A National Passion : Gardens: A Bloomin’ Joy for British

“God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. . . . “-- English philosopher-writer Francis Bacon, 1561-1626

Alan Titchmarsh is a media personality, so it’s hardly surprising that he receives up to 200 letters a week.

It’s the contents that are unusual.

“Rotting leaves, slugs, dead plants, I’ve had them all,” noted Titchmarsh, a professional gardener who offers horticultural tips on a weekly national radio program and writes a column for a national newspaper.

One enthusiastic fan even sent him a tiny plastic bag stapled to a note that read: “Can you please identify these berries found in the belly of a pigeon shot this week near my home.”

No Question Too Trivial

For Britain’s formidable army of horticultural enthusiasts, no question is too trivial, no subject too esoteric.

“There’s an insatiable appetite for information,” noted Titchmarsh. “The degree of interest is tremendous.”

For the British, a people better known for their measured detachment than displays of enthusiasm, gardening borders on a national passion. It is the subject of prime time television and radio programs, for regular columns in national newspapers and a seemingly endless supply of books.

“Gardening is bred in the blood,” said Christopher Brickell, director general of the Royal Horticultural Society. “There’s a feeling for the land here that has become part of the culture, part of the national character.”

Enjoyed at All Levels

In a country still divided by class, gardening is a rare leisure activity avidly enjoyed at all levels of society, from the posh country homes of the affluent south to the northern coal mining communities.

“It’s familiar to the duchess or the dustman,” said Titchmarsh. “Today, it’s more of a leveler than ever.”

With more than 2,300 private gardens now open to public viewing--from spacious royal grounds to postage stamp-sized central London plots--simply visiting gardens has become a leading summertime spectator activity.

One central London listing in a 216-page catalogue of private gardens open to the public is described as “a narrow basement and porch.”

“It’s more popular than cricket, “ stated John Sales, chief gardens adviser for Britain’s National Trust, the custodian for more than 100 of the country’s large gardens.

The Chelsea Flower Show, held each spring for the past 75 years in central London, is both a premier event on the British social calendar and a showcase for one of the broadest ranges of flora displayed anywhere.

According to a 1983 survey of leisure time activities in Britain, 44% of the adult population engaged in some form of gardening, making it second only to visiting the countryside as an outdoor pursuit. Last year, Britons spent $1.8 billion to make their gardens grow.

The country’s most avid gardeners range from the Queen Mother, mother of Queen Elizabeth II; to her grandson, Prince Charles, who confessed on television that he talks to his plants; to novelist Jeffrey Archer, to playwright John Mortimer.

Some explain the British penchant for gardening as little more than an expression of a romantic British optimism. Others see it differently.

“There’s a certain amount of masochism in us,” said Sales. “We all like to go out and get cold, tired and dirty, then come in, have a bath and say how awful it’s been.”

For urban-dwelling Britons, gardening offers a much-valued change of pace, often from high-pressure jobs.

“Gardening is an outlet; it gives me a chance to be creative,” explained Michael Darby, an executive at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, who spends about four hours a week grooming his small, central London garden. “It offers me something I don’t get in other parts of my life.”

Gardens are often seen as a refuge from anything unwelcome in the world at large, a place where people, like Prince Charles, can indulge their eccentricities. In Mortimer’s play, “A Voyage Around My Father,” for example, the playwright’s almost blind and eccentric father sets elaborate earwig traps to protect his garden and retreats among the dahlias and rhododendrons at the first sign of guests.

Whatever the reasons, Britons--more often than not armored in sweaters, rain-resistant jackets and waterproof boots--have defied their notoriously unfriendly weather to collectively transform an island poor in natural flora into what is widely acknowledged as the garden of Europe.

“The French, Germans and Dutch look to us as leaders in home gardening,” noted Fred Whitsey, the veteran gardening correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. “It’s in our history and in our nature. We haven’t lived in flats in town as people on the Continent have.”

The British interest in gardening is nowhere more visible than at the 250-acre Royal Horticultural Society garden here at Wisley, 25 miles southwest of London, where three-quarters of a million visitors last year admired the displays and gathered advice.

“We’re a garden for gardeners,” noted Barry M. C. Ambrose, who heads Wisley’s commercial activities.

On one recent Saturday, Ambrose dispensed a steady stream of advice to visitors, many of whom carried bits and pieces of plants.

