The garden is a moral environment. The condition of your garden, like the state of your teeth or the details of your browsing history, is a reasonable indicator of the condition of your soul. A daily email with the best of our journalism Anyone who has poured themselves another late-night glass of wine instead of going out to pluck snails from the vegetable patch will know this. Even if you do your duty, rummaging in the dark and peeling little wet bodies from stalks and leaves, the ethical problems keep coming. Do you smash them on the patio? Rehouse them in some unweeded corner? Toss them into your neighbour’s garden under cover of darkness? If only God had thought about such questions when drafting the Ten Commandments. “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), grows dilemmas that few of us will encounter unless our plot of green contains a ring of nudists going down on a monster strawberry. Everyone in this image seems to be having a great time. The women, the men and the woodpeckers. But Bosch knew that where there were lawns and herbaceous borders, there was work to be done as well as pleasure to be had. Someone had to grow those flowers before the guy on all fours on the right-hand side of the central panel decided to get his kicks by inserting them into his anus. The Chelsea Flower Show opens in London this week, a hardy perennial of the horticultural landscape shunted from spring to autumn this year by the weight of covid-19. Its organisers are keenly aware of the moral and political dimension of gardening. In previous years, plots have blossomed to raise awareness about epilepsy, climate change and the women’s education movement in Zimbabwe. This year the show will celebrate the importance of gardens as a source of solace during the pandemic, for those of us lucky enough to have one. Perhaps it will also acknowledge their re-emergence as a marker of privilege. Not the wrong question to... |