Domestic Wild: Memory, Nature and Gardening in Suburbia

Franklin Ginn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367668273
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317148418
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

In Domestic Wild, Franklin Ginn sets out to find a new sense of the wild at the heart of modernity. Inspired by experienced, skilful gardeners, Ginn analyses what happens when plants, animals and people meet in the suburbs of London. Weaving major theories of landscape, memory and nonhuman subjectivity with the practical wisdom of gardeners, this book offers a radical new account of everyday gardening. Amid spectacular horizons of planetary loss, Domestic Wild argues that gardening offers a means to cultivate a renewed sense of intimacy with nature and ourselves.

1 Inheriting landscape

Suburban histories and the force of the past

Maybe it is that the very constitution of ‘here’, of this landscape, and its magic, is precisely in the outrageous specialness of the current conjunction, this here and now.

Doreen Massey, Landscape as a Provocation¹

Legacies to receive, to mine, to discuss, to filter, to transform, faithfully unfaithfully.

Jacques Derrida, For What Tomorrow²

Geoffrey and Jillian live in a leafy suburb of southwest London. A vegetable patch lies at the back of their garden. Globe artichokes stand amid beds waiting to be planted with leafy greens, beans and root vegetables. The rest of the garden is centred on a large lawn and bordered by mature beech and ash trees. A summer house sits near the middle (Figure 1.1). Jillian’s plant knowledge and skill has been built up over 45 years of gardening, coaxing plants into being. Over this time, Jillian has learnt tricks to deal with the fact that some plants dislike the clayey London soil. She knows intimately the characteristics of specific parts of the garden: degree of shade, temperature, what might grow well and what might not. Geoffrey’s labour has also maintained the garden over the last 45 years.

Jillian and Geoffrey know that they inherit a landscape made through not just their own efforts, but by the labour of others. The house and garden have, in fact, been in Geoffrey’s family since they were constructed. The house was built on Horn Park, a Crown estate, in 1924. Geoffrey brought out the original advertising brochure for me, which described the house as ‘an artistic modern residence, build under an architect’s supervision, on high ground with good views, conveniently near town’. Geoffrey had also unearthed photographs of himself as a young child in the late 1930s in the very same garden. One portrayed Geoffrey as a small child, nestled in the crook of his mother’s arm (Figure 1.2). They are both watching the family cat playing with a ball. The garden is young; not much has grown. By quirk of fate, Geoffrey ended up moving back to this house when his grandparents died.

In this chapter, I want to show how the garden is animated by the traces of the past. I will suggest that how people inherit the past is a central question of gardening. The two photographs signal this aim in three ways. First, the old photograph carries an evidential force – it attests that the past happened.³ Geoffrey’s mother’s dress, the trellis, the roses, the pergola – these all prove that we are looking at the past. The period we are looking back to (1919–1939) saw the birth of gardening as a mass leisure pursuit. Between the wars, gardening became an important means of expression for those who moved to the outer reaches of London.⁴ This was a time of large-scale suburban expansion. London grew by 50 per cent in area with an increase in population of only 10 per cent, while four million suburban homes were built across England.⁵ The photograph, however, reminds us that forms of landscape are never simply ‘imposed upon a material substrate’, but that they ‘emerge as condensations of crystallisations of activity’.⁶ The landscapes of interwar suburbia were woven into life by their new inhabitants. The first section of this chapter explores these historic interwar legacies, providing the history to which Jillian and Geoffrey find themselves present when they occupy the space presented in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 View of Jillian and Geoffrey’s garden, Hither Green, London, 2009

Figure 1.2 Geoffrey as a baby with his mother and cat in his garden, c. 1938

Second, the aim of the chapter is illustrated by the fact that both photographs can be compared side by side. Juxtaposed, the two photographs remind us that the past has never really ceased to be, that the past continues to exist in the present. If we take the old photograph as standing in for all the historic interwar legacies, then these pasts are not just about what happened (a deadening anchor weight on landscape), but also about how these pasts continue to animate the present (an enlivening force in landscape). The second section explores several intertwined ways in which the past is ‘presented’.⁷ It does so by focusing on one particular object that embodies interwar histories of conformity and creativity, the privet hedge. In looking at how the past is presented through the body of the privet hedge, the section also opens up the possibility that the past may be absent, yet retain a palpable force on landscape in the present.

Third, as the past looms into palpable presence, it unsettles comforting ideas of landscape being about life, dwelling, presence and the material pleasures of gardening. The uncertain presence of the past also prompts thoughts on what to do with the past: how to inherit what has come before. This cannot really be seen in the two photographs, but Geoffrey and Jillian’s garden is an inventory of the past and its transformation through time. They, like all gardeners, are constantly reminded of what remains, what has been lost and, ultimately, what might be lost after they leave the garden. The garden, then, is an ‘inventory of mortality’, which can evoke melancholy, reflection, or pathos.⁸ The final section turns to this question of inheritance as a fundamental dynamic of landscape.

