The emperor’s new weeds

Even a dreadful garden will receive warm praise if you open it to the public – as Sir Roy Strong has proved

There is no garden in Britain so awful that someone won’t describe it as ‘lovely’. Especially if it is associated with a celebrity. I recently listened to Sir Roy Strong on the radio oozing complacency as he discussed his garden at the Laskett and why it should be saved for the nation. He made a virtue out of its disorder: ‘If a giant thistle seeds itself in the middle of the kitchen garden my head gardener just lets it grow there… and people love that.’

Oh no they don’t. If there is one thing most garden visitors can’t cope with, rightly or more possibly wrongly, it’s weeds and untidiness. It’s a narrow line between a ‘relaxed and domestic quality’ and a mess, but most garden visitors fail to get further than the idea that a weed creates a wasteland.

Some of us are more sophisticated and can appreciate that formal might not mean immaculate and that foxgloves seeding themselves around in a rose garden, as Sir Roy describes at the Laskett, are a charming addition (the roses are another question). There is a growing minority of interested people who are beginning seriously to engage with the aesthetics and philosophy of gardens and to visit and discuss gardens with this in mind, rather than simply noticing the weediness.

It was such a group that I took to the Laskett this summer, and we came away angry and disenchanted. Which is the right word, because what people take with them to a garden as talked-up as this — a book, television and radio programmes about it, and with a famous name attached — is just that: enchantment.