WHEN SOMETHING as vegetative as gardening can be compared to rock’n’roll, or even a “guerrilla” action, I am afraid that we have seriously lost the plot. George Orwell long since described the British as “a nation of flower lovers”. But the (horti-)cultural obsession is now growing wildly out of control.

The Royal Horticultural Society show at Chelsea, which ends today, has become a sort of national fashion week for flowers, a rockery festival exciting more coverage each year. Even this sensible paper hailed gardening as “the new rock’n’roll”, picturing the ex-Blur bassist making a proper peony of himself wielding a garden fork like a guitar. The BBC boasts about “live and interactive” coverage from Chelsea, as if it was offering instant action replays of the grass growing. During one action-packed outside broadcast, a professional photographer of flora suggested that his was “the most exciting job in the world”. The Guild of Drying Paint Watchers might demur.

Hay fever notwithstanding, I don’t actually dislike gardens. Kew or Hampton Court are a delight. But there is something rotten in the UK plot today.

Gardening has gone from being a private hobby to a public hobbyhorse, draining more and more time and money. Once it was a respite from the hurly-burly of life; as Voltaire’s Candide had it, whatever happened in the world “we must cultivate our garden”. Far from being a retreat, it is advancing way beyond the garden gate, a private pastime blossoming to fill the gap as our public and political life withers.

It is no longer deemed enough for Chelsea exhibits to provide eye-candy for champagne-quaffers. Now they are expected to display a social conscience, raising awareness as well as plants. This year’s themes of horticultural correctness apparently included drought, global warming, HIV/Aids in Africa, healthy eating, skin cancer and child protection.

Meanwhile far away from Chelsea, in the grimmer corners of our cities, hit squads of young people engage in “guerrilla gardening” — late night raids to “liberate” bits of wasteland by planting shrubs and ornamental grass. This is what youth activism has come to in our gardener’s world, not so much storming the barricades as weeding them. These rebels without herbaceous borders will be breaking the hosepipe ban next.

As Margaret Atwood, the Canadian writer, put it, gardening “is not a rational act”. But we Brits are tolerant of eccentricity. Like the madness of Big Brother contestants, however, the grubby personal habits of gardeners should be kept behind locked gates, away from view. It is one thing for a middle-aged lady to be cleared of indecent exposure this week for disporting undressed in her back garden, quite another for those naked ladies making an exhibitionist of themselves at the Chelsea Flower Show to have their blooms displayed all over the media. It is time to dig in against the greenhouse effect of gardening-mania, before it produces a permanent vegetative state.

• THE LATEST mad ideas to combat child obesity are to weigh all four and ten-year olds, and ban whole milk as well as chips and chocolate from schools. Welcome to the regime of the Tuckshop Taleban. Like the Afghan version, this powerful clique of zealots seems to believe that a person’s moral wellbeing can be physically measured — not by the length of their beard or hemline, but by their body mass index. And they will not allow facts to get in the way of their fervent beliefs.
  
  The Government’s own health advisers have said that the mass weigh-in can only stigmatise overweight kids and provoke anxiety among children and parents. Headmasters have said that policies of “gastronomic Puritanism” in schools drive children out to chip shops. There remain considerable doubts over the supposed “epidemic” of childhood obesity, or the actual long-term health effects of being overweight as a child.
  
  Yet the Tuckshop Taleban are sure in their hearts that sin and decadence are everywhere. My own London borough’s director of public health recently complained of fast-food chicken shops luring children into obesity. “Wouldn’t it be great,” she reportedly concluded, “if we could blow them all up?” Isn’t it great to know that the health of our children is in such reasonable hands?
  
  
  
  Mick.Hume@spiked-online.com

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