Gardening in Britain is big business. In 2023, UK households spent around £13.2 billion on garden goods, and another £5.8 billion on gardening and landscaping services. As the sector’s premier meetup, the Chelsea Flower Show is therefore an ideal opportunity to reflect on the latest trends. We will see a lot of hardy Mediterranean plants amid rammed earth brick work this year, and plenty of sustainability gubbins too. Rainwater harvesting will become a celebrated feature, replacing the battered plastic tubs under gutters.

Yet there will also be deeper developments: evidence of the ever-evolving relationship between man, technology and nature. That’s clear enough in the form of the Avanade Intelligent Garden, a particularly British expression of a wider global trend. Avanade, the sponsor, is a Microsoft-owned consultancy hawking their AI and business analytics skills, and its show garden will explore how monitoring soil moisture, pH, temperature, air quality, wind, and rainfall can help gardeners. With all those buzzwords floating about, it’s tempting to be cynical. But Je Ahn, principle of architecture practice Studio Weave, who designed the project with the gardener Tom Massey, insists the garden isn’t just a gimmick. As he says, 30% of trees planted in cities die within a year, and 50% within a decade. By monitoring their needs and their performance, we can ensure they survive.

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Is your garden imperialist?

By Giles Fraser

We should remember, here, that British gardens are very often laboratories. We have a rich history of applying technology to gardening in a way that has fundamentally determined the direction of social change. This is true in an age of mass migration and with a housing crisis as it was in times of yore. It may have been Louis XIV that built the “Machine de Marly” on the Seine — to supply the fountains of Versailles, itself the greatest piece of technology before the Industrial Revolution — but it would be the great estate gardens of Britain that actually fired modernity.

Consider, for instance, a technique like “puddling” — the compacting of clay to form an impermeable layer. It was vital in the building of our canal network, in the 18th and 19th centuries, but was ultimately borrowed from the “canals” and ornamental lakes of country gardens. Another good example is the orangery designed by Joseph Bramah for Windsor Castle in the early 19th century, and perhaps the first hot-water central heating system ever made. Joseph Paxton’s vast 1840 greenhouse, the Great Stove at Chatsworth, used hot-water heating: conducted from eight underground coal-fired boilers, all through a seven-mile maze of six-inch pipes. Steam engines were used in gardens years before their use in the manufacturing industry for pumping purposes. British gardens have always been busy.

Nor is it simply that gardens were testbeds for industrial development. When we look at the glass and steel structures that dominate our cities, we are looking at the end point of a technique first used for plants. The greenhouses of the 18th century first deployed uniform systems of glass panels and metal mullions — iron as opposed to its successor steel — to maximize light. The Hackney camellia house for the nurseryman Conrad Loddiges, completed in 1819, was one of the first to use standardized curved wrought-iron sash bars to hold curvilinear glass, all linked together and supported on cast-iron columns.

Yet technology also helped popularize gardening among the masses — and not just the greenhouses we inherited from those grand country houses. Until the Fifties, explains Fiona Davison of the Royal Horticultural Society, seeding plants required reserves of skill and patience. Plants were given as cuttings, shared between families and friends, severely limiting the range and possibilities of gardening. To do anything more adventurous, you would need a potting shed, heated somehow, to grow plants from seeds which you would buy blind from specialist importers, often by mail-order. It was a serious, almost agricultural, activity, for dedicated hobbyists, rather than part-timers.

But then, after the Second World War, came the popularization of plastic, meaning seeded plants could now be bought in cheap pots from new stores called garden centers; places of spectacular color and exotic choice, cribbed from the USA. Another important innovation was the television. Gardeners World premiered in 1968, six months after color was introduced to British TVs. For the first time, that allowed enthusiasts to convey the vibrancy of horticulture to millions of people in the comfort of their own homes. All that helped put gardening within reach of the wealthier working classes, especially as the suburbanization boom of earlier decades meant that around 70% of all Britons now owned land, up from just 5% in the 1870s.

Now, though, these dynamics are shifting. Though the portion of our housing stock that has gardens has been stable for many years, that could soon change as the housing crisis demands that ministers are under ever-more pressure to build more flats. In practice, that could soon mean that gardening increasingly becomes a middle-class pursuit. And though Labour has promised new urban apartments will have mandated green spaces, the Avanade example suggests these places are likely to be cared for by technology rather than serried ranks of gardeners.

If you don’t believe me, just visit the Bosco Verticale in Milan. Designed by the Italian architect Stefano Boeri, his project started as a single plant-clad high rise in the Italian city. Now, though, Boeri’s vision is being applied as far afield as Cairo and Nanjing. He explains that the plants themselves must be nurtured by a central control panel rather than neglectful humans. Planners and architects definitely want to green our ever-denser cities. But what we are beginning to see are plans for a technologically managed layering rather than the messy process of bringing together dirt and water and plantings to make life and color.

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Is your garden imperialist?

By Giles Fraser

Just as urban roads and social spaces are destined to become more regulated through technology, so will our relationship with nature. Not that the British suburban garden is destined to be subsumed by machines. That’s clear enough at the Chelsea Flower Show. The show garden of the great Japanese designer, Kazuyuki Ishihara, shows how British tastes are invigorated again and again by the exotic, with irises strewn among the maples.

