Gardeners dig in against a growth of horticultural officialdom
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Monty Don, the television plantsman, asked this week: “When did the term horticulturalist replace gardener? And why?” He may well ask, for he has put his green finger on a trend that goes far beyond the herbaceous border.
“Oh, Adam was a gardener,” declared Kipling in The Glory of the Garden. So he was. The poet also observed that “Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made / By singing: – ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade.” Right again.
I think we can put on one side the question of whether Kipling was a colonialist, ripe to be weeded from respectable bookshelves and thrown on the bonfire. One could as easily approach the matter from the Lefty outlook of John Ball, the 14th-century demagogue, asking: “When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?”
He might have added as a supplementary: “Who was then the Human Resources Compliance Officer?” For gardening is connatural with humanity and is not the gift of bossy authorities. Any of us may cultivate our own garden without a licence or online health and safety qualification, though faceless officialdom fires up its computer power to prevent us.
I heard someone on the wireless talking about a licence to grow seaweed, and I wondered who had invented that. I can’t remember if Magna Carta mentions it. Investigation reveals that the Crown Estate claims the right to license “any form of seaweed activity”. It claims ownership of most territory below the high tide mark. You can’t so much pop a piece of bladderwrack without official permission. This turns on its head the music-hall song You Can Do A Lot Of Things at the Seaside (That You Can’t Do In Town).
The word horticulturalist belongs on the polysyllabic theoretical, official, municipal, bureaucratic and restrictive side of raising plants. But the nation’s favourite hobby is not horticulture but gardening – practical, amateur, private, paperless and free.
The funniest reaction to Monty Don came from Horticulture Week, which rounded up a dozen horticulturists to denounce him for “degrading” the word horticulturist. The argument would have been more convincing had not the periodical changed its name some time ago to HortWeek.
Yes, Hort for short. Maybe a focus group had forecast it would boost circulation. Some Like It Hort. It’s the Hort that counts. It’ll sell like Hort cakes.
Meanwhile Farmers Weekly has felt no urge to reduce its name to AgWeek.
Samuel Johnson didn’t put the word horticulturist into his dictionary, let alone horticulturalist, which still doesn’t find a place in the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary.
Only in 1818 did horticulturist come into the language. Even that lovable word-coiner Sir Thomas Browne, publishing a work in 1658 on “the Quincuncial Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, naturally, artificially, mystically considered”, made its main title The Garden of Cyrus.
What do we call the world’s largest botanical collection? Kew Gardens, or the Royal Botanic Gardens at its most formal. It is not the National Horticultural Resource Centre. Its elder brother is the Chelsea Physic Garden, founded 1673. Oxford Botanic Garden had already been going for half a century then. Every one of them a garden, a lovesome thing, God wot. Horticulture on the whole is not.