A young woman carrying shriveled leaves from a garden shrub was told that the plant was being poisoned by its compost, while a Dutch visitor wanted seeds to take home.

“At home I can get two varieties of a plant, here I can choose from 20,” the Dutchman said, explaining his pilgrimage.

Wisley also runs a two-year practical training course for gardeners, and many graduates have gone on to shape showcase gardens throughout the English-speaking world. Those trained here, for example, have presided over the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, the Strybing Arboretum in San Francisco and the botanic gardens in Adelaide, Australia.

Brickell noted that the Melbourne Botanical Garden and the Asiatic Garden in Vancouver, Canada, both reflect strong British influence.

“The majority of key posts in the world of horticulture are held by British citizens,” said Ambrose.

The English influence, according to Ambrose, reflects a tendency to work more with nature than against it.

“In the U.S., gardens tend to be very tailored and there is no doubt man has the upper hand,” he said. “Our gardens are managed, but you can’t tell it. The idea is not to stop spontaneity, just to shape it.”

Britain is hardly an obvious candidate as a gardening nation.

Only 2,000 varieties of natural flora are native to Britain, a figure roughly a quarter that of Greece and roughly half that of California, according to Brickell.

The climate is so bad that some experts advise designing a garden for viewing from inside the house--where viewers can always stay dry.

“In this country, you spend a lot of time looking at a garden through your windows,” noted the Telegraph’s Whitsey. “If you scheme it that way, you can enjoy it much more.”

Although Britain’s wet weather tends to be unpleasant for people, the absence of temperature extremes makes it friendly for a broad variety of flora, including many subtropical plants.

While the Romans first imported many of the fruits, nuts and vegetables that today grow here, it was the rich harvest from countless expeditions of the 18th and 19th centuries that provided the main elements of today’s British gardens.

“Explorers, traders, even pirates brought back plants from their travels,” noted Brickell.

Rhododendrons, camellias, azaleas and roses were brought back from China and Japan, lilies from Malaya, orchids from Borneo and Java and the magnolia from North America.

Wealthy families, the large botanic gardens and the Royal Horticultural Society all mounted plant expeditions, bringing thousands of new plant species for cultivation in Britain.

Between 1800 and 1850, more than 1,000 new, rare species of orchids alone were brought into Britain, supplementing the 15 varieties that previously existed here.

The expeditions weren’t for the fainthearted.

George Forrest, dispatched to China by the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens in the early years of this century to search for rare plants, was forced to hide in a lake and breathe through a bamboo shoot to evade enraged Tibetan monks who wanted to kill him.

Another botanical explorer named David Nelson survived Capt. James Cook’s disastrous third voyage around the world in the 1770s, only to die on the Indonesian island of Timor a few years later after being cut adrift with the infamous Capt. William Bligh by the mutineers of the Bounty. Bligh’s mission on the ill-fated trip was also horticultural--to collect breadfruit from the Society Islands in the Pacific and transport them to the West Indies.

Other trips were less harrowing. British plant explorer David Douglas returned from California in the 1840s with an evergreen that still carries his name, the Douglas fir.

100,000 Varieties

Today, horticultural experts estimate that these imports have helped boost the variety of plants from the 2,000 native to Britain to more than 100,000, making the country one of the richest sources of flora anywhere.

Continued plant breeding has stretched the imagination for names of new flowers. One recently developed rose carries the name of a former television anchorwoman, while another was dubbed “Rose Financial Times,” after the salmon-colored paper used by the British business daily.

Fruit and vegetable gardens, once grown out of economic necessity, are tended more now out of personal satisfaction, but the clubs of gooseberry and leek growers still thrive in northern counties, as does the competition to cultivate the biggest and best of their kind.

In the years since World War II, expanded leisure time, the additional interest stimulated by the media, plus the greater number of private gardens opening to the public, have combined to fuel the country’s passion for gardening.

‘The Sweet Disease’

Occasionally, this enthusiasm goes too far, with some succumbing to what is delicately labeled “the sweet disease”--filching cuttings from another’s garden.

Last November, Christopher Lloyd, the gardening correspondent of the up-market monthly Country Life, confessed to the affliction.

“Let me say before others say it for me, that this was disgraceful behavior,” he wrote, before stressing, “I’ve taken nothing without permission these 30 years, I promise.”