Simon Busch: Sex in the Shrubbery
Gardening is such a dangerous riot of birth, decay and death, no wonder conservatives have stolen it writes Simon Busch.
I had hoped for a revolution. Might the guerrillas of gardening launch a lightning strike this year on the neat pavilions of the Chelsea Flower Show, might horticultural hegemony finally be overthrown? They did not; it was not.
Yes, there was a timid step away from hedgerows and prize roses in the form of the "chic gardens" and the "city gardens", but this was no transgression. It was instead a display of late capitalism's might manifested in our very backyards. Just as the forces of reaction can assimilate seemingly any radical threat to their supremacy and turn it, Che-like, into a T-shirt, so the Chelsea Flower Show can take modernity and clip it.
What Chelsea tried to sweep beneath the shrubbery is that gardening is about nothing if not sex and death. But, in our culture, it has been denuded, denatured, deracinated; robbed of its very essence. Take the average suburban garden, the garden-variety garden, of which Chelsea was a kind of fantastic mutation.
There is, on the one (clean, well-manicured) hand, the bourgeois garden: the plot to keep up with the Joneses. It forms the facade of houses in the suburbs of the actual or aspirant well-to-do. The bourgeois garden shows no affinity with plant-life, but is pure property. Coincidentally enough, it has reached its logical conclusion around the corner from me. At the front of my neighbour's house is a lawn that is always bright green, and of perfect, even length, because it is made out of plastic. But, even if its plants are alive, the bourgeois garden is dead.
On the other (doughty, roughened) hand, there is the Protestant garden. This is the product of the toil of the "keen gardener" and symbolises the fruit of virtuous hard work. Never suppose that these gardeners would use their weekends for slothful lying in bed, indulging, perhaps, in voluptuous grafting with their partners. No, Protestant gardeners are up at the crack of dawn, digging. (Although they would, no doubt, protest, organic gardeners are the latest variety of the Protestant strain, albeit disguised in home-made hemp jeans.)
Both the bourgeois and Protestant gardens lie, and most gardening literature is propaganda to their cause. The historical fact that gardening has been appropriated by conservatism shows us how dangerous it really is: it had to be stolen. The proper gardener is no conservative; neither is she a socialist, sowing the common harvest. She is an anarchist, and a libertine.
There is an odd, subversive book called The Decadent Gardener by Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray. The introduction describes the decadent gardening ethos thus: "In the garden, the decadent seeks to create a moment of beauty, which should then be allowed to fall into decay and ruin."
"Gardening", Lucan and Gray believe, is "little more than systematic violence in pursuit of beauty", and the gardener is first and foremost a sadist. These two, the Kropotkin and De Sade of horticulture, understand that "nowhere are sex and death more intimately bound together than in the garden".
For them, the garden is a place of "agony, self-doubt and betrayal". They remind us that, if we are to believe the Bible - not that they would be inclined to - the first murder was carried out by a gardener. And the first garden was a place where sin beckoned wherever you turned. Their book abounds with piercing, pricking truths. The flower, they remind us, for example, is nothing but a sexual organ.
The Decadent Garden consists of the plans for a series of thematic gardens that Lucan and Gray had conceived for a wealthy patroness. Each garden would symbolise an aspect of nature as they saw it. The Cruel Garden would consist largely of impenetrable thickets of thorns. The Fatal Garden would contain only representatives of the vegetable world's many poisonous denizens: among them, black bryony, dropwort and, of course, deadly nightshade.
In the Narcotic Garden, by the side of the opium poppy and cannabis sativa, would grow more obscure mind-altering plants such as mandrake, henbane and thornapple. The Priapic Garden would be populated by those species whose flowers and foliage assumed the most suggestive phallic and vulvic shapes. Their Torture Garden carried the libertine ideas of Lucan and Gray furthest and is perhaps best left to the reader's imagination.
Because Lucan and Gray barely realised their designs (they were too decadent to bother), their gardens flourish mainly in the mind. My own such fantasy garden would be planted to grow as the antithesis of the Protestant and bourgeois gardens. It would be a place of terrible beauty, an anti-garden.
Unlike the clipped compliance of the conservative garden - which symbolises, paradoxically, the exact opposite of nature's riot of sex, birth, decay and death - my garden would reek of healthful feculence and rot. It would be so lush and fertile that it would soon, vengefully, colonise my house. If you listen carefully, you will hear the roots penetrating the soft, moist soil, and a drawn-out scream as a creeper finally strangles a sapling.
