Richard Sudell is the forgotten hero of the garden revolution in Britain between the First and Second World Wars. A Quaker, born in Lancashire in 1892, the son of a straw and hay merchant, he left school at 14 and became a gardener, working at Kew and going to prison in 1916 as a conscientious objector. After his first prison sentence he worked with the Vacant Land Cultivation Society, helping to create allotments for the poor of London. When the First World War was over he moved with his first wife to Roehampton. There he began writing a monthly gardening column in the Roehampton Estate Gazette his neighbors, most of whom had never had a garden before, on how to “beautify” the debris-strewn mud patches outside their new front and back doors. His columns were collected in his first book, The urban gardening handbook (1924), aimed at promoting horticulture in the innovative housing estates of the London County Council.
“Vegetable rats!” Humphrey Brooke shouted at a pair of neatly pruned yellow roses in a suburban front yard
A Sudell-inspired garden was structured, brightly coloured and labour-saving. It was not a ‘gardener’s garden’, where children, animals and games were taboo, but a small, practical space, easy to maintain on weekends. Sudell recommended firethorn, hanging baskets, manicured lawns, tea roses and pansies; he also advocated crazy paving and suggested that paths should be straight so that washing could be dried alongside them. The estate’s tenants lived under constant threat of eviction:
Back then, if your garden wasn’t in order, the caretaker would knock on your door in his bowler hat, striped trousers and umbrella – the treatment – and give you two weeks to sort it out. If not, it was goodbye.
by Michael Gilson Behind the privet hedge combines biography and social history to revive Sudell’s contribution to the ‘beautification’ of Britain. As secretary of the London Gardeners Guild, Sudell encouraged flower shows, lectures, competitions, communal ownership of garden tools and the purchase of discounted seeds and bulbs through the Guild. He began writing for Ideal home in 1928 and moved to the Daily Herald in 1930, where his columns had a readership of two million. The English garden, Sudell believed, should be a space where the household could rest or read and “take their meals in the open air.” His book Landscape architecture (1933) advocated extending the beautification project beyond the privet hedge to factories, hotels, golf courses, roadsides, and gas stations. On eBay it is still possible to buy a complete set of Sudell’s 50 Wills cigarette cards with practical advice on growing flowers from ageratum to zinnia.
The backlash against the suburbs was fierce and immediate. ‘It is estimated that the combined development of private and municipal housing between the wars produced over 500,000 acres of new gardens,’ Gilson writes. But many deplored or mocked the vulgar tastes of the suburbanites: their ritualised visits to garden centres, the cheap furniture, the water features and the garden gnomes that adorned their tiny Edens. Edith Sitwell compared DH Lawrence to ‘a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in a suburban garden’. Gilson notes the snobbery that burst from Sitwell’s ‘suburban garden’ that she could not even find, and the irony of Lawrence’s own hatred of suburban houses, which he called ‘horrid little red rattraps’. Gilson points out that in the heated debate over whether the suburbs should take over Albion, the actual residents of the new garden cities had no voice. Sudell stood up for them.
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Richard Mabey is at the other end of the gardening spectrum to Sudell. Best known as a nature writer since his first book Free food (1972), revered as the author of the plant bible Flora Britannica and other inspirational books, his many readers probably don’t see him as a gardener at all—more as an advocate for a new, non-dominant understanding of the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. His latest book, The accidental gardenis centred around the Norfolk garden that he and his wife Polly have been curating over the past 20 years.
During the 2022 heatwave, Mabey and his wife felt “more vulnerable, less responsible for our own territory.” The strange feeling of gardening during a climate emergency was compounded by perceptions of obsolescence, and Mabey’s recent reliance on a stick, “the first tool of the natural world… my instrument of minimal intervention.” As Mabey accepted that their garden would have to adapt to the changing climate, she reflected on their intentions when they moved into their home 20 years ago. “It now feels disrespectful how casually we treated the things of our predecessors, since we assumed without question that whatever we planned would last forever.” The garden they inherited included “an island bed of azaleas and hebes” that they condemned, along with the other cultivated beds “on which we quickly began to mete out death sentences.”
Towards the end of his meditative book is a chapter entitled ‘Rose-Tinted’, in which Mabey describes taking his friend Humphrey Brooke, an art historian, curator and renowned collector of shrub roses at Lime Kiln, to the local pub. On the way they passed a suburban front garden with a number of neatly pruned yellow roses from a garden centre, at which Brooke, to the astonishment of the proprietor who had been clearing away the dead flowers, shouted: ‘Vegetable rats!’ Mabey observes:
It was a spectacular tantrum, and a very strange name for a class of roses whose worst sin is perhaps to have a little bling. But I could see what he didn’t like about them – their waxy petals and brash colours, and an absence of what you might call the essence of russeting – that wild, unkempt, intoxicatingly perfumed fandango of crumpled silk petals and tangled thorn.
Mabey wisely acknowledges that ‘the whole saga of the rose dynasty is an epic tale of social and cultural history’. The old roses he favours in his own garden are Fantin Latour, Willie Lobb, Omar Khayyam and the White Rose of York. Of course he has no room for the shocking pink masses of Dorothy Perkins or the hybrid tea rose Mrs Sam McGredy. James Bartholomew’s Yew and non-yew (1998), which extends Nancy Mitford’s ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’ distinction to the horticultural world, is still relevant. Marigolds and dahlias are Non-U, peonies are U, in case you were wondering. Garden snobbery will never go away, even if we’re all gardening against the apocalypse now.