Ultimately, the chapter is concerned with the temporality of the garden landscape. The landscape is enlivened by the presence of the past, by traces of the past and by the way we inherit the past, and these work to give the garden a complex temporality where past and present mingle. The chapter emphasises that landscape and subject are never consonant – in this chapter we see the garden not as an earthy, embracing, vital cocoon, but as a landscape constellated by antecedents, holdovers, remains. Wherever they are, gardeners inherit a garden with material traces from the past, such as design, framework, mature trees, dreams, or perhaps only some broken crockery in the soil. But they also inherit a landscape replete with meaning: a landscape storied by those who lived there and storied by narratives that circulated beyond the home but came to rest there. These are empirical questions particular to place, in this case, to the gardens of London suburbia. While specific to each case, every gardener always finds themselves present to traces from the past, and what they do with them, how they inherit the past, is central to gardening practice.

London’s interwar suburban landscapes

A blueprint for a new way of urban life emerged from the ruins of Britain’s great imperial war against Germany. Set up towards the end of the First World War, a wide-ranging inquiry into the future of housing published their findings in 1919.⁹ These were made government policy that same year. The report laid out the framework for a massive, government-backed and -subsidized programme of house building in England and Wales. The Tudor Walters Report was heavily influenced by Raymond Unwin (1863–1940), a prominent British planner and long-time advocate of the garden suburb.¹⁰ Unwin was obsessed with the capacity for architecture and planning to work as progressive social forces. Having pioneered several small settlements along the garden suburb model, Unwin had become chief town planning inspector of the Local Government Board, and with his allies attempted to define the character of interwar English suburbia. The Tudor Walters Report insisted on comparatively low-density build, at 12 dwellings per acre, with picturesque cottages, winding streets, plentiful gardens and greens. Although suggested standards were not statutory requirements, the model stressed clearly demarcated, bounded and familial domestic dwelling space. Along with the pages of recommendations on layout, size, aspect, building methods, provision of social and health amenities and transport, the Tudor Walters model circumscribed the ‘space of possibilities’ for dwelling that would in many ways come to define twentieth-century urban living in Britain.

The Tudor Walters Report responded to several needs. The first was the poor living conditions of London’s urban poor. Public health officials saw London as a ‘hotbed of chronic disease’ infested by rats, cockroaches, bugs, slugs, toads, and ‘creeping things innumerable’.¹¹ The London County Council cited overcrowding, lack of basic hygiene including toilets and running water, and predatory landlords running rampant across the inner city.¹² Prewar fears that Britain’s unhealthy stock of men would be unable to match the vigour of German armed forces resurfaced in concern about postwar virility, reproduction and national rebuilding.¹³ As well as ill effects on health, a lack of private, family space was seen to corrode social stability and domestic virtue. Paternalists again and again, in print and legislation, put forth the need to rehouse the working poor in conditions that would allow them to flourish. Commentators on the right exaggerated the threat of revolution in the 1920s, and argued that a new suburban lifestyle would successfully emasculate working-class politics.¹⁴ Suburban expansion would also soak up labour, now in ready supply as the armed forces demobilised, and provide a long-term sink for capital. Indeed, the desire to manage ‘natural’ forces and the market for an orderly urban transformation was a key motivator for successive interwar Labour governments.¹⁵

The suburb was not a new idea. In London, its antecedents lay in earlier middle-class experiments with suburban living, for example in Clapham, a radical hotbed of anti-slavery.¹⁶ These early middle-class suburbs articulated certain ideological goals, including distance from both the corrupt aristocratic countryside and the vices of the city, gendered separation of domestic and public spheres, and the sanctity of the family unit.¹⁷ Interwar suburbs were also inspired by the model villages of progressive industrialists, from the Quaker-owned London Lead Company to Cadbury’s Bourneville (1893), Rowntree’s New Earswick (1904) and Lever’s Port Sunlight (1914).¹⁸ The garden suburb was also a popularisation of Ebenzer Howards’ famous Garden Cities and his utopian mechanics of semi-urban living. Henrietta Barnett, a luminary of the influential Hampstead Garden Suburb, emphasised that is was a ‘national duty’ to demand ‘cottages surrounded with gardens, fruit trees, open spaces, rest-arbours for the old, and playing fields for the youth; flowering hedges, tree-lined roads’ for those living in crowded inner London. But such homes would not hark back to a mythical time, but would ‘grow the virtues’ required by the ‘complex needs of modern character’.¹⁹ While the garden suburb drew on a myth of an ancient green and pleasant England, a land of organic community, it fused this with modernity by emphasising improved domestic infrastructure, such as inside toilets and separate bathrooms. Suburbia’s utopian blueprint encapsulated a certain paradox, articulating a pared-down organic rurality through modern, rational, state-directed logics.²⁰

Paternalist concern for the urban poor, alloyed with commercial opportunity for the building industry and landowners, as well as the spectre of working-class political mobilisation, ushered in a period of unprecedented urban growth. Four...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Inheriting landscape: Suburban histories and the force of the past
• 2 Dig for Victory and the demands of remembering
• 3 Childhood, seed and beings of fiction: Becoming an authentic gardener
• 4 The possibilities of a plant
• 5 Awkward flourishing: Death of the unwanted
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Researching gardening in suburbia
• Appendix 2 Gardeners’ profile
• Appendix 3 Wartime domestic vegetable production data
• Bibliography
• Index