ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Gardening

Episode Date: August 31, 2025

Are gardens a sanctuary or an enclosure? The ACFM gang sketch out a weird-left history of gardening, from the walled gardens of paradise to the tarmacked lawns of suburban Britain. Find the books, music and Dunmore Pineapple mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

This is Acid Man. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the Weird Left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined as usual by my friends Kea Milburn. Hello. And Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today on this special microdose, we are talking about gardens and gardening. So, why are we talking about this now?

Kiyah, you had something you wanted to talk about. You had this topic suggested to you by a friend, and then we did a sort of, we've done an episode on growth, and we focused on personal growth and economic growth. But gardening just seems like a really interesting, interesting sort of topic. to get into, and like when I've been doing some reading around it, I read this book by Olivia Lank called The Garden Against Time, and I had these statistics about lockdown. She starts the book, you know, talking about lockdown, the COVID lockdown.

And apparently three million people in Britain started gardening for the first time in 2020, you know, at the beginning of lockdown. Over half of those are under 45. So it's like it's almost like a new wave of people getting into gardening. In the US, it's mirrored as well. 18.3 million people started gardening during the pandemic in the United States, apparently. And there's like, if you think about that, there's lots there actually about, you know, so there's working from home, you know, people were furloughed, etc., which gives you this question,

well, is gardening what we do if we didn't have to work? You know, if we remove the realm of necessity, is gardening part of what we do? That seems to be the indication from lockdown. But of course, we were stuck in our homes then, so that might distort it. you know and lockdown also was a time when these big inequalities were revealed particularly around what your home looked like and whether your home had a garden you know lockdown would be very different if you're pottering around your garden than if you were stuck in a tower block and of course the particular times during lockdown

you either couldn't go out to the park or to the countryside or you could only go to the park and keep walking was one of the rules wasn't it and it was like really officiously zealously policed that so that gives you another sort of wave to that inequity, if you like. And then the other thing that goes on during lockdown is that we have the 2020 wave for the Black Lives Movement, BLM, the movement for Black Lives.

And in the UK, remember that wave, the 2020 wave included the toppling of the Statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, a notorious slave trader, for instance. And like, people's eyes got cast onto all sorts of things, in particular English country houses and their huge gardens, etc. people started to think a little bit about where did the money come for that?

Where did the money come for these? It came from slavery and colonialism, etc. And so that link between English country houses our idea of what a garden is, being informed by these displays of wealth, but gardens also being something which hides stuff, hides the conditions of its own possibility. All of that is something I want to talk about. I don't know if we mentioned on the show,

we definitely mentioned to each other, all three of us took apart in the guerrilla, Gardening action in Parliament Square, what, 25 years ago, even though I don't think any of us knew each other then, so we were all there doing guerrilla gardening. There's a literature on kind of radical gardening. A few years after that, George Mackay published a book called Radical Gardening, looking at that history. So it's interesting to think about, because it's obviously, it's also quite a vexed idea, I think, the contemporary garden for me, because I really like having one, but I also sort of wonder if maybe they're not, like, entirely good things for

various reasons. But we can get into all that. So there's a lot to talk about. Yeah, definitely. I think for me, all of that is amazing. Both Keir and I both went to an exhibition at the British Museum in London on gardening, which had loads of interesting bits on social history. The bit that really jumped out for me was on the relationship between Empire and Pine apples, which we'll talk about in a bit, which fascinated me. I've done a bit of research on that. But also on a personal level, I consider myself a grower. That's an identity that I, something I see myself as. I see it as part of my identity when I talk about a bit, but the difference between maybe gardening and growing a little bit later, but just generally

kind of the involvement of plants and growing flowers and fruits and vegetables is a kind of a big part of my psyche and an activity that I do that helps me relate to another form of existence, kind of for me, at least, outside capitalism, just a relationship to the soil. And that happens in a practical way by gardening slash growing in my everyday life in, you know, the 21st century. So those are all interesting things to talk about. So before we get into the meat of the subject, we should mention that. You can go. even weirder and leftier by subscribing to our newsletter, which we send out after every new trip, so kind of about once a month, with bonus content and updates from all of the ACFM crew.

To sign up to that, go to Novara.commedia forward slash ACFM newsletter. And for more music and less of the chat, do follow the ever-expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify. Just search for ACFM. Also, it really helps us if you give us a five-star review on whatever platform you listen on. It really helps the algorithm and would be very, very happy if you could do that for us. And finally, to support us to keep bringing you even more from the ACFM Cosmos, please do support our hosts, Navarra Media, for as little as one pound a month by going to navara.media forward slash support. And with that in the bag, where do we want to start talking about gardening and growing?

Maybe a bit of social history, and maybe that will help us understand what is a garden in the first place? Yeah, if we're going to do the social history of gardening, we should start at the very beginning of history, which is, of course, the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve. I think that's 5,000 years ago, something like that, I'm not sure sure. And that's not very long, history's not going to be a very short show. No, I wanted to talk a little bit about that, the Garden of Eden. It's a walled garden, in fact, the Garden of Eden, isn't it? But it's sort of interesting, like, well, the origin myth of Christianity

is a sort of prelapsarian garden? It's not just Christianity, is it? It's the whole Abrahamic shabang. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's this idea of paradise as a walled garden, basically. And in fact, the word paradise traces back to ancient Persian language, which is paradise is the word for a walled garden. garden. And then that gets translated into ancient Greek. And in ancient Greek, the ancient Greek word for paradise is used in the Old Testament to refer to both the Garden of Eden and Heaven. It's

sort of interesting. I got a list from Olivia Lang's book as well. It's really interesting in that like we didn't have an image of heaven and then applied that word to gardens. It was, you know, we had the gardens first and that supplied our image and the name for heaven and paradise. basically. That's a sort of interesting way around, I think. And then the modern English word for garden, which is garden, and also the word yard, they both go back to this ancient English word geared, which means fence or enclosure. If you want to get into like what is a garden, like there's something there, isn't there about like, if there is something about enclosing, enclosing land, it sets up a dynamic, I think we'd probably talk about all the way through

between like the private and the public because it like gardens are this idea being closed land and you know it's ours but of course for great for great peers of history gardens were or gardens more than just vegetable gardens they were just the property of the of the wealthy basically and they were for display you know perhaps not quite public display to make that private public sort of dynamic but display to display your wealth to your peers definitely so there's there's something about private enclosure and then public that runs through the history of gardens, I think. Yeah, that's really interesting, yeah. I think the garden has an idealised space. It's not even confined to that Abrahamic tradition. There's a Chinese proverb, isn't there? If you would

be happy, plant a garden, you can think about the importance of the garden. In Zen, in the Zen traditions, gardening is like an important practice. It's a kind of meditative practice in itself. So it's really, it is really quite widespread. The sort of idea of the garden as an idealised space, I would say. It's an idealised space from which all kinds of social turmoil can be excluded and in which you have a sort of a kind of idealised experience of the natural world, the organic world, which is dependent on really heavy levels of intervention and cultivation. But it is sort of intent, the idea I guess, of a garden is part of the,

you take the things that people like about the natural world and then you do what's necessary to intensify them and then exclude the kind of dangerous or aesthetically unpleasant elements or just the elements that make you get less fruit or something. And then so there's this kind of very complicated relationship between ideas of the natural, ideas of nature and wilderness and ideas of cultivation

that's all built into this idea of the garden. I mean, of course, I mean, horticulture. doesn't only come about when you have ideas for enclosed land, does it? I mean, my understanding is that before agriculture, hunter-gathering people, engaged in practices which are referred to as horticultural, they encourage certain crops to grow in certain places, and that's basically where that's where agriculture comes from,

but it's usually classified as horticulture rather than agriculture. I don't even know what the formal differentiation between those terms is, I guess agriculture means growing, I mean, usually means growing, it actually implies growing cereal crops on a sort of mass scale, doesn't it usually? Whereas hunter-gatherer people before mass agriculture definitely did engage in various kinds of intervention, just like sowing seeds in particular places or trying to intervene in particular in natural environments to increase the crop of things like berries and nuts and what have you. horticulture sort of predate agriculture.

So the end of line question of that is when did gardening or horticulture start? And that distinction between agriculture and horticulture is probably useful in that because, you know, agriculture seems to have started 12,000 years ago. And so the story, I believe for a long time was that agriculture emerged like in different parts of the world, very similar times, basically, you know, 10 to 11,000 years ago in places which couldn't have influenced each other. So, you know, in Central America, in China, in the Middle East, etc. And so there must be, the idea is that there were climatic changes.

