Melancholy Little Gardens

– Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

Lionel Wallace, the protagonist of H.G. Wells’s The Door in the Wall (1906), was haunted by the vision of an enchanted garden glimpsed in childhood. Having eluded the vigilant and authoritative care of his nursery governess, he found himself wandering aimlessly among the long grey West Kensington roads until he came across a white wall with a green door. At first sight of the door he experienced a ‘peculiar emotion, an attraction, a desire to get to the door and open it and walk in’. After considerable hesitation he ‘went plump with outstretched hand through the green door and let it slam behind him. And so, in a trice, he came into the garden that has haunted all his life’.[1]

Passing through the door, Wallace left behind the mundane world and entered a domain of dreams and the imagination: ‘I became in a moment a very glad and wonder-happy little boy—in another world. It was a world with a different quality, a warmer, more penetrating and mellower light, with a faint clear gladness in the air, and wisps of sun-touched cloud in the blueness of its sky’.[2] The door in the wall was ‘a real door, leading through a real wall to immortal realities’, about which Wallace could ‘convey nothing of that indescribable quality of translucent unreality, that difference from the common things of experience that hung about it all’.[3]

It will be obvious to those who know London that nowhere could Wallace have indulged his fantasy more fruitfully than in this great metropolis—here thousands of miles of high ‘naked grey-brick walls, bordering habitations’ conceal and protect thousands of specks of private gardens.[4] Doubtless many other Londoners have been haunted by visions of enchanted gardens—perhaps real, or imaginary ones revealed in dreams—and will have attempted at various times in their lives to reconstruct these fragmentary memories.

The brick garden wall is the most important and conspicuous attribute of the city garden: it renders the garden and the adjoining house the impregnable sanctuary of the ‘modern citizens of Cockaigne’.[5] Here Londoners are free to pursue their own inclinations unimpeded. Although the city’s great and sometimes clumsy piles of brickwork have long been maligned—and most vehemently by Londoners themselves—they have a weakness for secure enclosure, and like nothing more than to be ‘coop’d in’ by brick walls. Grey and yellow stock brick walls and bristling iron railings have been thrown up for centuries to demarcate their territory and to protect it from a multitude of depredations. These garden ramparts are the capital stroke of the city garden. In so far as one cannot reasonably aspire to the heights of the landscape garden, one must accept the limitations of these diminutive, confined plots and make the best of things, even if one’s scanty and abortive efforts more regularly invite ridicule than praise.

For at least the last hundred years Londoners have, however, recognised that ‘dead wall-fences’ are not so much a blemish which impede their full enjoyment of the streetscape, but features which invite wondrous speculation of the world beyond them. The glimpse of the crown of a flowering Judas tree over a Hackney fence, or the presence of a small door set in a forbidding Chelsea garden wall can bring on a gust of emotion. We covet these secret spaces untainted by the grey world of the street, and, like Wallace, we passionately desire to seek the ‘green door’ which will admit us to the world beyond.

We know, of course, that were we able to penetrate such gardens we might gratify our curiosity, but we would do so at the expense of demystifying these otherwise ordinary workaday plots. For London gardens can be as uninteresting as they are strangely haphazard and unremarkable: long narrow strips of ground sprinkled with trees, shrubs, flowers and the occasional ‘water-work’. There is only so much one can do within the confines of so narrow and rectangular a patch.

In the late nineteenth century one writer exclaimed that it is not supposed that these kerchief-sized plots ‘were ever planted, but rather that they are pieces of unreclaimed land, with the withered vegetation of the original brickfield. No man thinks of walking in this desolate place, or of turning it to any account.’ And yet the ‘great aim of the Cockney gardener’ was ‘neatness, not health, or beauty pure et simple’.[6]

So that his small estate is free from broken bottles and rubbish, he is content that it shall be free from flowers also during the greater part of the year. He enjoys the blank surface of black mould, the trim bare shrubbery, where not one leaf remains half a day, the dean gravel walks and regular box borders, all arranged with the nicety of a Flemish kitchen garden. But Flemish kitchen gardens produce very acceptable viands at times, and the city horticulturist’s domain contains nothing. It is dingy, dull, and wet and naked in winter, spring and early summer. When the bedding out period arrives, the professional nurseryman is communicated with, and sends cartloads of petunias, verbena and geraniums, and the like to clothe the desert gorgeously for about six weeks or two months in the year.[7]

