Roses are red, violets are blue… but why are so few flowers ever black? Might it be because gardening itself is an inherently racist pursuit these days? It certainly is in the eyes of some.
During coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show held in late May, BBC Gardener’s World presenter Monty Don and his co-host Joe Swift sounded surprised by the chosen winner of the event’s Best Show Garden award, saying the procedures of judgement had “all become so technical” and a mere exercise in “the boxes… being ticked”, in an increasingly technocratic “procedure that is like passing a driving test”. And which particular boxes were being ticked at Chelsea? PC ones, as usual.
The gong was won by gardener Ula Maria, with a special ‘Forest Bathing Garden‘, which not only earned woke-points for being based upon foreign design traditions rather than native British ones, namely “the ancient Japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku, which means ‘bathing in the forest’”, but also for proudly listing its own “key sustainability points”, including that the slates and tiles used in its paving were all re-usable “reclaimed materials”.
Even better, the garden was somehow specifically designed for the use of sufferers from muscular dystrophy, on account of the fact it contained a “central hub with sculpted flint walls that provides a sheltered space for people to meet and share their experiences [of having muscular dystrophy] outside the clinical environment”. Well, great, but translated, surely that just means “There’s a little paved bit in the middle of the garden where people can stand and chat”, presumably about anything they so desire, not just specifically muscular dystrophy. Will AIDS, cancer or lupus sufferers be chucked out if they try to hijack proceedings to bring up their own tedious petty ailments?
Ah yes, but Maria’s garden also features “a large random knapped flint wall… chosen for its beautiful texture and form – reminiscent of muscle cells – which serves as a tool for explaining what muscular dystrophy is, and the devastating effect it can have on one’s muscles”. Where does this kind of thing end? You could plant an entire garden with trees bearing piles and piles of swollen, ripe, blood-purple plums, as a visual aid for explaining the trauma of haemorrhoids to children, or one full of lovely yellow daffodils and buttercups exclusively for the enjoyment of those with jaundice.
Design-wise, the garden looked perfectly fine but let’s face it, it probably wasn’t its actual design the thing won its prize for, was it? Instead, it was its worthy, right-on message.
Black Narcissus
What the presiding Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) judges may not realise about Maria’s winning design, however, is that, being based upon a traditional Japanese school of planting, rather than being impeccably woke, it may in fact have been profoundly racist, upon the now-dreaded grounds of ‘cultural appropriation’.
The current issue of BBC Gardener’s World Magazine features a discussion about this very issue, in its regular ‘Over the Fence’ column, where two writers give their own opposing viewpoints on the matter. This being a BBC-branded publication, however, the ‘opposing’ viewpoints printed actually both agree that British gardening is incurably racist, but only 50% so on the one hand, and 100% so on the other.
On the 100% side is Jackie Herald, an elderly white lady who appears to have coined the term ‘horticultural appropriation’ to describe how “In many cases, the abundant plant selections that we now take for granted [on sale in our local garden centre] did not come via free-willing exchanges, but were sourced by [white European] plant-hunters during years of colonialism and power-grabbing global trade”. Another example of horticultural appropriation Herald gave was that of an Aboriginal dot-painting being used to create a “planting plan” for some benighted “contemporary English garden”: presumably she wouldn’t have voted for Ula Maria’s culturally kidnapped Shinrin-yoku Japanese garden at this year’s Chelsea, then.
On the other, 50% racist side of the fence, meanwhile, sat Juliet Sargeant, a Tanzanian-born black woman who back in 2016 won a Gold Medal at Chelsea with a garden which “celebrate[d] the day Parliament passed The Modern Slavery Act in 2015” by virtue of featuring a load of free-standing doors in the middle of a fully-paved patio floor. This represented how modern slavery was “a hidden crime”, taking place “behind closed doors”, most unlike the open-air act of daylight robbery Sargeant’s own running away with the Gold Medal represented.
Inevitably, Ms. Sargeant was described by the BBC as a committed campaigner “for more diversity in horticulture”. Accordingly, when asked to write for Gardener’s World mag, she could hardly just say there should be no African or Asian-inspired gardens in modern Britain, as that would make her sound like a hideous nativist. Instead, whenever British citizens made foreign-inspired gardens, she said they should feel free to proceed, but only if “moving away from thoughtless cultural appropriation towards [thoughtful] cultural collaboration – a consensual exchange for mutual benefit, which amplifies the donor culture, preserving its history and honouring its origins”.
She gives the example of an RHS Chinese Streamside Garden, which was apparently designed “in collaboration with Manchester’s local Chinese community”, who I’m sure are all every bit as clued-up on traditional ancient Chinese water-feature praxis as the average inner-city white Mancunian is well-informed about the 18th-century parkland landscaping innovations of Capability Brown. If I went into the local Chinese chippy and tried asking the girl behind the counter whether or not I had her permission to plant a Chinese hibiscus in my rockery, she’d think I was taking the piss.
