I thought it wouldn’t happen. I thought that because the natural world is free, and because gardening is principally about doing, rather than getting and spending, that gardeners would be hard to beguile. But I was wrong. Like the rest of the population, they have taken up shopping as a hobby.
I thought it wouldn’t happen. I thought that because the natural world is free, and because gardening is principally about doing, rather than getting and spending, that gardeners would be hard to beguile. But I was wrong. Like the rest of the population, they have taken up shopping as a hobby.
There was a time, definitely in living memory, when no one spent much money on their gardens. All but the wealthiest and most ostentatious grew their ephemeral flowers and vegetables from seed; swapped cuttings, bulbs and perennial divisions with their neighbours, so that the same gladioli and Michaelmas daisies flowered in every garden in a street; and ordered trees and shrubs, which were delivered only in the dormant season, from nurseries which they knew only from catalogues. They derived their information from books, which they did not buy but borrowed from their friends.
The change began in the 1960s when, thanks to the discovery that you could put plants into containers (originally, used jam tins) in peat-based composts and sell them all year round, nurseries morphed into garden centres. These swiftly became retail outlets for the casual browsing shopper as well as the committed gardener. Anyone who reads the trade press will know that the emphasis is as much on how to make profits out of items to do with leisure — barbecues, sunloungers, pet treats, children’s toys, Christmas decorations — as on plants and horticultural sundries.
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