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 | | The former moat around the Tower of London was transformed into a vast array of banked flowers known as Superbloom in celebration of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee this year.Leon Neal/Getty Images |
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Into the garden … or is it? |
Last weekend, I took my children's hands and walked them into a castle moat filled with flowers. |
In the technicolor-bright photos on my phone, the experience seems like the kind of thing that might plausibly confirm that it was a good idea to live in London while raising two young daughters. After all: an actual castle. More precisely, that of the Tower of London, home to the crown jewels, carnivorous ravens, and the grassy hillock where Anne Boleyn was beheaded, none of which are available in Washington, D.C., where we used to live. |
In honor of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, the aforementioned moat is currently home to "Superbloom," millions of bright flowers grown in banked planters installed for the occasion. The effect is undeniably stunning, both from a distance, where it looks like ribbons of colors sloshing gently across one another as they undulate through the custom-built landscape, and up close, where individual poppies look as if each petal has been individually painted in watercolor, and occasional sunflowers looked as though they had strolled off a Van Gogh canvas. |
But something about it was unsettling, a little alienating even. I love gardens. But leaving Superbloom, I realized that I hadn't done any of the things I usually do while visiting them. |
I don't recall smelling a single flower. I did not fantasize about whether particularly striking blooms might be coaxed to live in a window box in my home, or use the plant-identifying app on my phone to determine that no, no they would not. I did not sit down and spend time in the quiet of nature. Even my 3-year-old daughter, who normally needs frequent reminders not to grab plants lest she injure them or vice versa, walked through without touching anything. |
Instead, my family and I waited in line to take the single trip down a giant slide that our admission ticket allowed us, then walked through at a steady pace with the crowd for the approximately 30 minutes our entry tickets had told us to expect. At one point, an installation of brass bees and butterflies were suspended on thin metal stems that arched over the paths, glittering in the sunlight and waving gently in the breeze. A small sign cheerfully informed us that the metal insects could be purchased individually in the gift shop. |
Was this a garden at all? Or was it something else — an Instagrammable experience, perhaps, or an art installation — that happened to feature live plants? I emailed Nigel Dunnet, the designer behind the project, to ask. Unfortunately he was sick, and unable to speak to me for this newsletter. But it turns out that a seemingly simple question — what is a garden, anyway? — is a surprisingly contentious, even political, one in Britain today. |
The Royal Horticultural Society's Chelsea Flower Show, held yearly in May, is the pinnacle of British gardening events. Each year, working over just a few weeks, the country's premier garden designers create complicated "show gardens" that feature artificially built landscapes, often complete with streams, ponds, boulders, hills and buildings, as well as thousands of plants and mature trees. The stakes of the competition are high: Winning a Chelsea medal can not only make a designer's career, but launch an entirely new trend in landscape design. |
But the winner of the coveted Best Show Garden award at this year's Chelsea Flower Show, held in late May, provoked considerable controversy over whether it could be considered a garden at all. |
"A Rewilding Britain Landscape," designed by Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt, was carefully constructed to look as if it was an abandoned area of land, untended by human hands as it slowly returned to a wild, natural state. It featured a beaver dam, made of wood that had been gnawed by beavers in the wild but then was transported and constructed by Urquhart & Hunt's team, intended to showcase the animals' ability to transform landscapes. (No beavers actually came to Chelsea.) Clumps of grass had been left untrimmed, so that they still had last year's seed heads and withered growth attached. |
 | | The overall winner at this year's Chelsea Flower Show, "A Rewilding Britain Landscape," designed by Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt, was carefully constructed to look as if it were an abandoned area.Guy Bell/Alamy |
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The garden won over the panel of judges, who praised the project's "skill, endeavor and charm." But other reactions were more mixed. "There was a lot of outrage this year at the awarding of the Best in Show," said Ambra Edwards, the author of "The Story of the English Garden," a history commissioned by the National Trust, as well as several other books about gardening. "Because it's not a garden in the way that we understand it. It's not a place in which you will go and sit and enjoy and have a cup of tea and whatever." |
