Privet sorrow

It is said that the road to hell is ‘paved with good intentions’. Well, so is the typical front garden in what used to be our green residential streets. In the last ten years, 13 per cent of the lush greenery in British front gardens has disappeared; 4.5 million of our front gardens are now entirely paved over. We used to laugh at overgrown front gardens populated with bearded garden gnomes; but those are surely preferable to grey rectangular deserts of nothingness, mere off-street parking spaces for the car. An exemplary front garden has been created for this week’s Chelsea Flower Show, demonstrating how parked cars and plants can and should live together in harmony.

Here are some of the most horrible types of front garden we encounter on our daily walks, each one bringing a stab of sadness.

Withered Ambition

 
This type of garden was certainly ‘paved with good intentions’. The owner’s vision was to have a lovely low-maintenance paved front garden with three tall pots, each containing a clipped box-tree ball. The only thing is, she couldn’t be bothered to clip them, or to water them. So they died. Now they are three misshapen brown box-ball corpses. ‘I found that I simply haven’t got green fingers,’ the owner says to her friends. ‘I just have to touch a plant and it dies.’ These front gardens often have a second sign of withered ambition: a bike padlocked to the railings, with two flat tyres.

The Failed Truth-Seeker

 
There are signs that this type of garden was once a Zen rock-garden. In the middle there’s a gnarled old bonsai tree, and round it is a circle of coarse grey gravel. But there’s a dirty old Tesco carrier bag hanging from one of the bonsai branches, and the gravel is full of weeds and cigarette butts.