Abstract
Suburban garden writing in cultural geography is not as common as you might expect, given how gardens mediate private intimate spaces of home and wider, more public, worlds of nature and society. Domestic Wild, as the title suggests, explores this conjunctive territory, considering English suburban gardens not as manicured, cosy retreats but as dynamic, sometimes unruly arenas in which major issues of nature and culture are articulated, or rather, to use one of the book’s pet verbs, ‘entangled’. The cover illustration is of a slug, and not just any slug, but the fast breeding, big eating Spanish Slug, Arion vulgaris, first spotted in England in the Spring of 2012, perhaps arriving in imported salad leaves.
Domestic Wild fits into a tradition of interpretative writing on gardens, in which down-to-earth matters of planting and pest control are related to high-minded questions of knowledge and power, the voices of practical gardeners mixed with those of academic theorists and philosophers. There is often, as here, a strong gothic strain to this writing, looking on the darker side of domestic landscapes, the killing part of cultivation, the Serpent in Eden and the worm in the bud.
Domestic Wild ranges far and wide to invoke some 30 authors in the cosmopolitan cultural theory pantheon from Adorno to Žižek, most of whom are not noted for their knowledge of gardens or suburbs. The effect, in re-imagining horticultural spaces, is rather like those symbolic gardens, on paper as well as on the ground (the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay comes to mind), in which statues of literary and philosophical figures, or their mottoes in monuments, are sited on the lawn or by the vegetable patch, or frame the wider landscape. These thinkers tend to crowd out the key human figures in the making and meaning of suburban gardens, the gardeners themselves. This is surprising as the book is ‘rooted in research’ with ‘committed gardeners’ (p. 10) in the outer suburbs of London, conducted over 2 years, including interviews, tours of gardens and access to family memorabilia, including old photographs and garden plans. The exception, and the best chapter for it, is the one on childhood, in which eloquent quotations from gardeners and some telling images are brought critically to bear on theoretical writing, in this case Ricoeur’s work on narrative. The last chapter too, on struggles with slugs, comes to life, as the gardeners ponder practical and ethical matters.
Elsewhere in Domestic Wild the gardens in question are departure points for investigative excursions in 20th century garden culture, with some sceptical views of the wartime Dig for Victory campaign, or the more recent cult of the Garden Centre and Makeover Television programme. There are some revelations on the way, for example, new to me, a prize-winning painting by James Tucker exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1941, titled Champion, of a prize winning giant cauliflower, symbol of the home front war effort.