12,000 years ago, we moved into the Holocene, the end of the last big ice age, and that must have promoted agriculture before that. And so the distinction with that, the agriculture bit is that we have settled communities, basically. And before that, you'd have horticulture, you'd have hunter-gather, societies and they would travel around a territory quite often and yes as you were saying jem they would try to facilitate the growth of particular of particular plants etc try to not quite cultivate them but create the conditions for them to grow etc because they would be moving on etc and i suppose with agriculture you all of a sudden you have settlement and you have surplus and therefore you

start to have things such as private property, basically, and the need to defend private property, and therefore some idea of enclosure would develop sort of almost naturally from that. Yeah. Territory, Division of Labor, hierarchy. Yeah, all that bad stuff. But also, I guess one thing this is pointing to as well, though, is that horticulture is a sort of ambivalent concept because it can imply growing things in a garden for mainly aesthetic reasons, or it can imply just growing things on a different scale to agriculture, but for the same purpose, like to produce food. So, I mean, there isn't a real, there isn't a very clear distinction between a kitchen garden and an allotment in English. You know, a kitchen garden just means like a garden you mainly

grow vegetables and fruit to eat. But then from very early on, obviously, there's an idea of the garden as a sort of, primarily a sort of aesthetic space. I mean, that's already there to some extent in that notion of paradise, although maybe, I mean, maybe it's just both, maybe it's aesthetic and it's productive. There were gardens understood as primarily aesthetic spaces even in the ancient world, weren't there? Because there's the hanging gardens of Babylon. We're supposed to have been one of the ancient wonders of the world, and that was described as an entirely aesthetic thing. It was supposed to be really impressive that you could see all these plants and flowers growing. There's a sort of indeterminacy, if you like, in between the, the, the,

the aesthetic function and the, you know, the food-producing function of the garden from very early on in the whole concept. That might be one way into, like, thinking about gardens in there and linking it to, you know, agriculture and protection of surplus, because if you're cultivating plants, you know, not for necessity, but for aesthetic reasons, and that implies you have some sort of surplus of time and energy, doesn't it, beyond mere survival? And then if you think about the history of gardening, like in the UK, for a long time, you know, gardening, you know, gardening as an aesthetic practice was the reserve of the wealthy, those who did have surplus time, energy and resources, basically. It gradually moves in the sort of like late 19th and into the

20th century into being something which is accessible by ordinary people. I mean, if you look at most sort of published histories of gardening, like in the modern world, in modern history, they'll talk about the way in which just kind of emerging ruling class in places like Britain, really from the 18th century onwards, engages in a set of practices which develop into something like modern landscape gardening. And I think, I mean, it's interesting to think about exactly what's going on there. You've basically, you've got this ruling class emerging in Britain in the 18th century, who are basically colonial mercantile capitalists, but a lot of them are also inheriting land and aristocratic titles from their ancestors, and a lot of them, if they

haven't inherited those things, they are buying them. But what is not happening is what happens saying 15th century Italy, where this kind of class of merchant princes just becomes a sort feudal aristocracy and stops doing like merchant print stuff eventually. Instead, what's happening is capitalism is in the process of becoming the dominant mode of production. So even once you've made your pile and bought your country estate, you're still like investing in, especially in colonials of commercial trade. And This is all very well established, really, before the Industrial Revolution really gathers momentum. And so this emerging sort of ruling class, who are really a sort of fusion of a traditional aristocracy

and an emerging sort of mercantile capitalist class, they have this very specific set of attitudes and priorities. And so they want to do stuff that is like a bit, like, makes them feel like their traditional aristocrats with like great landed estates, but is also very modern, because, of course, actually your traditional aristocrat with a big land of the state. They spent most of their time fighting other aristocrats dressed in armour and didn't and lived in a really draughty, horrible like castle and didn't have that good a time by the standards of an 18th century gentleman. And they also want to do stuff that's very sort of modern

that signifies to themselves and the rest of the world, their status is very contemporary and forward-looking and doing something new. And so the invention of these kind of big country estate gardens as a very distinctive type of landscape basically as a way of expressing all that at the same time. So I was expressing their status as like landholders, like nobles, but also as modern people who sort of intervene in the natural world.

And there was these really distinctive ways in which gardening fashion are the great country homes in Britain. in like the 18th into the 19th century it tracks other aesthetic trends in architecture and even sort of literature doesn't it? You go from, there's this kind of emulation of a sort of imagined classical style of

lots of like square lawns and avenues of trees and then in the... A folly, and a folly in the end of it, yeah. Yeah, and then there's the late 18th, 30, 19th century there's the fashion for the picturesque, which is influenced by romanticism and people try to create these like completely fake sort of

waterfalls and, you know, grottos and kind of slightly mountain-looking scenes and stuff. So all that is bound up really with the way in which this ruling class is kind of imagining itself and trying to construct a world for itself, isn't it? Yeah, there's a sort of interesting thing going on with nature and trying to naturalise social relations. I think you might even make that sort of claim. Because the thing that precedes the 18th century is these sort of Italian Renaissance gardens in which, you know, you'd have statues and seeds. from ancient mythology.

You still see quite a bit of that, don't you, and that sort of stuff. And then you have these very formal gardens. And then English landscape gardening which comes in with people like Capability Brown. I was in Derbyshire in April, and went for a walk around Chatsworth House, which is one of the first sort of big houses

and gardens that Capability Brown does. And you're right, Jim, yeah. They're not trying to replicate nature. They're trying to replicate this sort of idealizing, image of nature that they find in Italian painting, basically. And it's like, so they want a view from a particular point, usually from the house somewhere, which will mirror this picture, you know, and so they design these gardens of like a foreground, a middle ground and a background, etc.

Capability Brown in particular was like, he brought in this idea that you would do huge, huge engineering works, you know, move lakes, build lakes, you know, sweep away villages, etc. remodel this landscape with big sweeping lawns, etc. He introduces a fashion for lawns and that sort of thing. So you're trying to remodel a landscape, not so it fits in with nature, but so that it fits in with your idealised image of nature, basically, and gives a very picturesque sort of view. And then there are waves based, so after that you get people like Humphrey Repton.

They try to make the landscape gardens a little bit more sympathetic to the surrounding nature, to the nature that surrounds it, basically, brings back sort of like separate flower gardens, these sorts of things, you know, trying to harmonise the landscape with their surroundings, that sort of thing. There's something going on with that. Like, it brings us back to this idea of, like, trying to create an image of something which is permanent or eternal and stable, you know, this landscape's being here for ages, etc. And like, it hides something basically, you know, quite often so in chats with house, you know, a village was there, it was moved off, the people were checked off, basically.

And so what goes along with particularly the second half of this high age of landscape gardening is the enclosures, you know, the enclosures of common land and the expulsion of people off the land, really at the high points of that are between 1750 and like 1850, 1860, something like that. And that plays a role in creating the new land that can be incorporating. into the English country gardens, do you know what I mean? And the other thing, of course, the ever hidden condition of these gardens are where this money's coming from, and that money is coming from slavery and then colonialism,

or slavery and colonialism, basically, the huge wealth that's flowing in. So there's definitely that drive to sort of hide the conditions from which this money, this money and wealth, it comes dripping in blood, you know, flame and blood, as Marks puts it. Yes, yes. I mean, for several reasons, there's several reasons, aren't there?

Because on the one hand, like historically, if you go back to the Middle Ages, you know, the landed aristocracy, he really made their, you know, they got their wealth and resources through military conquests against each other, basically. And that was considered more honourable than noble. Or, you know, fucking the king or something like that. You get your title for that. But to be a merchant, to make your money from trade, was going to. considered less sort of noble than having your money from land. But then also that the fact that

the trade that people are actually engaged in is the slave trade is something people don't really want to have to talk about too much by the late 18th century. There is a growing sense, especially amongst the kind of literate middle class who don't own slaves. There's a lot of irritation that the people above them in the social hierarchy and making their money from the most hideous barbarism in history. So there's all these reasons why people really, you really want to kind of cover up the fact that that's where all this stuff is coming from. But it is worth reflecting on, really, that everything we still think of today as defining the traditional English landscape is completely invented in the 18th century.

I'm the Scottish as well, actually. The English and Scottish landscapes totally created in the 18th century. Before the 18th century, it doesn't look anything lying at that. Like Southern English, agricultural villages mostly have these massive, like, open fields that were basically farmed collectively. they went fences, they went hedges. There was basically loads of mud most of the time, except when the crops had all grown.

The highlands, you know, had a lot more people in them. I could do, like, you know, farming and herding and like small numbers and all of these kind of British landscapes are basically completely reinvented, mostly in the 18th century. In order to just, you know, as, you know, well, they are reinvented by the process of most people who've lived on that land for the past thousands. years or so being chucked off it and the land being reordered to be used for growing like

arable crops or intensive herding in England and the lowlands of Scotland and then up in the highland it's being you know it's been used for going to be used for hunting and what that says to me all of that is you know maybe a term that might be useful here both in terms of like on the micro level the arrangement of you know land or crops etc but also kind of on a politically, I think it would be useful to talk about control and where control plays a really important role in these defining of landscapes. This is an attempt to control nature, right? And this is a way of playing out your power of saying, yes, I can clear a village and I can design this thing that looks, you know, by the fashions of the time, like, you know, really

beautiful and like this Italian painting or whatever, you are forcing some kind of control on that landscape, right? And as you just mentioned, Jeremy, like, with the enclosures and also the felling of all of the ancient woodlands that has occurred over the last, you know, 400 years in the UK, like the landscape looks very different. And then we see that playing out in terms of like the control of, you know, the English garden with the lawn, etc., which we're also going to talk about. So that's kind of like really interesting. to understand how that kind of power plays out in terms of control on the landscape. And also in this interesting discourse that had, I think, come up at around the 18th century,

