Heavenly Dishevelment: A Guide to Effortless Good Taste

Let’s start with a story. A short story about a garden writer. We’ll call him Benjamin. And why ever not? It’s exactly the name given to boys who become garden writers: I know at least four. But to avoid confusion, we’ll pronounce it Spanish style, Ben-hah-meen. He was Ben-hah-meen Oscuro.

Benjamin Oscuro wrote a book. One of those small journals of everyday wonder: ‘aren’t plants interesting? Isn’t life beautiful? Gosh, how nice is blossom?’ We know the type. On Publication Thursday (books are published on a Thursday) the work swam out with some 300 others, to enjoy life as literature’s newest things. Bliss it was that week to be alive! But the next Thursday brought 350 younger books. And seven days later, 300 more, and so on, until the first books were buried like coccoliths in a Cretaceous sea: just a tiny layer in those white cliffs of Pages Written and Pages Unread.

Benjamin Oscuro was luckier than most. His publisher sent the book far and wide. One day it surfaced in a celebrity sitting room.

No typos here. Not a celebrity’s sitting room, A Celebrity Sitting Room. The room was the star. Floored in bright rugs, roofed in bent beams, lived in and lovely. It had 125,000 followers on social media. Benjamin Oscuro could see why. Serious chairs under exuberant cushions. Books everywhere; stacked on tables and piled from the floor. One wall seemed made of them. And in front of the books: pictures. Pictures leaning on the books and hung on the very shelves; boats in sail under varnish-yellow skies; crayons, charcoals, pastels and prints. ‘If I lived there’ thought Benjamin Oscuro, ‘I would be a better person’.

But most perfect were the flowers - blooms of the most heavenly dishevelment. Nasturtiums in flaming velvet; sweet peas cut on the vine, tendrils rampant, so obviously home-grown and organic that the magazines below must have crawled with pollen beetles. Some days saw foxgloves on three foot of stem, or mugs of kale leaves, or cow parsley, blessed blessed humble umbel, blocking windows and greening all with the light of a sunken lane. Every arrangement seemed to say: 'what’s a refrigerated logistics chain? I grew by the back door'.

And there, under the dropping petals of some long stem tulips, was the book, plucked from its publicity envelope and topping a stack. The publisher was euphoric! 'Do I see a copy of Benjamin Oscuro's new book!?' They commented. But the room answered not. The book remained through spring and summer, under peonies then roses. Eventually it moved to the shelves, top left… unopened. But Benjamin Oscuro does not mind. He’s happy under the room’s enchantment, that’s his life now: looking at his phone, waiting for a new vase, posting heart-eyes each time the pelargoniums switch table.

And the publisher? They’ve just come out with a new book. Beautifully photographed and bound. It’s about a familiar room in some cottage in the country, with bright rugs on the floor, bent beams on the ceiling and flowers for every day of the year.

Grounds warfare

Obviously, the above is fiction; it’s not as if both books are available in all good bookshops. But there is truth to the tale. The room, hypothetical as it may be, is the kind that deserves a hefty publishing deal. It sits in the vanguard of style; proof that the classiest interiors are curated not designed. These are spaces that brook no coordinated colours, no furniture sets, no beige and no right angles. Yes, they say, to profusion, yes to found-sculpture and vintage wallpaper, to tapestry, books and dogs, but let the dogs be old and always on the sofa!

This look is not new. Its how the decrepit old aristos are supposed to live: in a mess of heirloom and lurcher. And that’s exactly the point. I’m sorry to get sociological, and please keep in mind this is unequivocally my decor of choice, but all that colourful clutter is a status symbol. Forget the obvious brag of a luxury car; that just needs money, we’re talking about a more exclusive elite: those with cultural capital. The walls of art, the home-cut flowers, they loudly proclaim: 'we are people who know how to live in beautiful buildings, who are worthy of living in beautiful buildings - who belong in beautiful buildings'.

Here, on a small aesthetic battlefield, somewhere to edge of the wider class war, the objet trouvé is a weapon and the tower of books is a weapon. That mug of hopelessly mismatched daffodils? It’s practically a machete.

As you might have guessed, this week I’ve been reading Pierre Bourdieu. Specifically, Distinction, a book with its argument in its title: the food, art and decor we enjoy are not selected for the pleasure they bring, but because they are distinct; distinct from the things that other people enjoy, people who are not like us, people who are (whisper it) less than us…

… and yes, of course, the same applies to gardens.

