How common is your garden?

As spring (finally) arrives, it’s time to turn our attention back to what’s outside the back door. Helpfully, garden designer Isabel Bannerman (Highgrove, Houghton Hall, Arundel Castle) has written a memoir, Husbandry, in which she declares there is no such thing as ‘U and non-U’ in gardening.

She then undermines her argument by immediately setting out her shibboleths: variegated leaves, curvy paths, statues, fountains, tidiness. Anything, in effect, that is ‘suburban’ (bedding plants) or reminiscent of municipal planting schemes (ibid. those big, blowsy King Alfred daffodils you’ll see blaring from roundabouts at this time of year). 

Naturally, as a keen gardener, I rolled my eyes, then dashed outside to check I’d removed every last Euonymus with their verboten variegated leaves planted by the previous owners of the house we moved into after the lockdowns. I stopped short, however, of Bannerman’s husband Julian (‘Mr B’), who methodically dug up every last King Alfred daffodil in the garden of their new house, Ashington Manor Farm in Somerset.