it might be wrong, it might be later the 19th century, in this kind of debate between architecture and gardening. And there were these architects that were basically saying, oh, no, you know, like gardening is about nature. So it's not as good, you know, it's not a high art. It's not like in the same way that there were these arguments happening in the art world about, you know, like, structure and form is, you know, like good and masculine, but, like, colour is, you know, very feminine and, like, proper art is really about form and structure. And there was a similar debate going on between, you know, architecture and, and, you know, gardening. Gardening is, you know, it's not real. It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't exude power and control and

masculinity and then come along, you know, these big garden designs that we're talking about, which are completely about control and wealth and power. and that fulfills that kind of function, which we now see through the analysis of, you know, that we would analyze the lens of, you know, colonialism and empire, and it makes complete sense to kind of see it through that lens when we're, when we're analyzing it at this point in time. Can I just indulge myself, close listeners of this podcast will, might realize that I have a particular hatred for Lord Harewood of Harewood House just outside Leeds, a big stately home and garden, you know, and I dislike the guy because he's involved of Leeds United. I don't think you

should be. And like, you know, you look into it, little Google, and yeah, their money is, comes from sugar, basically. You know, and that wasn't growing sugar beats in, in Kent. That was slaves growing sugar in West Indies and then in the US. Well, they didn't grow sugar in the US, but they had slave plantations in the US as well. But that, that basic critical move that we were doing now and was really brought to the fore in the 2020 wave of the of the Black Lives Movement, the Movement for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter movement, people had a real visceral response to that. They really hated that. And, you know, there was that right-wing campaign to try and take over the National Trust, if you remember that, a couple of years ago, which got

defeated. And they wanted to take over the National Trust because they thought the National Trust was giving too much to this critical move of saying, well, where did this money come from then? you know what I mean? It was that in some ways it's because I think we think of gardens as like these domestic spaces perhaps outside politics right is one way we might think outside the how did you put the turbulence of the outside world or something like that but it's also because you know that the operation of creating these land state gardens which look like look like nature they or inform our conception of what nature looks like you know it is that undoing of things which you think are natural you know rather than undoing things we think are natural it is politicized

things which is just natural and eternal. Yeah, so I just think it's interesting, basically. It has such a visceral response, that attempt to do some critical analysis, you know, and awokeism, as I think is also known. My idea of what nature looks like or what the English landscape looks like, we've already done that move of saying, you know, we think it's eternal, but actually it's got social, political, historical conditions which created that and those conditions have got really quite horrific aspects to them but we can continue doing that and think about like the plants that are brought to the UK because in that exhibition that Nadia talked about there's quite a bit about the link between

the collection of new plants and then the colonial project and slavery in particular and so there's this guy Henry Sloan who's a famous plant collector who used slave ships to you know You know, he negotiated for slave ships to send plants back across the Atlantic to introduce into the UK garden, et cetera. And then there's that dynamic of, you know, in fact, you're relying on enslaved or colonized people to pass on their knowledge about those plants to tell you how to, how to tend to them, basically, how to, how those plants can be used. Yeah, yeah, let's talk about pineapples. So this, this was the factoid that blew my mind and I went away and did a lot of research on. So, Fran Bowman writes this book called The Pineapple King of Fruits, right? And I love this quote because it basically frames the role of pineapples in this colonial

story, which is that this idea that, and I quote, the pineapple was the Versailles of fruit costly, exclusive and deliberately ostentatious, okay? So the role of the pineapple tells us a lot of things because it basically becomes this imperial trophy fruit. Okay. So the origin is that I think pineapples are native to various bits of South America, I think like Brazil, Paraguay, and were first brought to Europe with the Spanish and the Portuguese colonial networks and around the 16th century. But very quickly they become a symbol of, of course, exotic luxury because they are incredibly rare in Europe, difficult to grow, and there's no way you can even get one.

if it wasn't for, you know, imperial trade connections, etc. But of course, overall, a pineapple can't be shipped across the Atlantic without it spoiling. So then in the UK there starts this project of trying to grow once. Like one of these status symbols are, can you grow a pineapple in your stately or, you know, mercantile wealth home? and it becomes this tangible demonstration of a landowner or, you know, a rich merchant's global reach, right? So they build these things called pineries, pineries or pineapple pits, which used, like, you put it, is built, I think, in a greenhouse and you need about 15 tons of fresh horse manure, like 15 tons as fuel in this pineapple pit. just to get the temperature up to be able to basically grow pineapples. So if you were able to grow a pineapple, you're then able to get your real capitalist head-on

and you can rent out your pineapple to other rich people. So then by the time it's the 18th and 19th century, the kind of like side hustle in town is can you rent out pineapples and you do this by renting it to, you know, another rich person in their dinner party and like wealthy hosts would put them at the centre of the table and they wouldn't actually eat them and they'd be passed around rented from one, you know, party, you know, dinner to the other until the actual actually rotted. But what's even more interesting is it doesn't stop at the actual pineapples. It becomes such a fascination that they start to appear in stone, in iron, in wood carvings

in some of these, you know, amazing gardens that we're talking about. apparently on gate posts to symbolise, like, this is a house that can afford the pineapple. And the most famous one, and we should definitely put a link to a picture of this, in the show notes, is the Dunmore pineapple in Scotland. So this is built in 1761 by the Earl of Dunmore, and it's the most famous building because it's crowned by this 50-foot-high stone pineapple, just like that is kind of like the symbol. So obviously, like, this is, the pineapple becomes this class signifier, and, you know, historical analysts have called it like, you know, it's not a fruit, it's a performance. It's a performance of class effectively. And then, of course, there's a connection with sugar and rum in terms of the kind of regions that they're grown in and a direct kind of relation to slavery after that. So then this, it becomes more and more of an architectural motif and becomes like, even more of a status symbol than some of the, you know, the other plants that Kia might have

mentioned, which are like, you know, orchids. So orchids, for example, as well, were, or at least there are orchids that are, quote, unquote, native. We'll get to that what's native and invasive in the UK. There are orchids that are native to the UK, but there were these, you know, exotic orchids that were brought, but, you know, it couldn't be passed around in the same way as a pineapple. So then it becomes this, like I said, class performance. piece, which I found absolutely fascinating. And like I said, you have to go check out the Dunmore, sorry, pineapple in Scotland. What is the Dunmore pineapple in Scotland?

There's a building and it's crowned by a 50-foot pineapple. Fifty-foot? My God. All right, that is worth travelling to Scotland for. I mean, if we're going to talk about other plants, which are sort of like signature plants, that we could sort of tell a social history about, I suppose, tulips is one of the other ones. isn't it, basically. Tulips, really famous for the tulips sort of mania or financial bubble around them, but like tulips originally a native to Central Asia. The word tulip comes from the Persian for Turban.

I'm not quite sure what that is, but like it's, you know, that idea of like that these tulips have been traveling presumably down the spice road. I don't know. I'm sure they do come around the spice room. I know they were being cultivated in Constantinople in the earth. Early Middle Ages, yeah, but they were coming from Iran, and then they get brought, the legend is at least, they get brought to Northern Europe in the 16th century,

late 16th century, isn't it? Yeah, well, like the tulip, Bulmania and Holland is like 1634 to 1636. They've been growing in popularity. Because I think actually we've talked a lot about the 18th century like country house landscape garden, but of course there were medieval walled gardens associated with castles and monasteries and if you had a big enough

kind of bourgeois house you might have a garden you might have a herb garden you might grow some plants and flowers so that kind of even what we would think of as a domestic garden it does sort of pre it does predates that 18th century landscape garden that we were talking about before

and by the really by like Shakespeare's time at the end of the 16th century there's enough people like from kind of aristocrats with these big wall gardens based on Italian and French designs, even to kind of middle-class people with smaller gardens, but they've still got gardens.

There's enough people around who have gardens that look like what we would think of gardens as looking like, that people want flowers, people want, like, attractive, colorful flowers. And people's minds are kind of blown by tulips, because they're the first major kind of flower variety, ornamental flower variety to be brought from outside Western Europe that it turns out to be quite easy to cultivate in Western Europe and looks really cool and people go like crazy for them people go crazy for them it's not dust in Holland actually it's like in France in particular

I think it's like I think it's mostly aristocrats but people go completely crazy for them and start playing right ridiculous prices for like the rarest tulips then that's where the kind of the tulip mania really develops in Holland. Just before we get into the tulip mania, just to clarify that it's between like the 10th and 14th centuries is that tulips are big, but they're big somewhere else. So like you said, Jeremy Persia, but also like parts of Asia and Turkey. And, you know, they show up in poetry and all of these things.

So people are still like amazed by them. In Persia, in the Ottoman Empire and in Persia, right, through to Constantinople. They are the equivalent of like a multi-million dollar industry, like already, by like the 13th century. It's important to stress that. Yeah, and then the Europeans catch wind of it. And then, Keir, do you want to tell us about tulip mania specifically?

The reason it's really famous, the whole tulip mania sort of boom, is because, you know, around that time in Dutch cities, you get the invention of financial sort of trading schemes, basically. So one of the things you can do in 1635 or something like that, there's a tulip futures trading scenes. You can buy futures options to buy tulips at a particular cost in a year's time or something like that, right? So you get like financial, the tools of financial speculation get developed,

is basically what I'm trying to say. And so the price of tulips, which spirals incredibly. So in 1637, like a single tulip bulb of a particular type of tulip would be sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled artisan, right? Which, so what would that be today? I don't know, but basically these are hundreds of thousands. Because it was assumed that the price of tulips could, would only ever increase. Yeah. And as far as I remember my history, they have.

