19.3.25 – a front garden is a contribution

Over the winter, I looked up from my dissatisfaction with the half-hearted, half-finished front garden and it clicked. If I designed the space toward being a publicly-obvious hedgehog haven, I could solve myriad issues in one fell swoop: the hedge-y corner with the wild cherry tree and cotoneaster will stay and get bulked out with a hazel and a small log pile; the pond will go beside it where the sun lingers; the pear tree will be joined by an apple tree which will all be underplanted with things that attract caterpillars and make good habitat for beetles; and the conversation with neighbours will be guided by a purposeful script about hedgehog conservation. Specifically, how easy it is to help by not using weedkillers and leaving some grass to grow long. It should only take a few years for the perennials to grow large and leafy enough for us to get some of the privacy I’ve yearned for. The dog only ever passes through the front when on a lead, so it’s safe for the hedgehogs to explore. And most of it won’t require being out front daily; just often enough to chat with neighbours when I truly feel up to it.

A perfect situation, albeit one so simple that it bothered me I hadn’t thought of it before. When we moved into this house in July 2022, we came from a ground floor tenement flat that, until it was unjustly destroyed by the landlord for building works, had a lush front garden a mere 2.5 by 5 metres big. It was an unexpected adjustment to now have a front garden twice the size of the old one and a private back garden a good 13 metres long and 7 metres wide. After years living side-by-side with other growers who used every scrap of precious land available to them, it seemed outrageous to me that most of the houses in my new neighbourhood did nothing at all with their front gardens except keep the gravel and paving clear of volunteer plants. But despite my incredulity, I spent the next couple years focusing entirely on the back, removing the fake grass installed by the previous owners and establishing an edible polyculture. The front garden – an empty square divided by the front path, full of pebble gravel and bordered by a shrubby partition of rampant cherry laurel, pyracantha, and close-fisted tea roses – was easy to neglect. At first, with the dream of the back garden being realised, I simply felt overwhelmed by all the possibilities of what the front could be: romantic cottage garden with dahlias and forget-me-nots! productive vegetable garden with raised beds! miniature orchard with roses! But with time, the suburban sensibility of our new street was made apparent to me, and I felt the pressure of neighbouring eyes on our happy weeds and haphazard efforts at growing squashes. Every new idea for the front suddenly did not feel like a possibility, but like a reaction: sometimes, one of optimistic encouragement; but more often than I would like, a passive-aggressive rebuke against my neighbours’ paved gardens and knee-jerk use of glyphosate.

It was only after the hedgehog haven crystallised in my mind that I realised I’d been holding my shoulders a certain way in the front garden; that I felt, from many angles, unpleasantly defensive in it. In retrospect, I don’t think this feeling should have come as such a surprise. It’s a prickly, ungenerous sensation but it certainly isn’t an unfamiliar one. Until we moved to this house, every garden I had before was a tiny, public-facing project made in the margins of pathways or squeezed into land the size of a parking space. The defensive posture grew out of being a perennial renter, living with the constant low-level anxiety about my growing spaces being taken away, damaged, or destroyed. I was defensive against temperamental and arrogant landlords, careless landscapers, glyphosate-spraying council workers, and the kind of infrastructure that discourages land engagement versus the hands-off “access to green space”. But I increasingly found myself defensive about passers-by and neighbours too. For me, an unknowingly autistic introvert at the time, it was an intense struggle to manage my desire to be alone in the garden with the reality of constant interruption: at a harmless level, from cheerful, well-liked neighbours on their way in or out; more annoyingly, from curious passers-by who lingered too long and wanted to share their belief in various conspiracy theories; and at the most anxiety-producing, from one particular neighbour who was either screaming at me in the open that I was mentally unwell or trying to love-bomb us with strange offerings and gifts for the dog. If I wanted to pot on and plant out in a solitary flow state, I had to go out around 6am, before the unspoken post-7am-eye-contact rule came into force.

In our new house, the defensiveness receded but did not disappear. I still felt anxious about neighbourhood chat, but that’s just me with all new and unplanned conversation. I still felt righteously indignant about landlords, but this is an anger shared by everyone I know. Then, early on, a strange and outrageous conflict with neighbours down the street made it clear to us that our garden was being observed and harshly judged. At the time, the front was full of (neatly stacked) pallets and some other rubbish from the shitlawn-removal in the back, and I had not bothered to weed some volunteer plants that sprung from the gravel and delighted me. The front garden was namechecked and it was said outright that this is a nice street and we don’t belong here. It didn’t much matter to my brain that all our immediate neighbours are friendly people who have been nothing but welcoming and patient with the front garden’s evolution, or that the people doing the accusing were cruelly overreacting. The defensiveness rose up indignantly as I recognised the language of front-garden-as-class-signifier that I hadn’t been speaking, had never learned to speak, and felt suddenly tasked with learning due to our permanence in this place. Whether or not I was conscious of it, resentment and defensiveness have shaped my relationship with the front garden ever since.

