Radical Gardening
Politics, Idealism and Rebellion in the Garden

War is the natural occupation of man … war-and gardening.

Winston Churchill to Siegfried Sassoon, 1918

In the common public perception, contemporary gardening is understood as suburban, as leisure activity, as television makeover opportunity. Its origins are seen as religious or spiritual (Garden of Eden), military (the clipped lawn, the ha-ha and defensive ditches), aristocratic or monarchical (the stately home, the Royal Horticultural Society). Radical Gardening travels an alternative route, through history and across landscape, linking propagation with propaganda. For everyday garden life is not only patio, barbecue, white picket fence, topiary, herbaceous border.… From window box to veggie box, from political plot to flower power, this book uncovers and celebrates moments, movements, gestures, of a people's approach to gardens and gardening. It weaves together garden history with the counterculture, stories of individual plants with discussion of government policy, the social history of campaign groups with the pleasure and dirt of hands in the earth, as well as original interviews alongside media, pop and art references, to offer an informing and inspiring new take on an old subject.

The Garden City Movement



While gardens, allotments and parks could be all thought of as attempts to introduce elements of the countryside into the urban landscape…a more ambitious attempt to introduce rural features into towns…was the mid- and late-nineteenth century series of model village suburbs, which culminated in the garden cities.

Jeremy Burchardt, Paradise Lost



GO UP AND POSSESS THE LAND!

Ebenezer Howard, (unpublished) instruction in slogan form included in a draft of one of the diagrams for Garden Cities for Tomorrow.



The Garden City Movement of the first decades of the twentieth century was one of a number of social improvement models around the design of the urban environment which led in due course to the practice of town planning, by government and local authority alike. But for us it has a special place for two reasons. First, in its early years the movement espoused a politics which appealed to idealists, socialists, utopianists, enthusiastic to mark the new century with a new society. It drew on revolutionary and reformist ideas of the time in order to critique the existing world and to envision the future one, of cooperation and small-scale community. Second, it has a green heart: the garden city positioned the garden itself, and its related public spaces like parks and local farms, as a key transformative engine in this socio-horticultural experiment. The aim of Ebenezer Howard in his highly influential 1902 book Garden Cities of Tomorrow (a revision of his 1898 Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform), and of the increasing numbers of people active in the movement, was to combine idealism and landscape in order to produce what he called 'a new life, a new civilisation'. Hugely intriguingly, I think, for us as contemporary readers, a plan of social change with an environmental core has become more timely, even pressing once more, and it may well be that we can still learn from the Garden City movement of a century ago.



There had been earlier versions of planned urban spaces that encapsulated a garden aesthetic in some way - such as the 'greene town' of William Penn's vision for the design of the new city of Philadelphia in America in the seventeenth century. One of Howard's followers in the movement, F.J. Osborn, maps other uses of the term 'garden city' before Howard's:



Chicago (surprising as it seems at a distance) called itself The Garden City, through pride in ins magnificent surroundings. Christchurch, founded in 1850, was known as the Garden City of New Zealand. The first place to be given Garden City as its official name appears to have been the New York suburb on Long Island started…in 1869. By 1900, there were, besides this one, nine villages and a small town in the United States named Garden City.