Eighty-five years ago the National Gardens Scheme was created and blighted gardens in the UK forever. And in this anniversary year we will be bored silly by the praises sung of it.

Starting as a scheme to let everyone, even the hoi polloi, into posh gardens for a donation to charity, it now dominates the garden world, tainting all it touches. Somehow the belief has grown that the gardens under the scheme are great, quality gardens. The reality of their predominant mediocrity can never be confronted because, my dear, it’s all for good causes. Good gardens, awful gardens, nonexistent gardens such as Antony Woodward’s rather vacant plot on an inaccessible Welsh hillside — all may come to the party and be bathed in a rosy glow of goodwill and piety.

The charity and afternoon tea aspect of the scheme has lent an aura of middle-aged mindlessness to the creation and maintenance of gardens. There are groundbreaking creative intelligences at work in the garden world, which we sometimes glimpse: for example, at Chelsea. But they operate in a context where their achievement is transformed into a hobby. Because gardens open for charity, they become, in popular fantasy, charitable exercises in their own right, beyond examination or the luxury of being taken seriously.

The purpose of visiting a garden becomes harmless pleasure and tea, a chance for a gossip with friends while deploring the greenfly on the roses on thorny sticks that are as common as the strangely fashionable lemon drizzle cake. It is a chance to admire the less than admirable and deplore the perfectly acceptable. Convention rules. There will be no breath of complaint about rotten design poorly executed, but a so-called ‘weed’ can bring the County Organiser down upon a garden opener like a ton of manure.