What is even the point of a front garden and this tedious suburban language of tidiness and conformity if everyone is simply going to pave theirs over to park their giant SUVs on it? Or halfway astroturf it so it looks like a shitty carpet? Or cover it in gravel and spray the audacious volunteer plants with poison every time they poke their heads up? In a particularly irate mood, I Google searched “British front garden”, and lamented that the first results were RHS pages exploring how to turn one’s front garden in a parking space without paving over it or forgoing plant life. There was nothing about urban front gardens, or what it’s like to grow in a very public-facing way. It took a long time to get to any kind of literature that truly elucidated for me what the social function of the British front garden used to be or might be again, which is, very simply: an aesthetic and ecological contribution to the collective production of place.

For a century, the place being produced was the suburban or village neighbourhood, whose residents sought to communicate something meaningful about their economic class and social values both to each other and to visitors through the medium of flowers and hedging. But with the intense rise of individualism following Thatcher’s reign and the domination of larger and larger cars, the idea of the front garden as a contribution has been lost. There are, of course, many functional benefits to a front garden that remain: it plays a valuable role in setting the home back from the road, creating privacy and reducing noise/pollution. When used as an actual garden, it creates permeable greenspace next to hard surfaces, which prevents flooding in our increasingly rainy seasons and lowers temperatures in our intensifying heat waves. And in other parts of the world, where porches are built onto houses and community plays a larger role in domestic life, it’s a useful space for fostering connections and welcoming people into the home. But in the UK, where “tidy” spaces signify social courtesy, regardless of how lifeless they ultimately are, the only kind of place being collectively produced is one beset by extreme weather events, wildlife extinction and endangerment, and the collapse of our climate as we know it. For many of us, this is not a contribution made consciously; ecological literacy is at an all-time low, and many well-meaning people simply don’t know the power they hold as landowners. But for even more of us, the contribution we would have made is stolen when renters’ use of land is unfairly restricted by landlords, and new developments omit front gardens altogether. They don’t even include drying greens for flats these days.

To see my own front garden as a contribution is both clarifying and confronting. It begs the question of me, who am I contributing to? What am I contributing? To what end? It forces me to see myself not just within the non-human community of this place (a community I generally feel more comfortable in the company of), but within the human collective of this neighbourhood. It refines other questions I have asked of myself about what my role is in the resistance to fascism and how I’m best situated to support fellow immigrants, disabled folk, and queer kin. It forces me to confront my own inherited individualism that makes me feel like, if I can be slightly more self-sufficient, then we’ll be ok. Most of all, it reframes my perspective on the front garden from one of defensive boundary-setting to one of connection and invitation. For me, the word “contribution” brings to mind the potlucks of my childhood, where the generosity of hosting a meal or a party was supported by everyone bringing a dish to share. The idea that I am contributing something massively lessens the burden of the front-garden-as-obligation that I felt before. Now, I feel a vivid sense of agency that inverts the judgment I (rightly or wrongly) perceived coming into the garden with the power and privilege of my own offering reverberating out from it.

This offering, in the form of a hedgehog-oriented garden, obviously has a practical function in creating habitat for hedgehogs and the whole ecology of beings that are intimately tied to hedgehogs. (If only there was as much concern for beetles and moths!) Less obviously, its function within the human community is an invitation to connect: to share our admiration and concern for this endangered British mammal and collectively make this place greener, shadier, livelier. To remake our front gardens as contributions to all our neighbours, human and non-human alike.

If you would like to read more about front gardens, please can I recommend Ros Ball’s wonderful piece about Peter’s front garden in Dulwich, South London; an incredible contribution in a densely urban place.

Poppy seed heads under the pear tree in the front garden last autumn

reading lately:

Within a day of each other last month, Alycia Pirmohamed and Nina Mingya Powles shared beautifully resonant pieces about travelling to/away/apart from home and traversing memory. I’ve been thinking about both pieces a lot as I continue to process my brief stint at home in January for my uncle’s funeral.

rivering

#29: Coconut rice, cloud forest

Jeannette Winterson on grounding one’s self in where you are in this moment has been really quite helpful for me in a week of unbelievable government violence.

Where Are You?

fighting for:

Palestine is being slaughtered and starved by “israel”. Have you emailed your MP or MSP or representatives lately to demand divestment from weapons manufacturers and sanctions against “israel”? This week I’m looking into how to establish an Apartheid Free Zone with businesses in my neighbourhood.

You might also have seen that the UK government plans to cut welfare benefits by £5 billion, affecting at least a million disabled people. If allowed to happen, this will be a death sentence for many and compound already impossible circumstances for many more. I know so many people whose lives will be horribly changed by this brutality. If you live in the UK, I hope you will (at the very least) contact your MP to oppose this cruelty, and if you can, join in the protests being organised across the country. This is a very helpful email template. The full consultation can be found here and the response form here.