No, no, it all blew up. It all blew up in 1636 or 7 or something like that, basically. Yeah, loads of people, loads of people, like, spent their savings on tulip investments. I'm not clear, actually, whether they were always just buying bulbs, or they were just buying, like, certificates we'd said that they would get some bulbs or that if the price of bulbs went up, they would get some money. Yeah, it was. It was like futures trading. It was like, yeah, quite often nobody saw the bulb, basically, which is.

also because there was this the flaming virus right okay which wasn't discussed it wasn't understood what this was until the 20th century which will eventually kill the the bulb so it's also that they're kind of like you're hedging on like there's a riskier there's like also to kind of like different risks that you're taking so what that was a virus that attacked tulips so it so it causes yeah so it causes the kind of flaming in the design of the um um of the of the way the flower looks, but eventually it kills it. Eventually it kills it. So what generation you're getting your bulbs is like, you know, unknown. So there's all of this risk risk factors like suddenly in the, in the acquiring of the bulbs. So yeah, the price, so after a couple of years of all this, the price of tulip bulbs and tulip futures collapsed and people lost fortunes in this speculative frenzy. It's a great story in it because it's got like financial speculation ignorance of nature, inability to properly price in natural dynamics. It speaks very much to 2025.

It comes back to this issue of control, though, for me. I mean, I don't think it's ignorance of nature. It's just completely like bypassing the idea that there are kind of like different natural processes, that there are variations in nature, in that the difference in temperature and weather that year is going to make it. And it was just this idea that this is something, this is a, commodity that can be controlled in the same way that, you know, maybe perhaps capitalists have learned, and that's why they moved on to the machines, that, you know, in the way that we're

talking about in the previous episode on growing, you know, that labor is a commodity that has all sorts of variations to it because, you know, people are complex in the same way like a tulip bulb is complex as well and is affected by all sorts of different things. But what the, what this sparks, like specifically the tulip cultivation and obsession going back. to the stately homes, you know, or like, you know, the rich merchants' homes in the UK in the 18th century, there becomes like this new trade, which is called florists. So florists didn't exist as a thing. And then by the 18th century, it's like these are people who are in charge of the decorative, aesthetic qualities to provide that service for rich people, effectively.

It also brings up this other dynamic which runs through the history of gardening, which is, you know, what is your attitude to nature? Are you attempting to control it and almost at war with it, basically? Or are you trying to work in harmony with it or, you know, work alongside it, you know, nurture it and that's that sort of thing. And that's one of the dynamics it flows back and forth throughout the history of gardening. And one of the ways you can get into that is to talk about the idea of the lawn, the quintessential British lawn, basically, the centrepiece for any garden. We can trace it back to Capability Brown, you know, that the birth, the English landscape garden, you know, these manicured lawns sweeping down to these artificial

lakes past these clumps of trees and all this sort of stuff, you know, you can see where the taste for lawns directly comes out of the landscape garden. That dynamic of, are we at war with nature or against it, you know, if you think about something like the 1940s or 50s and, you know, and the use of pesticides by gardeners in the UK, you know, pesticides drenched on your lawn, etc etc and i always remember like in the 1980s lawn mowers with this huge thing on tv advertising hover mowers versus non-hover mowers with like constantly on it's a lot less bother than a hove than a hover i remember all of these little jingles in my in my head you know this idea that the lawn you know a perfect lawn was like this symbol of um of success you know what i mean

and you can see that you can see the sort of social history in that as in you know this is a time when, you know, when your, when home ownership becomes this really important thing, you know, the sale of council houses, etc. And it's a period, the 1980s, for some people, at least of, like this big domestication, basically, domestication against a harshening world of work. The thing about lawnmowers is it's like the masculine thing you can do in the garden in the 21st, or 20th and 21st centuries. Like, you know, you can be uber masculine and still be doing and you're not like putting flowers or not caring about nature, you are like control, you know, line back, line back. So it's seen as an activity that, you know, would appeal to kind

of the suburban up and coming classes, you know. That is true, but there is also the idea of like the garden being the man's domain or like, you know, he's got his, he's got his shed where he's got his lawnmower and all that sort of stuff. But, you know, people growing flowers, of men growing flowers, it doesn't seem that unusual to me if we're thinking about like these 50s, 40s, 50s, 60s sort of eras. I think at least in some microcultures or some networks, historically there was a degree of anxiety around men spending too much time growing flowers. Like gardening was seen as a sort of mainly a male preserve, but the most masculine forms of gardening were growing vegetables or cultivating the lawn. There's,

that classic episode of the King of the Hill that really makes fun of this whole idea of the lawn, indeed, as the equivalent to the barbecue, the male preserve, outdoors, the zone of control. It's really interesting phenomenon of the lawn because it is thought of, it is thought of as a kind of symbol of English culture, an English suburban culture, as well as English aristocratic culture,

like around the world, the lawn is associated with Englishness. And it is interesting. because it's one of those things that, like, it requires a lot of work. It's a lot of work to maintain a lawn, even though it looks so sort of boring. It's just an expanse of, a neat expanse of grass. And it does seem to somehow express this desire for control and this sort of love-hate relationship with nature. I always thought of lawns as this kind of symbol of the fascism

at the heart of English suburban psychic life. until I had a little kids and then I realised, well, actually, there are practical reasons for having lawns. Like a lawn, because the popularity of lawns is also grows up with the popularity of field sports. And the lawn is basically a small domestic version of a pitch that you can play sports on.

And tradition, and all the well-established English, like field sports, are played on grass. If you've got little kids running around at home, it's very, it's practical. You know, it's safe. They have room to run. and they won't hurt themselves if they fall over.

So there are sort of pragmatic reasons why the lawn becomes this very, this very popular symbol of British sort of suburbanity in a way. Also, to your point about kids, I mean, really important point with the increasing number of cars, like a lot of parents not wanting to send from the mid-20th century onwards, send their kids out to play in the street. I mean, I know, like, I must have played in the street, I lived in a cul-de-sac when I was a kid, right?

But apart from that, there'll be cars zooming past back and forth all the time. And if you have a garden, then you and your neighbour's kids can be in the garden. You don't need to worry about them getting run over. This is a good point. This is one of the things we were going to get on to on the whole episode, really. And I said at the start, I were talking about my ambivalence. And like, I live in a terraced house in an extremely gentrified bit of northeast London that has a garden. It has a nice garden.

and it's really pleasant and it's my partner Joe does all the gardening and it's very good at it and our neighbours also sort of cultivate their gardens in a very nice way which kind of makes house even nicer so I'm always very conscious especially in the summer

I can just sit out there working all day it's incredibly pleasant and I'm also acutely conscious that the garden like the actual house that you don't have to pay some landlord thousands of pounds a month to live in. It's just a it's a privilege which has now been withdrawn from almost everybody younger than me in a way

which I find is really upsetting and so I feel a lot of ambivalent about it and I'm also conscious that a lot of radical urban planners historically have said that the English addiction to the private garden is disastrous that it means that domestic housing just requires far too much space than you can expect to be available to individual family units or even private individuals and households in an urban setting like Britain that we'd be much better off with much denser housing and with much more public space like park space rather than gardens that's a really popular view and I have a lot of sympathy with it but I think that's a really good point you made an idea actually that really has to be taken account of like the growth the growth and

growth and growth of cars and car use is something that really drives the desire for the desire for the garden actually has a safe space. You're totally right about that. And of course, I mean, really, to some extent, I mean, to some extent, you know, one of the things, that is one of the things that has really driven the continued attachment of people in Britain to the particular ideal of owning your own home with a garden so that you can have a a bit of space of your own. It's not only a kind of inability to free ourselves from bourgeois individualism and so petty bourgeois conceptions of privacy. It's also because we have been driven out of the public realm by cars in a lot of places. And kids have been driven out of the

public realm by cars. And you know, you can point to localized exceptions. I mean, again, where I live in this highly gentrified bit of northeast London, we also, there are very few cars driving around because there was a big road closure, anti-car program that was driven by a bunch of green activists locally a few years ago. So obviously there are exceptions to that. But overall, statistically, unless you happen to live in a place like this, of which there are relatively few still in Britain, then despite all the reasons why car you should not be going up,

it has been going up, it hasn't, it has continued to go up since the, you know, forever, basically. And even the switch to electric vehicles, it reduces pollution and it reduces noise. in a way, which even I'm prepared to ignore it as a lifelong car hater. But one of the things that it doesn't, the switch to electric vehicles does not reduce is the extent to its land use, especially in urban settings, is dominated by the needs of the car. And in which that, you know, it pushes people off the streets, especially kids. So, and pets, and even pets, you know, if you've got pet, it's quite difficult to not have a garden.