London’s small gardens have frequently been reviled and characterised as inhospitable and infertile enclosures. Dickens remarked in 1839 that these;

melancholy little plots of ground behind houses were usually fenced in by four high whitewashed walls and frowned upon by stacks of chimneys, in which there withers on from year to year a crippled tree, that makes a show of putting forth a few leaves in late autumn, when other trees shed theirs, and drooping in the effort, lingers on all crackled and some dried rill the following season, when it repeats the same process, and perhaps if the weather be particularly genial, even tempts some rheumatic sparrow to chirrup in its branches.[8]

The ‘little busy Employs’ of city gardening have long been a London passion.[9] Just how this interest developed is unknown, and the origins of London’s small gardens are, we are told, as remote as their layouts are inconvenient and their character bleak and airless. Amateur gardening in the ‘first city of the world’ has never been easy—indeed, ‘it is beset with difficulties’. It has been by all accounts a ‘wicked and wilful waste of time and money’: ‘Providence’, it would appear, had ‘originally designed that the soil of London should bear nothing beyond bricks and mortar’—though it was not so much the fault of the ground as it was of the constant depredations of cats, sparrows, slugs, snails and caterpillars.[10] The ‘Toms of London’ have been among the ‘gardener’s worst companion—for as fast you put in the seed, just as fast they would scratch it up again; and, of course, nothing would satisfy the creatures but they must go lying in your beds of a night’.[11] London sparrows have been no less monstrous; these ‘feathered ogres’, ‘brazenfaced little chits’ and ‘impudent vagabonds’ of the bird kingdom are ‘as bold as brass’, ‘make noise enough for an infant’s school, and pick away the gardener’s tender crop’.[12] What ‘nasty, smutty, two-penny cabbages’ survive these assaults are the prey of insects, and their leaves are ‘as yellow and as full of holes as the seat of a cane-bottomed chair’.[13]

No less problematic has been the want of light and fresh air in town; for the ‘whole atmosphere of the place is so dreadfully smokey, that, without joking, one might just as well try to rear cauliflowers all round the top of a steam-boat funnel, as to think of getting one’s vegetables out of a metropolitan hop-skip-and-a-jump kitchen garden’.[14]

Playing at market gardening by ‘trying to convert a trumpery band-box full of mould and gravel into a productive orchard’ is, perhaps, an unreasonable expectation. But some find it ‘quite as hard to raise a nosegay as a salad’, and are compelled to ‘have the place nicely turfed in the centre, and a few pretty rose-bushes, and geranium trees’ where the ‘nurse could let the child roll about, and no harm could possibly come to it’.[15]

Although Londoners have been confident in their ability to create their own gardens, they have not always been inclined to take an interest in their maintenance. Generations of citizens have been content to let strangers, in the guise of ‘florists’, or jobbing gardeners, tend them—people who ‘would do the whole thing for a mere nothing … and attend to it afterwards, either by the day, month or year, on the most reasonable terms’.[16] One should not, therefore, be surprised to find that these self-employed ‘garden operatives’ have always suffered a bad press: they have been condemned for centuries by professional gardeners and garden owners alike. In 1722 Thomas Fairchild denounced the,

many ignorant Pretenders, who call at Houses where they know there is any Ground, let it be in Season or out of Season, and tell the Owners it is a good Time to dress and make up their Gardens; and often impose on them that employ them, by telling them every Thing will do when perhaps it is a wrong Season … This is a great Discouragement, which makes those Persons, who delight a little in a Garden, neglect doing any Thing at all, thinking their Labour and Cost thrown away’.[17]

Practical considerations, however, will inevitably fail to arouse our emotional interest in London’s little paradisal plots. Our fascination has less to do with examining the scope of garden building and gardening activities than speculating on the ground’s potential to release its cultivators and admirers from thousands of irksome and petty worldlinesses. Gardens are about potential, and gardening is a metaphor for the exercise of the imagination.

Lionel Wallace was throughout his short life haunted by an insatiable longing—by a sense that beyond the garden door there were possibilities of beauty and desire that eluded him. Although aware of the potential of the garden to fulfil his sense of longing, only once did he open the door and let it close behind him—the memory of beauty and happiness he experienced in his single visit filled his heart and made all the other interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to him.

Others will appreciate, however, that neither experience nor knowledge can dull or extinguish a true passion. For they, too, are haunted by longings as they know that somewhere in life there arc possibilities that still elude them. Some gardens are destined to remain magically inaccessible. The door in their walls will, nevertheless, continue to beckon us away from the realities of our daily routine and into a world of desire and enchantment.

This essay was first published in The London Gardener or The Gardener’s Intelligence, vol.4, 1997-1998.

Notes

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Todd Longstaffe-Gowan is a landscape architect with an international practice based in London.