Dirty marmalade people

But we already knew that. Back in 1996 James Bartholomew published Yew & Non-Yew, a horticultural riff on the notion that there are U (upper class) and Non-U (non-upper class) words that betray one’s position on the social ladder; a notion given air in Nancy Mitford’s ‘The English Aristocracy’. (Unsurprisingly, Mitford’s original is wittier than its parody. It’s also more interesting on gardens, despite giving them three sentences. Here’s the Hon. Nancy complaining that the modern lord: ‘fiddles about with herbaceous borders, one of the most hideous conceptions known to man. He never seems to plant anything larger than a flowering prunus, never builds ornamental bridges, or digs lakes, or adds wings to his house.’) Bartholomew suggests that ‘tasteful’ gardens spring from ‘the upper-class person’s wish to imagine himself a nineteenth or eighteenth-century squire’. Which is just wrong, the tasteful upper-class person wishes to imagine themselves an antiquarian poet-peasant or a slightly under-washed Bloomsbury jam-maker.

Bourdieu recognised the type back in ’79. He noticed that it was not enough simply to own an old country house:

‘one must also appropriate it… acquire trophies, the secrets of fishing, the skills of gardening, competences which are both ancient and slowly learned, like cooking… A pot of ‘home-made gherkins’, ‘made to grandma’s recipe’ and brought to the table with the appropriate verbal accompaniment — as when exhibiting the ‘little picture by an eighteenth century French master’ spotted at the antique-dealer’s, or the ‘exquisite little piece of furniture’ unearthed in a junk shop — symbolises a squandering of time and a competence which can only be acquired by long frequentation of old, cultivated people and things.’

All very good and true, but what we want to know, we social climbers and arrivistes, is: how does one go about creating a fully-weaponised garden of taste?

The key lies in Bourdieu’s squandering of time. Such gardens should never be consciously 'low-maintenance', for that implies a paucity of hours - probably true, but not in keeping with our image of innate, effortless and leisured discernment - there’s no place for streamlined efficiencies in this fantasy of kale and tulip, so take your ‘rise and grind mindset’ back to Hammersmith. Gardens should be high-maintenance but never highly maintained. There should be vegetable plots and cut-flower beds, but give us weeds within; chicory gone to flower, umbels in the apple trees; nothing neat, nothing edged, nothing tidy. Our garden should say: “yes, I suppose we could mow, but why, when there are friends for lunch and a forgotten church to visit?”

Time is important beyond its squandering. We should think of our gardens as four dimensional spaces - with time as the fourth and most romantic. In effective garden design, it something to be played with as much as colour or texture. Flowers raise goosebumps when slapped on a stack of books because they are new and alive and books (with apologies to any authors) are fossilised. Roses blooming on ancient stone, orchards of gnarled trunks over nodding daffs, York stone slabs spangled with Erigeron, all do the same. They mesh the quick and the dead, the old and the young and give us the beauty shivers. It is the temporal equivalent to hitting the ‘high, low’ registers; a trick beloved of the cultural cognoscenti; who pair art and antiques with obscene postcards and bleached Polaroids.

For those without storied trees or ancient walls, all is not lost. Read Husbandry by Isabel Bannerman, a lovely account of Isabel and Julian Bannerman’s move to a new garden. Immediately, they blow the entire budget on a group of monumental yew cones, tall as a house. But no need to worry; the topiary has an aura of age and ancestral-belonging so profound that it legitimises, and even encourages, the strewing of cheap, gap-filling seeds.

The Bannermans provide another example: despite being garden designers, their own garden appears entirely undesigned. In the book it emerges piecemeal, product of wandering around with thoughts and a spade. Not the striving result of pens and paper and VectorWorks, but a sort of efflorescence of innate good taste. This is what one must aim for, even if it means asking a professional to make it all look charmingly mismatched. Everything must present as the result of two decades’ worth of stupid and inspired ideas, never of mood-boards and masterplans.

The final part of a tasteful garden is the plants. Herbaceous species should be wild and profuse, they are your obscene postcards. Woody things need more attention, they are your antiques. Heed Bourdieu and think of them as treasures, each equivalent to portraits hewn from a flea-market. They should have provenance: found in that creepy nursery on the drive down from Arbroath; or gifted by dear old Penny Picklewraith; or dug by headlamp from a hedge. There is a hierarchy of shrubs to learn. Ugly, winter-scented things are near its top. That’s why, if I ever get a chance to name a plant, I’ll choose something fragrant, floppy and large. I’ll call it Lornicera ‘Shibboleth’. Then I’ll die, and for years afterward the right sort of people will say, 'oh that old thing? It’s a shibboleth. We dropped in for lunch with old Benjamin Oscoro on our way to see the font at Sizewell and he snuck us a cutting.'

What a gorgeous way to be remembered! Particularly for a man who has never existed…