And it's because, well, they can't just wander around the street a lot of the time because it's not safe because there's too many. cars. So I think it is one of the features of the kind of 90s, like, you know, you know, fringe kind of radical culture that we all come out of that I feel like we sort of, we ought to get back to you a little bit. It's like proper car hatred because of the extent to which he really does with people, you know, living in this car dominated culture, it forces people to adopt a particular relationship. And it forces you into your garden, whether you want to be, it forces you into your garden, even if you might like to be out in public a bit more, because the public is dominated by these noisy machines. But this is a thing. This also says something about front

gardens, because front gardens, four suburbanites, front gardens, and even townspeople, front gardens used to be something that people are really proud of because very few cars were parked on the street or in the drive. And so people in the same vein that we're talking about, you know, keeping up with the Joneses, like, you know, coming up into the suburbs, like home ownership, all of that. People wanted to have pretty front gardens. There's hardly any pretty front gardens. I mean, of course, they do exist, but people don't used to sit out in the street, you know, facing the road. Yeah, but it feels like if you've got one, it feels like wasted space. Like, loads of people still have front gardens. If you're living in like a Victorian Edwardian house because it was the norm, but a lot of the time, it just feels like totally wasted space because what can you do in them?

Grow vegetables. That's what, that's what I've done. I've built a veg box. veg box. I saw my neighbours do that and I've got a veg box in my drive effectively. I'm growing vegetables, like loads of them. I'll tell you what you do with them. You basically tarmac it over and part of your car there. I mean, it's an incredible

loss of like garden space in London in particular basically to being tarmacked over for parking space. So one thing that dynamic between you know controlling nature or what would it collaborate with nature, something like that, we might say. The overspills of that is this idea of invasive species that, you know, basically,

in particular, actually, this colonial history of bringing plants from all around the world, you know, and then them sort of like leaking out into the wider, from a garden, from a sort of probably like a formal garden, you know, a country garden, a rich person's garden, leaking out into the wider world and causing havoc. One of the plants I always think about that, that is Japanese not weed. in the South Wales, in the Swansea Valley, which was absolutely, even in the 70s and 80s, was absolutely loads and loads of Japanese knotweed about.

And the story goes that it leaked out of Craghernose Castle, which is not an old castle, it's sort of like, I think it's probably like 18th century sort of house, basically. But, you know, it's got crenellations. And the famous opera singer Adelina Patti, Madame Patti, owned it at a particular time. And it had formal gardens in the Japanese knotweed, leaked out of that and went to

went up the Swansea Valley. Loads of it near where I lived and we used to me and my friends used to pretend they were like triffids and attack them with like sticks. Pretending the sticks with swords and wade through them. We didn't know actually but like if you did that I mean a little bit of

that Japanese knot we got on your plants and you worked back to your garden that tiny little bit of Japanese knot would be enough to grow basically and it would grow new plants etc and it's got to the stage now where In fact, it's quite hard to borrow money on housing, which has got Japanese knotweed in it. The banks won't lend you money.

And it's because Japanese knotweed can grow through concrete and stuff like that. It's extremely hard to get rid of. And in fact, there are all these firms that do this. You have to do like soil removal and replace the soil, etc. I have no idea if I brought it back to the house. I grew up in because I haven't been back there for a long time. Probably concrete is overgrown with this Asian plant, I'm not sure. No, that's a really good example.

of a plant that is definitely spoken about in this discourse as like invasive, problematic and like foreign, right? So it's not just called not wheat. It's like Japanese knotweed and it's always referred to as that. Another species which falls in that category, which is a species of flowering plant, which I love the story of, is buddlier. So if you live in an urban centre, London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, even, and you know, you've got these big, junctions, these train junctions, you might see this kind of flowering plant with this kind of dark green foliage and then these kind of purple long shoots of flower heads with all of these different flowers, which are basically like dominated the train and urban landscape and

in between cracks and in buildings and etc. And I absolutely love the story of this plant, but the best place I'd love for any listener to go and read more about. this is a book of poems, I should say. Before I say the story, I want to reference this book of poems by L. Q, who is a Malaysian Chinese accountant, actually, and she works in the charity sector, and she's written this amazing debut poetry collection, which is all about the language of migration in relation to plants and animal species, right? It's an incredible book of poetry and shout out to the Inquilab radical book club that I'm a part of at the University of the Arts, London, a student staff and faculty book club. And that's where I was introduced to this book of poems.

And she's got a book, one of her poems is about Budlia. And so what's great about this plant, I love the story. So it's originally from the central and southwestern China, right? And it grows on riverbanks and kind of like rocky and disturbed ground. And apparently it's first recorded as collected by a westerner by Armand David, who is this French Jesuit missionary, a naturalist, of course, as many of them were, in the kind of still within the colonial framework, in about the 1860s, right, so that it starts coming back to the UK at this high point of what's called botanical imperialism, right? So this is basically what we've been talking about with the pineapples. It's introduced into the UK in 1896.

and by around the 20th century, it's this thought of as a decorative garden shrub with these lilac pumes, like I said, and it has his appeal to pollinators and butterflies, etc. It's ornamental. People use it in country estates, private gardens, they show off about it. But what I love about this plant is it's anarchic behavior because what it essentially does by the mid-20th century is it jumps the fence and it totally takes over urban spaces. And the one event, which is deemed to be the key event, which allows for this, is the Blitz. Because the Blitz occurs and there's all this bombing in the Second World War, and you end up with these derelict buildings, industrial sites, and kind of railway lines,

which are not being, quote, unquote, maintained, right? So poor soil, plenty of sunlight, and exposed rubble is like the perfect habitat, because it's mimicking this natural habitat in China. And then it spreads aggressively. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow. Like I mentioned, it becomes called the bombsite plant or the urban foxglove. And it's able to disperse seeds at this record rate. You get almost 3 million seeds from one flower head.

But it's also a symbol of life emerging from destruction of post-war Britain. but people who, going back to the theme of when we're talking about controlling nature, like people who are trying to control nature, absolutely hate it. And there's so much money that is spent every year by Network Rail and other councils trying to get rid of it and manage it, but yet it thrives because it just absolutely loves those sites. And I love it. I think it's wonderful, but it does, you know, get in the way of that kind of necessary kind of control. Do check out the poetry book by LQ.

more than weeds. One of the questions we need to think about is like, why is gardening just so popular? People normally talk about as a hobby, don't they, basically, the most popular hobby or whatever? What do gardens do for people? Why is it something that people find so attractive? Well, like I alluded to earlier, it's been recognised as therapeutic, that it's going back a really long time.

Like I said, there's this Asian traditions go back a really long way of just recognizing that it is going to help you calm down, especially if you're someone who lives in a kind of urban commercial environment. And is, you know, like, Zen gardens, is that like, is it Zen because of the practice, the sort of like slowing down practice of the gardening or raking? Well, we're talking about multiple things here. So the idea of the garden as just a nice thing to have runs through sort of Chinese culture for a really long time.

And Zen is a different thing from that, really. And the Japanese Zen garden specifically, well, it's an intervention into a culture that has valued gardens for a long time already. And then there's this specific practice of a very, very minimal kind of garden, which is really just about organising stones in space and maybe a few bushes or bonsai trees. And, yeah, the minimalism of it is what's really connected to an idea of keeping the mind really calm and quiet. And it's partly connected to the idea of just domestic activity being something you can do. in a meditative state you maintain the meditative state while you just engage in ordinary

domestic activities and gardening is one of those because i suppose that what the difference between like you know gardening and other domestic activities which could be done meditatively is it some sort of connection to nature that's a sort of thing i was wanting to get to some or perhaps like an increased awareness of nature so one of the things i always think about with gardens is you know you're basically have to, you have to pay attention to the seasons, you know what I mean? You have to be, pay attention to like a cyclical time basically and, you know, gardening involves widening your knowledge of plants and wildlife, I suppose, as well actually. I mean, it's more than meditative. Like for me, my, my relationship to growing things is, you know, like a spiritual

experience. It's part of how I actualise myself, if not daily, then weekly. My relationship, my relationship to plants, especially plants and wildlife. Like as we're recording this, I'm just watching the little goldfinches on the bird feeder in front of me. And my relationship with nature through gardening and through growing is like a really important one to me. Like it's not an abstract thing. It's a practice. So it feels to me similar to like my relationship to yoga, you know, and my relationship to my body, which when I was thinking, about this, I was thinking, well, how does this relate to community? Because we're going to talk about allotments, I guess, and that's kind of important. But there's also, like,

a shared culture and a language. And this is my, you know, like, I say this quite openly, and I know it's a, it's a, it's a mainstream space that people often would not see it as kind of left wing or whatever. But like, I'm a huge fan of Gardner's World as a program on the BBC. And I watch it religiously. So Gardner's World is a 55-year-old, like, mainstream BBC program is on the BBC, currently at 8pm, almost every Friday. And, you know, there are some famous, like gardening figures in it, like Monti-Don and Adam Frost, both of who I'm a massive fans of. But there's several things that goes on. When I'm watching that program, I feel part of a community that are interested in plants and a relationship with plants on the.

