A paradoxical appreciation of the ordinary

In this Garden Therapy essay, I explore a perspective brought by a long career in design, and an appreciation of the ordinary that can only come from having experienced some utterly extraordinary gardens. I discovered Mary Keen's work through James Alexander-Sinclair's interview with her for the Garden Collective (I highly recommend a listen once you have finished reading this), and I immediately bought her book, Diary of a Keen Gardener, and devoured it.

As tends to happen, as soon as I became aware of Mary, I found her everywhere. In Country Life and Gardens Illustrated, even on Gardeners' World. I was intrigued, and I was utterly delighted when Mary agreed to be interviewed for Garden Therapy.

Dear Mary,

The visit

I must start with my gratitude. My gratitude for your time and your generosity, for the conversation that ranged not just far and wide, but also into a depth that feels so rare in these rushed days and superficial and transactional social exchanges. For the soup and the salad, which captured that perfect moment where the colder season merges into spring, and where we start to hope that future meals will be taken outdoors, at the tin table by the wicker bench, looking at your huge magnolia tree.

My gratitude is all the sharper for the sense that your garden is a haven, and a space of very personal creativity and pleasure. I know this from your book, but to be with you amongst the vividity of the Corfu blue honesty and the freshness of the primroses, I felt it all the more. I have had the sensation so many times of seeing my own garden through the eyes of others (usually fifteen minutes before guests arrive and suddenly all of the scruffier patches, or the trugs that I have left out, abandoned mid-weed to go and cook, seem to stand out in sharp relief) but I think that this was one of the first times I have been able to see another’s garden through the eyes of its gardener.

Yours is, of course, a plantswoman’s garden. I know Joe called it that, but I know it too. The spacing and the rhythm, and the use of colour and form. The curves and the shape of the beds and the paths that led me into the corners and the edges, to look out and then in. But it is also a village garden, of a certain size, with neighbours and noises, and I know you won’t mind me saying this, it is an ‘ordinary’ garden.

Now, the reason that this is a letter and not a recording of our conversation is because we covered topics that are beyond what we would necessarily wish to share unedited. But perhaps this being a letter and not a recording is better somehow, because I think it means something that certain bits have stuck in my mind, and I have returned to them over and over again.

The ideas

We talked about death, and how loss changes us, and how it doesn’t.

We talked about being visible, and invisible, and being too visible. Our views of self-promotion and those of others. (I don’t think we covered gender enough in this part of the conversation; I would love to return to it sometime.)

We talked about how the extraordinarily rich and famous garden and why, and a bit about Chelsea.

And this is where it got really interesting. Not because of the eye-popping celebrity of your client list, but because you are so utterly and fabulously unfazed by them and all the accoutrements of that world. Not only that, but your career in working in such a way has left you with a deep appreciation for the ordinary.

I sense you shine a light on an uncomfortable truth, which is that we so often revere the extraordinary. We are encouraged to value only the gardens that are designed to dazzle, and photographed at 5am by a famous photographer, manicured within an inch of its life, by an actual ordinary gardener who never seems to get a mention in the credits.

We both live in small houses, crammed with books, but as I scan my shelves, I see only those that are beyond my reach and the reach of many others. The gardens of Arne Maynard, or those in Winter Gardens. (There’s an overlap.) Dixter. Piet Oudolf’s gardens. Even Perch Hill, Sarah Raven’s garden.

Few of them reflect my everyday experience of my own garden and the act of gardening. More than that, the everyday experience of being in my own garden.

Your book does. Maybe my book does. I hope mine does, but maybe I wasn’t brave enough then to allow myself to let the ordinariness show. We’re so brainwashed to believe that only the extraordinary, the beautiful, the perfect are worthy of celebration that it seems positively radical to share the gardens that we all recognise and relate to. The plants that didn’t make it. The pots that somehow don’t look quite right. The magnolia that lost its petals in a storm.

As we drove to Garden and Wood, you talked about how it isn’t only gardens that seem to fall into the ordinary/extraordinary trap. It is people. The designers, the head gardeners, and the owners are feted, and the people who dig the bindweed and strim the edges are not. The shape of the garden that is maintained over months and years by labour and attention seems to matter so much less than the vision that once was dreamed, until the dreamer moved on. The work is done by others, and there is little appreciation for their toil.

I thought a lot about this whilst I watched Chelsea; armies of diggers and planters and landscapers in high viz were needed to bring one designer’s vision to life, but they didn’t seem to make it onto Gardeners' World.

The lesson

Which brings me back to your garden, and what it taught me about my garden. I started this letter by calling your garden a village garden, but what I really wanted to call it was a domestic garden. A garden in which the dreamer and the visionary and the digger and the weeder and the client are all in the same person.

I knocked on your door, and I came through the cross passage of your home, through the kitchen and into the garden. The home and the kitchen and the garden were all of the same tone, because they were all yours. Earthy, with sprigs of colour. Flowers on the table, lifting details to eye level for extra appreciation. The greenhouse with the path that passes through so we could stroke the pelargoniums on the way to the magnolia. We bent down to look at the fritillaria and I bemoaned the dryness of my ground which means that they fail to thrive despite my best efforts and I flirted with the sin of envy.

Envy of the honey-coloured Cotswold stone and the miniature house at the end of the garden. Envy of your sense of colour and texture that seems to come so naturally when I have to try. I wondered what my garden would say about me. A thatched cottage containing high ambition and barely concealed chaos. Bindweed in the strawberries and dust and dog hair on the rickety stairs. Keys in the fruit bowl and every vase of flowers from the garden surrounded by a halo of shed petals.

What I envy the most though is your absolute sense of yourself. That appreciation of the ordinary is an expression of your belief that this is where the extraordinary lies. Not in the glitz and the glamour of celebrity clients or Chelsea designers, but in the garden and the home that you made.

I always thought that the solution to envy would be to create something extraordinary, to feel like I had won some sort of unspoken competition by having a photograph of my flower field in Gardens Illustrated, and then I wouldn’t feel any discontentment at all. This is so absurd that I feel silly putting it into words because of course, this isn’t how happiness works.

Happiness is in falling in love with what you have. It is soup and salad and a good conversation.

It is flowers on the table, always, and a view of the garden from the kitchen window.

To be happy every day, I will cultivate a deep appreciation of the ordinary.

I hope you had a wonderful day at Chelsea, and that you were just as pleased to get home again,

Grace

What do you think? Have I discovered the secret of happiness? Can you embrace the ordinary in your garden...?