But the deeper source of the controversy may have been the garden's reference to "rewilding." Britain has very few acres of uncultivated and ungrazed land, and there is a growing movement here that calls for allowing some of the countryside to return to a more natural state, supported by the introduction of beavers, wild pigs and other animals, in order to support biodiversity and draw more carbon out of the atmosphere. |
While rewilding has a lot of support from environmental activists, many of whom are young and live in cities, and from a few large landowners, it has proved controversial among many farmers, who see it as a threat to traditional farming methods and a potential cause of land price inflation. |
Monty Don, a host of the "Gardener's World" program on BBC television who also owns a farm in Wales, said that the prizewinning Chelsea entry was a "kind of polemic around beavers" rather than a real garden. |
Last January, he told the Times of London that "The concept of rewilding is enthusiastically promoted by people who don't have anything to rewild. In other words, it's other people's land that they want to rewild." The concept, he said, was unworkable for anyone but independently wealthy estate owners who do not need to farm their land. |
L'Affaire Chelsea mirrors broader divides in British politics and society. The national identity has traditionally been centered around the countryside. (See, e.g., the hymn "Jerusalem," an unofficial national anthem of England that refers to the country as a "green and pleasant land.") But the main engines of economic growth for centuries have been urban, as the mills and shipyards of the industrial revolution gave way to the financial industry and high-tech service sector. |
The rewilding movement, with its focus on the health of the land, biodiversity, and sustainability, would seem to fit into the "green and pleasant" identity. But in many ways it is an outgrowth of a more urban-centric society, in which the money to buy and rewild land, and the tourists who support it, can come from cities, making it possible for the countryside to be left to its own devices rather than put to work generating crops. |
That might seem like a lot to project onto a garden that doesn't even have any real beavers in it. But gardening has been a way to express political ideas and national identity since the 18th century, said Edwards, the garden writer and historian. |
The English gardening style, with its emphasis on naturalistic landscapes rather than formal, linear plantings, developed in part as a way to reject the political influence of France. Aristocrats' choice of statues for their gardens signaled their allegiance to enlightenment ideals, civil liberties, and more. During the Victorian era, people created gardens that featured plants from far-flung corners of the British Empire, a reflection of the nation's global power. |
 | | Birmingham Botanical Gardens. The English gardening style emphasizes naturalistic landscapes rather than formal, linear plantings.Andy Haslam for The New York Times |
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And today, it reflects the growing economic and cultural power of corporations, as well as cities. The Chelsea Flower Show began as an event by and for gardeners, at a time when the pinnacle of garden culture could be found in the gardens of aristocrats' country manor houses. But in the 1980s, corporations hungry for branding opportunities realized that show gardens could be an attention-grabbing public spectacle. |
"In the 1980s, you start to get third-party sponsorship of gardens, and the show gardens start to become more theatrical," said Fiona Davison, the head of libraries and exhibitions for the Royal Horticultural Society. At the same time, she said, local governments began to use garden festivals as urban regeneration tools that could draw tourists, and with them investment dollars. |
Together, those two trends drove home the idea that a garden was supposed to do something more than simply be a garden, and at the same time created an expectation that garden events would happen on a scale that could only be supported via third-party sponsorships. |
Which brings us back to Superbloom, a £4 million horticultural spectacle whose primary sponsor is the luxury-goods company Burberry, along with other sponsors that include banks and an international law firm. It is a tourist attraction perched on the edge of London's financial district, optimized for Instagram moments. (Visitors who purchase the optional "smiler package" can have their visit documented by photographers stationed throughout the display.) |
The area is hardly in need of regeneration, but the project does show how dead-zone slivers of urban landscapes might be transformed into something beautiful and alive with pollinators as well as plants — a form of biodiversity that requires no estates or beavers to accomplish. And it is more accessible, in every sense of the term, than a wild Scottish country estate: reachable via public transport, viewable for free from a public platform, and equipped with ramps. |
So who cares whether or not it's a garden, or whether I smelled the flowers there? For centuries, the moat kept people out. Now it draws them in. |
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