home turf, right? Okay, there are some people who are like mass growers and there's a lot of there's a lot of obsession and eccentricity, I guess, in the program. But the way the program is designed is Montedon in his like massive like gardens in Long Maddo or like Adam Frost in his new downsized house or whatever talking about like here are the things that I'm growing this week and here are some of the challenges that I've had. Now let's cut to like a view of. garden and something that they've been doing. And then the program then goes back again. Then it goes to like visiting like amazing gardens that belong to like the RHS or something and then back to another kind of viewers videos. And I find it just incredibly life. It's both life affirming

because it allows me to connect with other people who are interested in plants and growing. The RHS is the Royal Horticultural Society, the UK's main gardening charity. It's been going on since 1804 and it's famous for its gardens, its seal of approval on specific varieties of seed packets, and of course the Chelsea Flower Show, which is effectively the Glastonbury of Flower Shows, which takes place in May of every year, because everybody wants to go and nobody can afford it as the tickets have become ridiculously expensive, so everybody watches it on TV. There's something about being able to view all sorts of different kinds of people across kind of class and experience and, you know, location in the north and the south, you know, next to the

sea kind of inland, urban countryside, who are growing plants and their stories and their experiences from people, you know, with tiny little spaces like growing on a balcony to people like huge, huge gardens. And just like there's something that is like really spiritual and beautiful about it. And in every single episode for gardeners, there are things that don't work. And I think that's kind of the fundamental thing is understanding that you have to kind of work with nature. But also it's an educational program for me because right at the end, there's like the segment of like, here are your jobs for the weekend, which is really useful for me, which is like these are the things that if you're growing any of these plants or vegetables, you know, ornamental or growing for food. And I do both. Like here are some things that you should be thinking about doing for the weekend.

that I obviously have nothing close to the resources that, you know, Monti Don or any of the stars have. But it's just filled me. Like watching cooking programs, it fills me with such a sense of enormous well-being and connection to other people who are doing these things, like even if I don't do any of it. So in a way, there's also like that dual factor. So I'm a practitioner, but also it fulfills the same function as, you know, people who watch cooking programs but never cook a thing because it like relaxes the brain. Because there's, I can't get enough just of watching people talk about plants and, um, and engage with plants. Like, it's not just relaxing, but it, for me, it very much sits, like, it's about beauty and it's about wonder and it's

about curiosity. And it sits outside the kind of monetized, transactional. relationships that we're forced to engage in in capitalism. So for me, it's the absolute perfect program. And if you haven't watched it, at the very least, if you're the kind of person who takes screens to bed, which is not me, but like, watch it, help you fall asleep. It is so soothing. If you can't fall asleep, like, watch Gardner's World. Yeah, to me, it's the absolute perfect program, and I love it.

And I am definitely somebody who, not so much the Chelsea Flower Show, because that's too much for me, but some of the other kind of like BBC events, smaller events, which happen around the north of England, like that is my ideal like weekend out. Like I'd absolutely love to go to those shows and just look at what people do and how

they engage with, you know, gardens on a very small scale. So that's kind of, for me, is that experience and that practice that epitomises, you know, not the colonial, not the kind of all of this stuff that we're talking about. Obviously it's related to that history.

in a sense, like we're talking about the concept of a garden. But like this is, this is the, yeah, this is the spiritual and important aspect of gardening for me. There's this thing called the Quiet Garden Movement, basically a network of places around the world, actually, where you can go and find a quiet garden that you can get access to, to go and meditate it or something. If people are looking for a place to go, just like, chill out, check out the Quiet Garden Movement.

I've never been to one. I've always, it's one of those things I've always wanted to go to one. I think it's just peace away from capitalism. Like, you know, I think it's like, it's a human condition thing, like the ability to be able to be in, I want to say nature, but with everything that we've discussed, like a lot of it is, you know, contrived, obviously like these plants were put there by humans. But it's still, you know, like I'm engaging with, you know, foxes and birds and hedgehogs and whatever.

And I know Kia as well, like you've got like, you know, bee houses and hedgehog houses and the rest of it in your garden. And, like, what that does to us as humans as a connection, I think is really important. It's part of, like, the healing and coming back to yourself. The other thing just came to mind, actually, if we're talking about growing for food, is that big sort of tradition, a sort of working class tradition of trying to grow giant vegetables, like grow the biggest leaks for competitions and all that sort of stuff. I also associate that with, like, mining villages, do you know what I mean? The fierce competition to grow the biggest leaks and then, you know, having to guard your garden or allotment against people trying to sabotage your leaks and all that

sort of stuff. I don't know why that came to mind, but it's an important part of British gardening tradition. I always think of that as also a kind of rural thing, but I mean mining villages are sort of both rural and not rural, but it also, it's also continuous with a history of British like working class practices which are about like trying to maintain some cultivation with nature, like even under the conditions of sort of industrialized urban degradation. So you can sort of connect it to things like pigeon founcing, pigeon keeping and pigeon racing. People in really often quite a very urbanized context, like trying to keep a bit of access to a bit of nature. And I mean, historically, again, that's something that people on the left have been

quite ambivalent about, because you can understand it as the kind of utopian desire to maintain some connection to non-alienated labour. That's sort of what Nadi is talking about partly and see it as something with potentially radical implications. But on the other hand, you know, some people have seen it as symptomatic of even like the English working class and the British working class is inability to shake off the petty bourgeois attachment to land, property and some sort of... Yeah, pre-endire giant marrows. The three curses of capitalism.

So, I mean, all of those things are sort of true at the same time. All those things are potentially true at the same time, aren't they? But we were going to talk about the allotments, the idea of allotments. And this is an idea that goes back, again, it has its origin sort of in the late 90th century, this idea that municipalities would make available to people, small amounts of land on which to grow food. And they were really, they were supposed to be for growing food. And it's still the case in Britain today.

there are lots of places where I live there's quite a bit there are several tracts of land given over to allotments they're highly coveted the way you get an allotment is you just have to apply

to the local authorities and you want one and the waiting list is supposed to be years long but allotments again have all this sort of interesting social history to them to a certain extent

they're the last vestige of the pre-capitalist right to common land that people had the right that people even very poor people had to have some access to land on which to grow food. And this term the grower that Nardia used to describe herself earlier in the show.

Well, I sort of associate that in my mind, we're partly with people being into allotment. The people I have known previously who have called themselves growers, have mostly been people who had allotments, actually. They're really into producing food on allotments. And I know that recently, I know that it's something that some people connected, like to the Green Party in Waltham State who have tried to make part of radical demands politically, locally,

the right to grow, the idea of the right to grow, should be understood as an actual political right which people should claim. I don't think that many people in Waltham State are actually that interested in that being one of their rights. I think they'd rather have the right to have enough money to buy food and be able to buy it relatively cheaply. But, you know, it's an interesting idea.

And it definitely is an idea. this idea that people should have a right to grow that has informed the allotment movement going back I think over a century now and of course, you know, one of our most famous allotment lovers in Britain today is Jeremy Corbyn.

So I think maybe I'll do a little bit of like, I'll do a little bit of sectarianism explaining perhaps some of the identitarian and linguistic different differences between like gardening and being a gardener versus a grower, which might explain a little bit about going back to what you're saying about the Green Party, and also how Corby himself was viewed and how the identity as a grower worked or didn't work for him in the election campaign. I mean, I consider myself a grower because I more or less, I mostly

grow foods. But there is, I don't really like doing, as I've mentioned many times on this podcast. Like, I don't like identitarian kind of led politics, but it wouldn't be fair to say that that doesn't exist at all in the reality of people growing things. So I guess it can be summarized

as people who identify primarily as a gardener. Like, there is, and we haven't talked about, well, we did talk about it a little bit in the beginning, I guess, but like, there is an association with like extra time, free time, leisure. There's definitely mostly about aesthetics, there's that curation, there's an element of control, and then flowers

is like the number one thing that comes up for people, like lawns and flowers. It's viewed as mostly middle class. I don't know if that's fair or not, but also, as we were mentioning earlier at the top of the show, this is tied to having your own garden. And you don't, you don't tend to garden outside your own garden unless you are a professional, right? Okay. So it's tied to property ownership in some sense and a kind of domestic relationship, right? And then obviously related to the program. But I mentioned, like, Gardner's World and, you know, the RHS and the National Trust and all of that kind of imagery and world of like a middle class kind of very mainstream organization. And, you know, there might be kind of like romanticized identities and all of this

language around cottage gardens and as we mentioned, wool gardens and a kind of control over nature. Whereas growers, and this is why this terminology has become quite big, I think in the 21st century in Britain, is more about production, cultivation, self-sufficiency, sustainability, and is very much linked and perpetuated by the allotment movement or allotment tiers, permaculture, kind of people, etc. And it can have more working class kind of activist or even migrant connotations. I'm not sure to what extent that's true, but it is suggesting, I think, a more functional or even political relationship to the land, and cooperation is a big thing here. So people who call themselves growers, there tends to be more of, like, food exchange is involved, there's more informality, there's more kind of like, you know, growing your own resistance to kind of commodification of food, et cetera, and that tends to be more of the kind

of connotations that comes with that. Having said all of that, I'm not sure other than the fact that I mostly grow vegetables, like why I've necessarily called myself a grower, but I think there's something there about, like, you don't need a garden to be a grower. There are people who are like growing on like inside their houses. They're growing on like balconies. They're growing in flats. Like if you've got enough sun, like you can, you know, grow a courgette indoors if there's a bit of wind or whatever. And it's mostly that idea of like cultivation of food. So cycling back to Jeremy Corbyn, I think it's really interesting, like, what Jeremy Corbyn as a grower, like that identity as, you know, Jeremy Corbyn, like with his marrow, like when we did in my local momentum raffle that we did in the 2017 election, like one of the prizes was like Jeremy Corbyn's chutney or something, you know, that he had made himself. like that all conjures a certain aesthetic in an image which the labour right in trying to like put forward a kind of like much more business like technocratic modern functional party like it doesn't work with that at all it's kind of it says a certain kind of it gives a certain kind of aesthetic which I think you know worked for some people and didn't work for other people in the election but it definitely said

it says something about like the kind of clothes that he wears, it kind of says something about him being a certain kind of person, all I think which are probably unfair connotations, but they are definitely connotations in the optics, which kind of had an effect on the election campaign. So I think that imagery of somebody like working in the allotment, you know, and like producing like the biggest marrow or whatever and taking it to the local fair competition is a certain kind of,

is a kind of certain trope or persona, which Jeremy Corbyn fit into. It's interesting that the aesthetics of how somebody who gardens or grows is seen, you know, in terms of that class, et cetera, politics or something like that. Because like the allotments, Jeremy's right, you know, the allotments, the actual, the allotments as we know them today, like they trace back to the enclosures, basically. And provision made in enclosure acts for like small plots for landless.