Nonetheless, says Sargeant, looming climate change means different species will soon begin becoming native to Britain (e.g., black Tanzanians), meaning the nation’s desperate gardeners will soon inevitably “need the scientific as well as artistic knowledge of other countries and cultures if we are to survive and thrive”. Quick, import more wheelbarrow-loads of Mexicans immediately! They’re the only ones who can possibly know how to grow any sustainable cacti in the brutally parched deserts of Glasgow and Newcastle c.2055.
I Don’t Want To Go To Chelsea
In the past, Monty Don himself has actually branded the Chelsea Flower Show insufficiently diverse, condemning “old farts” for “blocking the way ahead” (sounds like an excellent inspiration for a special constipation-themed garden for Chelsea 2025, maybe?), which is why, in 2022, the RHS, which runs the whole shebang, appointed its first ever Inclusivity Ambassador, the excitingly brown-skinned Manoj Malde, of Indian heritage and born in Kenya.
In a 2022 interview with the Times, Manoj bizarrely implied the reason white people have traditionally attended the Chelsea Flower Show in larger numbers than, say, Peruvians, Namibians or Persians, is not that Britain has traditionally been a white country, so these people didn’t actually live here, but instead because poverty-stricken non-whites customarily used their gardens to grow food in, not flowers (other professional identitarians agree with this analysis, saying “Gardening while Black” is a “means of resisting and surviving” white supremacism via obscure Good Life-like means). Thus, RHS gardens should henceforth have an increasing emphasis upon showcasing prime vegetables like he does, argued Manoj, since if non-whites see “a certain type of spinach” they already grow at home on display there, “that will encourage them to come”.
“As beautiful as RHS gardens are, they’re very much in an English style,” he added. Yes, that will be because they’re in England. In Manoj’s view, in order to counteract this lamentable fact, we should plant many more non-native flora across the nation, even though “many of these plants may not grow in this country” properly due to the different climate here. Manoj also wishes to encourage more blind people to visit RHS gardens. Possibly because, once they are full of dead plants, bits of spinach, old doorframes and people with assorted ailments, they’re the only ones who won’t be able to see the total mess people like him want to make of them.
Always In the Wong
But it’s not just Chelsea. Kew Gardens, it appears, is a kind of gigantic slave-plantation, harbouring millions of kidnapped foreign seeds and plant-specimens, cruelly uprooted from their homelands without prior permission, being “just taken” away from Africa in ships by criminal colonialists like Kunta Kinte was – at least according to South African botanist Muthama Muasya of the University of Cape Town, who in November last year called for Kew to “return plants of Empire to their homes”. He’s the William Wilberforce of the gardening world.
Meanwhile, in 2022, for some incomprehensible reason, Transport for London began spreading hysteria about wisteria, condemning it for having “colonial roots” (and stems and petals too, presumably) as it was brought to England in the 19th century from China. Another dubious import into England from the Orient is James Wong, an “ethnobotanist”, BBC presenter and ambassador for both the RHS and the Liz Earle Natural Skincare Company, who was also once gardening correspondent for the Observer – at least until 2023, when he resigned, accusing the newspaper of “institutionalised transphobia”.
Wong had previously made a good living accusing gardening of being guilty of institutionalised racism, having once been told “You look just like Kim Jong-Un in that suit” before having the Gangnam Style dance performed in front of him by fellow guests at the Chelsea Flower Show.
Worse, whilst “admiring one of my favourite conceptual gardens at the Hampton Court Flower Show”, an “avant garde horticultural installation… inspired by the issues facing displaced peoples around the world”, he kept on hearing visitors complaining that planters should be “keeping politics out of gardening”. But James Wong is precisely the kind of obsessive identitarian Leftie who cannot resist inserting politics into everything, implausibly claiming that “all aspects of horticulture are based on political ideas” and that “the very idea that politics should be kept out of gardening is itself a resoundingly political statement, as it dismisses the status quo as apolitical, objective reality, and anything challenging it as inapposite ‘activism’”.
Wong’s most notorious Observer column came in 2022, when he suggested it may be time to ditch the very words ‘garden’, ‘gardening’ and ‘gardener’ for hip, inclusive, new terms like ‘plantdaddy’ and ‘urbanfarmer’, as the original words came with unspecified (but presumably racially-tinged) “cultural baggage” which suggested “an incredibly narrow way in which to garden and an even narrower sense of just who is allowed to participate”. Such linguistic reformation, Wong hoped, may facilitate the “unfolding of a parallel horticultural universe”.
This total Triffid has often received online criticism for such articles, leading Wong to claim that, due to its habitual use of words like ‘heritage’ and ‘native’, “U.K. gardening culture has racism baked into its DNA” in a series of comically self-absorbed tweets like the following:
“This is the kind of exhausting shit you have to go through every day if you work in U.K. horticulture,” Wong once complained. What about the kind of “exhausting shit” ordinary disillusioned flower-lovers have to put up with from bores like Wong every time they go to Chelsea, Kew or Hampton Court these days?
