Seeds of snobbery

The tension has been there for a long time, creeping through the sub- soil. But somehow it never took root. In gardening, unlike so much of the modern world, people are generally polite. Now, though, garden warfare has burst into full, gaudy bloom.

There has been shouting - yes, good heavens, shouting! - at the Chelsea Flower Show.

Diarmuid Gavin, the handsome young Irish garden designer, reckoned that smart-alec snobs were mocking him in a radio interview about his new garden design for Chelsea.

He was outraged by their comments over his 'Brookside' style garden. He got back at his tormentors, who he reckoned included the upmarket garden designer Bunny Guinness, by accusing them of elitism and snobbery.

To call someone a snob these days is worse than calling them a criminal, a thug or even an accountant. But the one place we thought we could still get away with a bit of snobbery was in the privacy of one's own garden.

For who among us has not mocked a neighbour's garden, or tittered behind our pruning shears when a friend invests in a plastic ornamental water feature?

Beneath the veneer of camaraderie between gardeners, there is a chasm between the two different gardening styles - a gulf with long historic and cultural roots. It is inevitable, then, that open warfare between the 'snobs' and the 'yobs' breaks out occasionally.

The philosophy of the upmarket gardener - Bunny Guinness and her ilk - is characterised by a liking for formality, and respect verging on the slavish for materials and flowers which appear 'natural', even when they are the result of centuries of plant breeding.

The seriously unpretentious gardener falls for none of this. He likes 'a splash of colour', 'a bit of fun', and he doesn't mind what materials he uses, from bare concrete to plastic statues.

The classic upmarket plant, for example, is the Euphorbia. The great thing about Euphorbias is that they don't really flower. This is terrifically useful because it removes the danger of something truly ghastly happening - a colour clash.

The seriously unpretentious gardener, on the other hand, can't see the point. 'What a dull plant,' he thinks. 'Can't we find something that looks a bit more like a Knickerbocker Glory?'

Examples of the seriously unpretentious gardener's beloved 'colour splashes' - actually they are more like deluges - can be seen on almost any TV gardening makeover show, and in parts of the gardening Press.

The garden of a Mrs and Mrs Sutton, for example, won a Garden News prize some years ago during the high point of unpretentious gardening. One of their more conservative features was a display of 350 'non- stop' (non-stop flowering, that is) begonias of varying colours arranged in a circle.

Nearby was a 40-gallon plastic orange juice barrel (why waste it?) packed to the brim with busy lizzies. The garden had 1,500 busy lizzies in all.

Before the snobbish element chortles too much about this 'vulgarity', they should remember one thing. Their own antecedents - the aristocratic Victorian gardeners - were doing precisely the same sort of thing. The bedding out of plants to produce as much colour as possible was once the 'snobby' thing to do.

Ideas of taste are continually changing, so there can be nothing eternally 'right' about one type of gardening style.

Really, one should have some pity for the snobs. They make rods for their own backs. Take seating, for example. For the upmarket gardener, there are only three acceptable forms of seating: wooden benches (hard), traditional style metal seats (hard and cold), and stone benches (hard, cold and damp).

Inevitably, upmarket gardeners find sitting down in the garden hard to bear for long, and they have to go indoors.

Downmarket gardeners, by contrast, are free of such restrictions, and can buy a folding lounger or lavishly-sprung swinging seat.

They can then stretch their legs out and sit in great comfort, sipping a Strawberry Daiquiri with a brightly-coloured paper umbrella sticking out of it.

It is pretty obvious who is having the better time of it.

The trouble comes, though, with changing tastes. Upmarket features in garden design stay pretty constant: stone paths, garden 'rooms' divided by yew hedges, knot gardens, old roses with names like Comte de Chambord and so on.

But the downmarket features change rather more frequently. I visited my local garden centre yesterday, to track the current fashions.

There, I found stepping stones which looked like they had been fashioned from the sliced trunk of an old tree. These, of course, were made of concrete which had been given a tree-trunk sort of shape and then coloured.

Another good find was a brown ceramic hippopotamus, about 3ft long. It would be terrific fun, peeking out from a flower-bed - if only to give garden snobs a seizure. Even more of a hoot, though, was the Mexican guitarist with a large sombrero in coloured ceramic.

Guitarists seem to be the 'in thing' at the moment. I've even seen a metal frog, 4ft high, strumming away.

Naffest of all, though, are the copies of classical statues. Fancy your very own Venus de Milo or Michelangelo's David?

There's no need to go traipsing around foreign galleries. Thanks to Homebase, you can have the bright white resin version - which is conveniently light, and cleverly made small enough to fit into the boot of your car.

Diarmuid Gavin has rightly spoken out against snobs, and has stood defiantly by his design for Chelsea - which, incidentally, appears to be constructed from thousands of lottery balls. But it would be good to see just how far he goes in being an unpretentious man of the people.

So come on, Diarmuid. Let's see you put a plastic Venus de Milo in your garden! Or are you, perhaps, guilty of your own kind of snobbery? For the truth is that gardening brings out the Hyacinth Bucket in all of us.

Yes, it's true that we all have slightly different cultural and class inheritances - but let he who is without sin cast the first bright blue ceramic extra-large pebble.