for the landless poor basically during the enclosures that didn't happen a lot but then in the early part of the 19th century there are a couple of bills which made a statutory requirement of a had yeah produced a statutory requirement for councils to provide allotments if there's demand for them basically so it's like during the wars during the first world war and particularly the second world war where you have this dig for victory thing there's a massive expansion of allotments people's gardens are turned into a focus on growing food it's etc, et cetera, et cetera, and like really huge amounts of food are grown on allotment, in fact. So there's that sort of wave of enthusiasm, which might give you, you know,

which might carry on in allotment culture and give you a particular view of culture of what, of who grows allotments, a sort of working class thing, who can grow the biggest marrow sort of thing. But then the next sort of wave where allotments really become very popular is in the 1970s. And you can think of the TV show The Good Life, which is about about, a suburban couple turn in their garden into food production as a piece of trying to go self-sufficient basically and they also have an allotment in which they try to grow food etc and you have that in that that that gets that you know that expansion of allotments gets tied up with with that whole

sort of like back to the land sort of alternative culture sort of movement and those you could basically see in the figure of Jeremy Corby in a little bit of both of those cultural tendencies in allotments But allotments are also really interesting because if we think about that public and private thing, because of course, each allotment is assigned to particular person or family, allotment holder. But then you have collective governance of the collection of allotments, the allotment committee, you know, a very, very rare instance of the self-management of basically public property, if you want. It's almost like a model for how you could democratize all sorts of public communities, I think.

I mean, one of the other thing to talk about, I suppose, is, you know, house plants. That's been a real explosion of house plants, partly because, you know, as Jen was saying, younger people tend not to have access to gardens, caught in house shares or in flats, et cetera, et cetera. There's a really big culture around houseplants and tended to houseplants and all that sort of stuff. I mentioned that because I want the crowbine and an anecdote about my nan, my nanny, Phyllis, who used to move all of her houseplants into the bathroom when she went to bed at night because she'd read, that at night, plants, you know, in the day, plants taking carbon dioxide and give out oxygen, all very good. At night time, they taking oxygen and give out carbon dioxide.

And so she was very worried about her plants choking her to death as she slept. Very wise, I think I'll take up that practice myself. Yeah, I couldn't live without my houseplants. I mean, I like to be surrounded by living things, so I've got a huge amount of houseplants. which keep me company when I'm recording this podcast. Yes, we've got very large spider plant called Ken. We should just talk briefly about this, you know, this public, private, dynamic, dialectic even that's been going through the, through the, because it is a really important part of like the, the, the, the, the weirdness of gardens is that they are, you know, these private enclosed spaces. And then we should say, you know, through the 20th century,

even before that, actually, you know, in the 19th century, you have the expansion of public parks, basically. And some of those are through because of the high rates of inheritance tax, deaf duties, and a general movement towards income and wealth equality during the 20th century, well, after the First World War, actually, right up until 1976, where it starts to reverse. So you have this expansion of public provision of parks and gardening and these sorts of things. And we should probably just mention this idea of garden cities that come in in the beginning of the 20th century

with architects such as like Ebenezer Howard, etc., which is in this idea that you need to replant cities so that there is an expanse of public green space in them, basically. So cities would be based around gardens and might be in their attempt to sort of, break down the distinction between town and city and all that sort of stuff. Something which has basically really been rolled back because there's been a real emphasis on private gardens, etc. What you also mentioned at the beginning gem was this idea of guerrilla gardening and there has been like there's a history of gardening as a form of resistance.

Is that the right word of it? There's been an association between like gardening, growing and protest, anti-capitalism, etc i mean the most obvious thing to start with is is the diggers basically from the mid 17th century where this group of radicals in the aftermath of they weren't gardeners they were growers they were growers all right yeah yeah but you can set it up like this which you know they basically take over some land and they start to cultivate that land basically it's like this radical act they've got their radical egalitarians basically pushing forward the sort of egalitarian drives of the English Civil War.

The bit everyone knows about is the 1649 Act. In George's Hill. Yeah, on St. George's Hill. They immortalised by Billy Bragg when Gerard Wynne's group of diggers publicly declared that they were taking over this land as common land and setting up some sort of a commune. But I was reading, I can't remember the name of the book now,

I was reading a recent book about the, really about the 17th century in Britain a few months ago. And it was talking about the fact that actually this practice of digging as a protest against enclosure had an earlier history. They didn't invent the term diggers, the Winstandley group. The term was already quite old by that point. And it was a well-established practice against enclosure. It was to go and dig up, enclosed land and start, you know. Because digging, I mean, to dig it means you're cultivating it.

It means you're claiming it for cultivation, basically. that is certainly an early example of a protest against capitalism in its arguably one of its most fundamental incipient forms. Yeah, and like, you know, most famously of all, when Stanley says that the earth is a common treasury for all, so it's this idea of like, you know, this is not a walled garden, you know, this is a common garden, you know. And so there's that idea of opening up enclosed space

as a revolting private property, I mean, that's the simplest way to put it. And that gets repeated, I think, you know, in the 20th century, there are movements that there's a very similar thing. One of the more famous sort of struggled around a park is about the Berkeley People's Park movement in the late 70s, 1969, I think it is. And that's when radical students and, you know, people from the local area, they take over abandoned land, which is owned by the University of California, and they turn it into a community garden basically and then the university comes fences off the land and surrounds it by

armed police. It's something like 3,000 protesters march on the park and have a clash with the police, etc. And eventually they win and it's Berkeley's People's Park is still there in California. There are English equivalence of that. We've talked before about like struggles over parks in London in the 1970s. One of those you could point to is this struggle for a Community Garden in Tolmas Square, which is near Houston Station. And that was like an anti-gentrification campaign where they occupied land, which was earmarked for like a high-rise, probably like offices, actually, because it would have been urban living at that point and transform it into a community garden as a way of, like the diggers, I suppose,

you know, claiming it, this is now being cultivated. We have already have a purpose for this piece of land. We don't need this office block here, etc. But it lasted for a number of years. Yeah, and the interesting thing, if we're going to talk about guerrilla gardening as like a practice, I mean, we mentioned right at the top of the show, the May Day 2000, and this whole part of it, which was turfing up Parliament Square, which was like a really interesting action in itself of this idea of like bringing turf and putting it down on Parliament Square and then having picnics and doing all of these kind of things, like as part of the protest. But, you know, during that era in the 2000s and still going on is, you know, much. more like smaller ad hoc like gorilla gardening projects where people effectively, like my understanding of gorilla gardening is like you're not taking permission from anyone to quote

unquote garden or cultivate this public space. I mean, it's mostly ornamental, I think, but you know, it can obviously be growing vegetables as well, although there are particular hazards to not being able to control, you know, the pollutants that might happen, like pollute the food in the public space. But people do this all over Britain. Like you might have a tree, going out in your street and, you know, there's, it's like people are throwing like bottles and like beer cans and whatever around it. And, you know, a group of people who live local to that will, you know, reclaim that by starting to grow flowers and, you know, improving the aesthetic, which then hopefully means that people are less likely to trash it. You know, I don't know if that

theory always stands, but there's lots of kind of like these very micro attempt to, quote, unquote, beautify or, you know, bring plants or flowers to, to, to, to, to, small bits of land that people are engaging with all the time whether or not they view themselves as kind of like radicals trying to kind of reclaim space. And often I found what I'm finding interesting is that, and again, this is anecdotal. I don't have the data for this. I don't have Mr. Stats having done the research for me on this. But it seems to be that as councils have less money, I think more and more people are getting away with this stuff because as the welfare stay on a local level also, you know, is squeezed or is kind of like pulling back.

Like people are just taking some of this stuff into their own hands. I mean, definitely in my local area, there has been some of that. And the council just kind of lets people get away with it and also often celebrates it, which in a way is kind of rewarding volunteerism, which politically I have a problem with, but I'm kind of trying to understand it as, you know, at least somebody's doing something about it, which of course is very different, like the political intentions explicitly of like guerrilla gardening per se. But what I'm saying is, I guess, that though it's not entirely clear, it's quite blurred the lines between like both of these kind of activities. Yeah, that's a really interesting point.

