IF Peter Rabbit were to wander into the gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show this week he wouldn’t need to be concerned about being put in a pie, just snagging his tail on a gargoyle or banging his head on an enormous billiard ball. Sixty years ago it was a case of “digging for victory” in the English garden; it abounded with plump cabbages and parsnips, every one of which was helping to defeat the Hun by supplanting vital food supplies lost in U-boat attacks in the mid-Atlantic.

Nowadays, though, it is more of a case of digging for vanity. In the modern English garden you don’t hear the blackbirds tweeting so much as the sound of egos clashing as they compete to produce the most luxuriantly funded wasteland.

If the silliness were confined to the Chelsea Flower Show it wouldn’t be a problem, but everybody seems to be at it these days: spending thousands of pounds on groundworks on their garden and then filling them with several tons of woodwork, metalwork and multicoloured pebbles — with perhaps a little room left for the odd plant or two.

Look over my back fence in rural Cambridgeshire and it is a sea of swing chairs, rockeries and barbecues. But it is far worse in the suburbs. In Surrey it seems to have become the norm to floodlight your veranda and to toast the lawn with gas heaters. No wonder the birds have stopped singing: a recent study revealed that the poor things have been dying from exhaustion because they can no longer tell the difference between night and day.





IN the average Essex garden the only wildlife you are ever likely to see is the leathery bodies of motor dealers and their wives frolicking naked in their hot tubs. The entire country has been invaded by naked statuettes flashing their cement buttocks in the manner of The Three Graces. And to think that we used to laugh at Johnny Major and his gnomes.

Back in the 1970s it was in our living rooms that we used to show off by filling them with ghastly novelties such as lava lamps and bean bags. Nowadays, the interiors of our homes are a picture of restraint and the rubbish has migrated to our gardens. I suppose in one sense it is logical: put a lava lamp in your living room and it might be seen by a couple of hundred people in a year but put an illuminated fountain on your front lawn and it will be seen by several thousand a week. If you want to make an idiot of yourself, gardening is the quickest and surest way of doing it.

What’s wrong with a lawn set among a few trees and flowers? There isn’t enough money in them for the garden centre industry, that’s what. Recently I went to my local garden centre to try to buy a new lawnmower. A lawnmower in a garden centre? “No, sorry sir, we don’t stock them,” I was told. They did have an ample supply of solar- powered fountains, £300 barbecue stands and uPVC balustrades.

How, other than by selling us ornaments, can garden centres stay in business when the English garden is getting smaller and smaller? There is little need for a lawnmower on an average housing estate these days; a pair of nail scissors will do. And now that John Prescott demands that all new homes should be built at a density of between 30 and 50 to the hectare, the English garden is soon going to be reduced to a window box adorned with a gnome and a fountain.

I’m half tempted to work myself into a state of anger about John Prescott’s planning edict. How dare he lay down the law about the size of our gardens and so deprive me of the chance of ever owning a garden large enough in which to play croquet, let alone a scratch game of cricket? But when I think of the thousands of acres of dappled lawns that disappear each year beneath multicoloured paving slabs and wooden decking I have to say that maybe it is a good idea that the British gardener be rationed for space.





Ross Clark writes on property issues

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