• Simon Busch is currently engaged in constructing a litter-and-abandoned-car garden near his home in east London
Yes, there was a timid step away from hedgerows and prize roses in the form of the "chic gardens" and the "city gardens", but this was no transgression. It was instead a display of late capitalism's might manifested in our very backyards. Just as the forces of reaction can assimilate seemingly any radical threat to their supremacy and turn it, Che-like, into a T-shirt, so the Chelsea Flower Show can take modernity and clip it.
What Chelsea tried to sweep beneath the shrubbery is that gardening is about nothing if not sex and death. But, in our culture, it has been denuded, denatured, deracinated; robbed of its very essence. Take the average suburban garden, the garden-variety garden, of which Chelsea was a kind of fantastic mutation.
There is, on the one (clean, well-manicured) hand, the bourgeois garden: the plot to keep up with the Joneses. It forms the facade of houses in the suburbs of the actual or aspirant well-to-do. The bourgeois garden shows no affinity with plant-life, but is pure property. Coincidentally enough, it has reached its logical conclusion around the corner from me. At the front of my neighbour's house is a lawn that is always bright green, and of perfect, even length, because it is made out of plastic. But, even if its plants are alive, the bourgeois garden is dead.
On the other (doughty, roughened) hand, there is the Protestant garden. This is the product of the toil of the "keen gardener" and symbolises the fruit of virtuous hard work. Never suppose that these gardeners would use their weekends for slothful lying in bed, indulging, perhaps, in voluptuous grafting with their partners. No, Protestant gardeners are up at the crack of dawn, digging. (Although they would, no doubt, protest, organic gardeners are the latest variety of the Protestant strain, albeit disguised in home-made hemp jeans.)
Both the bourgeois and Protestant gardens lie, and most gardening literature is propaganda to their cause. The historical fact that gardening has been appropriated by conservatism shows us how dangerous it really is: it had to be stolen. The proper gardener is no conservative; neither is she a socialist, sowing the common harvest. She is an anarchist, and a libertine.
There is an odd, subversive book called The Decadent Gardener by Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray. The introduction describes the decadent gardening ethos thus: "In the garden, the decadent seeks to create a moment of beauty, which should then be allowed to fall into decay and ruin."
"Gardening", Lucan and Gray believe, is "little more than systematic violence in pursuit of beauty", and the gardener is first and foremost a sadist. These two, the Kropotkin and De Sade of horticulture, understand that "nowhere are sex and death more intimately bound together than in the garden".
For them, the garden is a place of "agony, self-doubt and betrayal". They remind us that, if we are to believe the Bible - not that they would be inclined to - the first murder was carried out by a gardener. And the first garden was a place where sin beckoned wherever you turned. Their book abounds with piercing, pricking truths. The flower, they remind us, for example, is nothing but a sexual organ.
The Decadent Garden consists of the plans for a series of thematic gardens that Lucan and Gray had conceived for a wealthy patroness. Each garden would symbolise an aspect of nature as they saw it. The Cruel Garden would consist largely of impenetrable thickets of thorns. The Fatal Garden would contain only representatives of the vegetable world's many poisonous denizens: among them, black bryony, dropwort and, of course, deadly nightshade.
In the Narcotic Garden, by the side of the opium poppy and cannabis sativa, would grow more obscure mind-altering plants such as mandrake, henbane and thornapple. The Priapic Garden would be populated by those species whose flowers and foliage assumed the most suggestive phallic and vulvic shapes. Their Torture Garden carried the libertine ideas of Lucan and Gray furthest and is perhaps best left to the reader's imagination.
Because Lucan and Gray barely realised their designs (they were too decadent to bother), their gardens flourish mainly in the mind. My own such fantasy garden would be planted to grow as the antithesis of the Protestant and bourgeois gardens. It would be a place of terrible beauty, an anti-garden.
Unlike the clipped compliance of the conservative garden - which symbolises, paradoxically, the exact opposite of nature's riot of sex, birth, decay and death - my garden would reek of healthful feculence and rot. It would be so lush and fertile that it would soon, vengefully, colonise my house. If you listen carefully, you will hear the roots penetrating the soft, moist soil, and a drawn-out scream as a creeper finally strangles a sapling.
• Simon Busch is currently engaged in constructing a litter-and-abandoned-car garden near his home in east London
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