Imparadised 
Colin Burrow
- Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens by Rebecca Bushnell
Gardening today labours to be classless. TV programmes and books try to persuade us that we, whoever we are, can make over scrubby lawns, erect decking, build pergolas, plumb in water features, and construct a little Blenheim in a rectangle of twenty by thirty feet. Everyone knows this notion of classlessness is false, since nothing stimulates petty snobberies more immediately than a garden. If you have the wrong sort of paving, or if you put swathes of purple and orange together in the misguided belief that you are the new Gertrude Jekyll, you can be sure your friends will snigger about it on the way home. And if you see a garden which has nothing in it but an abandoned car and knee-high grass, you know to quicken your step. Gardens are full of class, and we can read them like books.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Other articles by this contributor:
Who wouldn’t buy it? · speculating about Shakespeare
Not Quite Nasty · Anthony Burgess
Tuesday Girl · Seraphick Love
Recribrations · John Donne in Performance
Waves of Wo · George Gascoigne
print layout
tell a friend