‘Write about the best English gardens,’ says the email from the deputy editor, ‘or what makes a good garden?’ That’s a bit like saying, ‘write about the best paintings, or the best music.’ Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and we now behold so many varieties of English garden that it is hard to tell what Englishness is any longer. But it is probably safe to say that the trend is no longer lavender and roses and formal enclosures of yew and box, nor grassy parks with statues and studied references to high learning.
When Kent leaped the fence in the 18th century and saw all nature as a garden, the whole world clapped. Pevsner called it ‘by far the greatest contribution England has made to aesthetic theory’. But to-ing and fro-ing with nature has always been a feature of our gardens, so the reaction arrived with the Victorians, who put the wild behind the fence again.
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