Britain’s suburban gardens endure, from the thin tithes behind Victorian terraces, through the neo-Elizabethan patches of the garden cities, to the overlooked patch of the modern estate, invigorated by tips from Garden Rescue or Real Gardens. They’re all different, of course, but together evoke an older kind of gardening. For planners and politicians pondering how to hit housing targets, they’re also a reminder that what makes suburban living attractive is the imminence of the natural, the opportunity not just to watch plants passively, but to get our hands dirty and help them bloom.

It’s never been high up on the to-do list. But the fine weather of late has made me look for an excuse to spend some time outside. And so I have been to the garden centre to buy manure, and I have started to break open the shell of hardened ground and feed it with sweet smelling, life giving fibre. It’s a strangely satisfying thing to do. Hands filthy, I’m feeding the dead earth with biological energy in order to return it to life.

A few miles from here, over the river, the Chelsea Flower Show is in full bloom. I have been a couple of times, but it’s become a bit too corporate: this year’s Gold Winners include the Morgan Stanley garden and the M&G Investments garden – M&G also being the sponsors of the whole event. And at £107, ticket prices are steep. I think I’ll stick with B&Q rather than M&G.

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I also find that the themed gardens at Chelsea strain a little too much for social relevance. The pictures of the CAMFED Campaign for Female Education garden did indeed look splendidly colourful, recreating a Zimbabwean schoolyard in the heart of SW3. But it struck me as more of a sermon than a garden.

Of course, there is nothing at all wrong with a sermon on the subject of women and education in Africa. Far from it. And I also do think that gardens have long been places of moral edification. But there is a crucial and telling difference between the way our own gardens work on us morally and the sort of moral instruction that is being offered by a themed garden in SW3.

In the morally-themed garden, the flowers and planting are being used to illustrate a moral concern, like a poster or a promotional film might. But the really important moral point of gardens is not that attractive flowers and planting are used to illustrate some important wider cause, but that the very act of being in a garden – tending to it, playing in it, eating in it, weeding, watering, walking about in it – all contribute to our moral formation. And a roped-off, do-not-touch garden in Chelsea just cannot achieve that.

In other words, to borrow an idea from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, some virtues are ‘internal’ to certain practices. And the morally-themed garden is not virtuous in this sense – the morality it illustrates is not the morality internal to the activity of gardening.

The philosopher David Cooper makes a similar point about morality and gardens in the context of a much wider discussion of moral philosophy’s history. Cooper rightly regrets that moral philosophy has moved away from the Aristotelian idea that our moral take on the world is bound up with the sort of life we live as a whole – with our friendships, our jobs, our lived environment.

Morality is not a separate compartment of ourselves – a stern-faced bit, only concerned with important things like human rights and vulnerable people. Morality is not just for when we are ‘on duty’, as it were: it involves cultivating virtuous habits of the mind that are always in play, including in our ‘off duty’ activities.

Morality is everything: it is the whole of our lived life, including the bits that we have mistakenly come to regard as private and morally neutral.

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My soil is a case in point. Working the ground, feeding it manure, involves a form of care for the natural environment that is not all about some immediate advantage for me. Yes, I and others will hopefully benefit from the beauty of the delphiniums I imagine one day growing there. But that’s only half the story. Because the very act of pottering about in the garden establishes an increasingly fond alliance between myself and the forces of nature, which sets my own life in a wider perspective.

To put it in Christian terms, it feels like a mini collaboration between me and God. Success is only party in my own hands. When it comes, I am thankful. So, gardening teaches dependency: the idea that life is a gift, and that the gift itself should be gratefully received.

Why do my own tomatoes “taste better” than the ones I buy from Sainsbury’s? Objectively, they don’t. But it makes perfect sense to say they taste better than shop-bought ones because taste, here, is not just a matter of sensory experience: it has a much more expanded sense of what the tomato means.

A garden is, of course, part nature, part human artifice. At times, garden fashions have emphasised the latter – straight lines, geometric planting, topiary. At other times, a more ‘wild’ look has been in vogue, as with the Romantics.

But whatever one’s preference, the garden is always an intersection between nature and human activity. And so the garden always feels to me like a sustained meditation on our human place within a world that does not do our bidding. A world in which the weeds will always finally win.

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Over the coming summer, the garden will be a place of great joy. Laughter, barbeques, den-making, lawn-mowing contemplation. For Aristotle, being good is always an aspect of the good life – of a life well lived. From this perspective, morality and personal happiness are not set against each other as if being good always involves a sacrifice to one’s personal happiness. That is more a Christian perspective – always more concerned with the emergency ethics of dramatic situations. And from this Christian perspective, the ethics of Aristotle’s Eudemonia can feel a little too complacent – in danger of being conscripted by what one might call bourgeois complacency.

Well, I will bear that in mind. But for now, I will linger in my garden. Drink tea with friends. Fight the weeds. Play with my children. Host parish parties. Watch the delphiniums grow. In terms of modern culture wars, all this might be called a sense of place. And the garden might therefore be regarded as the spiritual headquarters of the ‘somewheres’ as opposed to the ‘anywheres’.

But the great thing about the garden is that when I’m in it I don’t much care about such matters. Feeding the ground with life, hands stinking of the farmyard – that feels so much more important.