Why gardening has become more political than ever - Chelsea Flower Show 2016

What could possibly be more innocuous than a garden? The primary place for “pottering about”, the garden is the ultimate middle-class space to unwind, stealthily one-up the neighbours, and worry about unimportant minutiae such as when to prune the apple tree or how to attack an unsightly yellow patch of grass.

As the Chelsea Flower Show opens today, Kashmira Gander finds that, from anti-capitalist allotments to community protests, gardening has never been a more political act

Among gardeners happily trampling this stereotype, and a handful of others to boot, is Juliet Sargeant. The first black female designer to create a garden for the Chelsea Flower Show, she is using her exhibit in the Fresh category to raise awareness of modern slavery. At its centre is an oak representing the the “Wilberforce Oak”, the tree in Kent under which in 1787 William Pitt challenged his friend William Wilberforce to first bring abolition before parliament.

By bringing an issue such as slavery – certainly not typical dinnertime conversation – to the flower show, Sargeant not only highlights an important issue but draws attention to how the show is a symbol of the establishment. It is, after all, an event held in an exclusive area of one of the most expensive cities in the world: where space is at a premium and the housing crisis shows little sign of slowing.

If gardens are considered blank canvases of land on which to express the identity and tastes of a household or a city, they become undeniably political. Most obviously, gardens are bound to environmental issues, but also and more subtly to ideas of ownership, property and inequality.

“The domestic garden is your own small green patch of earth there’s deep micro-politics in how you treat that,” says George McKay, professor of media studies at the University of East Anglia and the author of Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism and Rebellion in the Garden.

The seemingly unimportant choice between keeping an immaculate lawn or a messy vegetable patch prompts a gardener to consider whether they should use chemicals or stay organic. The personal is political, and a gardener’s choices are comparable to opting for a vegan or a meat-eating lifestyle.

Professor Bryony Hoskins of the University of Roehampton’s department of social sciences, believes that political activities have become more individualised, and gardening is no exception. “A garden is a space where the personal and everyday merges into the public sphere, somewhere in between the privacy of your home and the street,” she says.

Perhaps gardens aren’t so personal after all. In certain neighbourhoods, an unkempt plot or a misplaced gnome can become a prickly issue, as anything damaging the pristine image of a street can affect all-important house prices.

Sara Jane Trebar is campaigning to save her local allotment in Watford, where ‘neighbours of all backgrounds, cultures and religions work side by side in peace’