Last Word The move towards sustainable

Sign of the Times

The move towards more sustainable gardening reflects our wider concerns about the sustainability of the planet in general, explains Katherine Swift

Fashions change – in gardens, as in clothes. But it’s never just about fashion. Neither is fashion. Look at safety pins and punk in the time of Mrs Thatcher; or the yards of fabric in a New Look skirt after the end of WWII. Gardens, like fashion, refl ect the spirit of the age, and over the past 50 years we have seen four shifts in garden style in response to our changing view of the world.

In the 1970s when I started gardening, British gardeners were still stuck in the past, making what were essentially early 20th-century Arts & Crafts gardens with formal lines and cottage-garden planting. Our models were Sissinghurst and Hidcote by way of Rosemary Verey. Then we were jolted into the present by the likes of Christopher Bradley-Hole and his second-generation Modernist gardens – we Brits were very late to that particular feast – all sleek, precision-cut stone, gleaming water and stainless steel. Beautiful gardens, but they could have been anywhere – in a desert on the Gulf or in the middle of London – an International Style to match the concrete and glass skyscrapers of the modern city.

New intensive maintenance and irrigation techniques meant that perennials could be planted anywhere and in any combination: a purely decorative and artifi cial approach that was challenged by Piet Oudolf. His hugely infl uential New Perennial style, adopted by British gardeners in the 1990s, promoted a more sustainable way of planting, in free-fl owing naturalistic settings with signature plantings of grasses.

Then came the fi nancial crash and the Postmodern garden: a fusion of New Perennial planting with formal historical or post-industrial elements, as in the post-capitalist New York setting of Oudolf’s iconic High Line, a recolonising by nature of a disused, high-level railway line, a style represented in this country by the re-imagining of the 19th-century Italianate parterre at Trentham with New Perennial style planting by Tom Stuart-Smith.

Now we are seeing the fourth major shift in style. It’s as if the WWII ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign has been re-imagined for the 21st century. Rather than digging up the lawn for potatoes, we let it grow into a wildfl ower meadow. Instead of building an Anderson shelter, we make bug hotels and put up bird boxes. These are sustainable gardens, but it is sustainability of the planet we worry about now, not just sustainable planting. Gardens are co-operative, collaborative and local: we have community gardens, community orchards, community composting schemes. Guerilla gardeners seize unused ground and grow fl owers up lampposts. City planners sow wildfl owers on tra c islands.

We decrease our carbon footprint by buying locally and seeking out local materials and suppliers. We cherish the textures of local stone and gravel. We recycle bricks and re-use timber – the aesthetic is rust and old weathered wood instead of stainless steel. We conserve water: rainwater butts are a feature; water in these gardens is more likely to trickle than to gush, to nourish rather than purely to ornament. Anxieties about food and its wholesomeness lead us to grow our own vegetables and experiment with organic gardening. The need to reduce carbon emissions encourages us to eat less meat. We plant local varieties of apples because we like the feeling of distinctiveness they give. We choose old varieties of vegetables because they maintain genetic diversity. We don’t have a name for them yet, but no one could accuse these gardens of being all about fashion. ■

“We have community gardens, community orchards, community composting”