The local authorities like becoming sort of encouraging of semi-official forms of volunteerism because they just can't, they can't carry out so much of what they're traditionally supposed to do, isn't it? That was sort of, I mean, that was the whole point of the David Cameron, big society idea in 2010. To get people to work for free, there is this debate about, you know, what the real intentions behind no-mo may, you know, is or was. So, like, no-mo-may is for pollinators and for the wildlife, like, leave your lawn to grow in May and don't cut it. it, you know, until the end of May or at least, you know, July, ideally, etc. But then the same principle was applied to like verges and various different like public bits of land. And the environmental argument was made, but there is the counter argument made by

local residences, which is like, look, this is just an environment, this is like greenwashing where the council doesn't have money, doesn't want to invest in like cutting down, you know, the grass here, which has, like, grown up to, like, whatever, like my shoulders or whatever. It's dangerous. It's unsightly, but, you know, it's been used as the cover of environmentalism. And I think, you know, like, there are arguments on either side for some of that. Perhaps we should, like, refocus on Jeremy's ambivalence and this, this, this, like, private public dynamic that's been running through the discussion of gardens. And, like, think a little bit about, well, answer this question.

Will we have private gardens under socialism? you to say about that? We have been thinking about this, and I have to say that gender is an aspect here, because I find it very difficult. Like, I was saying this and preparing for the show. Like, I really like being able to go out at least part of my garden, like, in my pants. And I won't be able to do that away from the male gaze. And I do, as a woman, quite like having a bit of private space, like whether it's a bit

of balcony or a bit of patio, where I can engage with the natural world and not be overlooked. So I don't have to have a big garden or a big balcony. I'm happy to do most of my growing activities with other people, for sure. But I would quite like a bit of private outdoor space, I would have to say, as a woman. I've got me, I didn't bring pants-based gardening into my considerations of this question. So I'm going to have to read adjust. Yeah, I accept that, yeah. I tend to take seriously the arguments of urban plans.

that the desire of British people for private gardens is really makes it very difficult to deploy like creative solutions in terms of urban planning and it makes it difficult to maximise some green space to which everybody could have access in a in a public way but I also I think I mean what you were saying is true I think I can see why people want they I can see why people want some sort of privacy part of the question here and it's Partly the question raised by that idea of the quiet garden movement as well, though, actually, is, well, what, you know, from a radically collectivist perspective, like, what do we make of the occasional need for solitude? I think that is interesting, because gardens have also, have been

to places to be. They have been places to experience solitude, as well as places to be with other people collectively. And I'm sure there are available solutions. I mean, maybe the private garden movement is points to a possible solution. Maybe, you know, maybe we could have, we can have publicly owned spaces, which, you know, people can, you know, you can reserve it or you can go. You can go and use it and then other people can use it when you're done with it. Because part of the problem there, of course, arguably from us is that, and I guess this does speak to actually why I feel sort of gildy about it sometimes.

Like you're only using it for a couple of hours a day, you know, at most, really, most of the times. That's the human perspective, though, but the, like, the wildlife are using it, right? So in terms of, like, the statistics, in terms of, like, the amount of space for wildlife in the UK, people who are maintaining their gardens is, like, that's doing a huge service, like, in the face of, like, like, incredible construction happening. Yeah, I'm not saying, I'm not, I'm not talking about, like, should you not have a garden? I mean, in the, in the socialist utopia, we're imagining, the eco-socialist utopia, there would be like, you know, wildlife running all over the shop in the in these publicly managed spaces forgot we were in the utopia

they'd be all over the shop they'd be having a great they'd be having a great time it's just a question of whether we would need to each have our own permanently private space well then my question is like will will this is this is interesting because I went when I I I went and saw um the french socialist leader Melanchon a couple of weeks ago in in Hackney in London and it was just really interesting that he was talking about. He went from talking about, you know, the rights to water and the rights to food to the rights to the night sky and the rights for like quiet. And I was thinking about this in relation to what we were saying about gardens is like, you know, often, thankfully, when I'm visiting a garden or walking around like a public space,

I don't sit next to somebody who's like scrolling through fucking Instagram or TikTok with like all this kind of like zappy noise. It's one of the number one things that makes me anxious in a public space is the fact that quiet has been taken away, you know, and talking about solitude, well, I think there is a way to be quiet and, you know, have a certain solitude with other people around, you know, when I am ruler of the world, like, I'm absolutely like banning, like scrolling with the sound on in a public place. Like, that's one of the things I find most jarring. So it depends in the utopia. Are I going to be allowed to ban that or not? You know, I'm out to ban. It's interesting that like in utopian writing there is a real tradition of of seeing gardens as central

to utopia. So like in Thomas Moore's utopia, which is like 15, 16, like this huge amount of writing about like these sort of abundant gardens. And once again, it's like the diggers, they're trying to remove this idea of abundant gardens from, you know, the maintenance of hierarchy and, you know, and private property to some degree. So in Moore's Utopia, there's, you know, every 10 years, residents get assigned a new house and a new garden by lot, basically. So it's this idea that you'd be moving round in some sort of way. Perhaps you would have a private garden, but only for 10 years,

and then you'd move on, it'd be somebody else's or something like that. And then in William Morris's news from nowhere, there's a real focus on gardens. I'm like imagining central London actually as like, you know, as not just one, as sort of one big garden or like, you know, lots of, you know, really famous places being turned into gardens, but collective commonly owned or common gardens in some sort of way. I suppose the other thing we'd have to take into account in all of this is like climate change

and these sorts of things. I mention it because Yorkshire Water are bringing in a hosepipe ban on Friday, so we won't be able to water our garden, you know, it's going to be a real crisis for gardeners that. That brings up all sorts of things, privatised water owners. neglect of infrastructure, these sorts of things. But it also might indicate this like, there might well have to be a move away from the idea of gardens

as like private luxuries, do you know what I mean? And so there's this whole discourse around private sufficiency and public luxury. So perhaps it would be that like, you know, in fact, we'd have to dedicate less space to private gardens while allowing people to have, you know, private gardens. Or perhaps those gardens will have to be given over to food production because the contemporary, you know, the modern system of food production is basically unsustainable. We've talked about this before, basically.

In fact, at abundance, we produced a report before Christmas called food systems in common where we're trying to think through how you transition to a much more collectively owned and agroecological food protection system. So agriacological is very much on that wing of like trying to collaborate with nature and move away from that sort of like dominate nature through their mass monocrops, etc., these sorts of ideas. And one of the things we were trying to think through was how people could be much more involved in food production,

in food systems, etc, and have some sort of democratic control of it, but also perhaps participate in it, you know, a sort of extension of allotments or something like that. And if you want to look at like a model for that, you could look at Cuba in the post-Soviet Union era, the post-crisis era of Cuba. You know, urban gardens, in particular, that are hugely productive, a huge sort of drive to turn cities into food production centres, basically. If we're thinking about, you know, would we have private gardens under socialism or eco-socialism, they would probably look very different.

And perhaps that balance between private and public would be shifted to some degree. Another utopic piece of writing that perhaps we should mention, and it would be interesting to think about whether a project, I mean, maybe this is partly what you're doing in abundance. do tell if this is what you're doing is taking from some of that utopic kind of post-war 50, 60, 70s architectural and utopic

future building texts and kind of updating it for the reality of climate change. Because of course one of my favorite books is a pattern language, towns, buildings and construction. Such an incredible series of two books from 1978

which is built on this idea that there are languages that could be spoken in architecture to build these modern towns and residences on these kind of patterns. And one of the key things that comes up in these kind of books is like how much space should be devoted to like grass and trees and like how do we keep design to be rooted in nature and have like those kind of interactions

which we imagine we want in a utopia, which is that more of a more of a connection to wildlife. And how do we bring that into the way that we envisage space and design? I think it's like it's a really, really beautiful set of books, but obviously written before the age of climate change. So it would be really fascinating to see some of those ideas updated for the 21st century. It's one of the other things. It's not just a public-private thing.

And what you raised there, Nadia, is how much of this should be expert knowledge should play into this and how much of it should be sort of like democratically governed. And in fact, you know, gardening, just like football is one of those areas which shows people's, like, huge ability, actually, to be able to process information and be able to participate meaningfully in conversations, basically, you know, to be able to develop knowledge and participate in knowledge development, etc. But one of the other things that the reasons people might rebel against the idea they wouldn't have a private garden is because, like, part of gardening,

is this, you know, is this moving beyond just necessity into all, most aesthetic or even artistic sort of practices. And of course, you'd have to do that in a much more collective way, perhaps. We talk about in, not actually in our report on food systems, but in the Radical Abundance book, Ready for Pre-order Now, dear listeners, we have a chapter of food system. We talk about cloud berries. And so cloud berries are these berries that grow in Scandinavia,

as you can grow them in Scotland as well. And they're really, really delicious, but they're very expensive because they don't lend themselves to monocrop industrialized forms of agriculture. You've got one cloudberry bush and like the fruits will come into, will ripen at different times on the same bush, for instance. And it's quite hard to predict when they will ripen. So one of the things we're trying to imagine is not just like, how do you create very efficient, collectively owned and democratically managed food systems?

It's like how do you create space for food cultivation to be an element of play, you know, we say perhaps people will, perhaps communities will decide, in fact, what we want to do is do this thing. It's really fucking hard. Grow cloud berries because they're delicious. You know, we've got this surplus. We're sure you can expend in artistic practices via food cultivation. That's not a nice image, I think, of like, of what food cultivation under socialism could look like or gardening under socialism could look like. Whoa, that's pretty far out.