Les Fleurs du Mal
Sociologist Dr. Ben Pitcher is even worse. The very white author of the book Consuming Race, which, shockingly, is printed on equally white paper, Pitcher sees racism in every single consumer product he buys – up to and including gardening implements and shop-bought plants. You can’t just call a spade a spade, the Daily Mail implied about his thought, as in America, ‘spade’ is a racist term for a black man, as in ‘as black as the Ace of Spades’. According to Pitcher, due to contemporary hate-speech laws, there is “a crisis in white identity in multicultural Britain” meaning that, as you can get prosecuted for openly calling to kick the immigrants out, white people are forced to talk about doing so in code instead: by talking about gardening, for example, where “soil purity” becomes a Nazi ‘Blut und Boden’-like metaphor for racial purity.
In 2014, Pitcher went on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed to claim that another Radio 4 show, Gardeners’ Question Time, was “saturated with racial meanings” which linked directly to “the rise of racist and fascist parties across Europe”, with all its talk of native species and so forth “shoring up a fantasy of [white Anglo-Saxon] national integrity” – at least that’s what the evil alt-Right media said. Pitcher subsequently wrote a piece for the Guardian calling this a “deliberate misconstrual” of his views, even though this is literally what he said on the programme.
His fellow guest, black crossbench peer Lola Young, illustrated such quasi-genocidal horrors in action by recalling how: “I remember back in the late 80s-early 90s when [invasive] rhododendrons were seen as this huge problem, and people were talking about going out rhododendron-bashing. This was at a time when Paki-bashing was something that was all too prevalent on our streets.” When householders try to rid their properties of Japanese Knotweed, is this just secret subliminal revenge for the Fall of Singapore?
What a lot of leaf-rot. The only time Gardener’s Question Time was credibly accused of racism was way back in 2008 when an official apology was issued by the BBC after a caller to the show ‘offensively’ asked for advice on growing Rhodochiton volubilis, commonly known as ‘BMW’, or ‘The Black Man’s Willy’, for reasons self-evident in the following picture:
They look a bit worse for wear, but I suppose you can see how the nickname arose. Following the call, appropriately named panellist Bob Flowerdew laughed, admitting he had “only ever seen one [willy] close up – and not that colour!”, presumably meaning his own. Another guest, sexually sheltered horticulturalist Anne Swithinbank, observed that “I’ve never seen one in my life”, although she had heard that BMWs “don’t really like the cold, as you can imagine. They shrivel up and look very unhappy”.
Never mind, Anne. With the RHS’s recent wokeward turn in its giving out of prizes, it won’t be long before you turn up at Chelsea and all you can see will be garden after garden full of genitally inclusive blooms.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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It wouldn’t matter if it relied on viewership to fund itself. It would just die off quite quickly as people stopped watching and listening to their garbage.
The problem is that the state takes money from all of us to produce all the propaganda.
it’s like being forced to fund your enemy.
I don’t pay it, Starmer will just make the TV licence an internet tax. Mark my words.
This has already been done in Germany. The system there is a little different. You don’t need to get license to watch TV but a license is required for owning a device which could be used to watch TV or receive radio transmissions of public broadcasters. Without anyone asking for that, the German public broadcasters all started to offer internet streaming services and hence, turned everyone with a device which could access anything on the internet into a forcibly recruited subscriber.
Yes, like the “Devshirme” tribute of Balkan Christian children demanded by the Ottoman Turks for 300 years, or the “Jizya Tax” demanded of all infidels.
So candidates who are “dismissive or derisory of diversity and inclusion” will be excluded, thus making the BBC less diverse!
Doublethink is strong with these people. Orwell knew what he was talking about.
Candidates should test the BBC on their commitment to equity by demanding the same salary as Gary Lineker.
That wouldn’t be fair – they would be doing ten times more work than the crisp salesman.
The short answer to this question (“explain what …”) is “Nothing”. Both are umbrella terms without any real meaning.
And that’s why you’re not BBC material. Which, in many ways, is not at all insulting. Quite the opposite.
Diversity = Less White People. ——–So you will be employed by the BBC if you approve of that. Do the BBC think that all white people are oppressors, and all black people are oppressed? Do they then believe that these people should receive preferential treatment? ——-Here are a couple of BBC headlines “Inside the mind of White America”—-“Elderly White men block change.”.——The Cultural Marxists at the BBC like to dive us up into different groups (1) Black or White (2) Muslim or Christian (3) Straight or LGBT (4) Oppressors and Oppressed. ——–The name of the game is “Intolerance” in the name of “Tolerance”———The “Dying Breed” white male has to go.
Stopping racism with racism. Keeping people out in the name of inclusion. Making sure everyone looks the same to ensure diversity. Giving people priority to ensure equality. Orwell wouldn’t know whether he should be horrified or proud that he called it.
As diverse intellectually as the Hitler youth leadership.
“explain what diversity and inclusion means to you …..’
So if you say something like – ‘it means no white people, especially no white men, plus the promotion of biologically inaccurate labelling instead of merit or ability for hiring purposes, to meet DEI criteria and ESG scores’ – will that get you the job?
“will that get you the job?”
No. Shortlist possibly.
This is why I call this a viral ideology. Once it infiltrates a company, it completely takes over. We hire people in good faith because we believe they are the best qualified candidates to do the job. And then they turn around and replace all the people around them with their own. And before you know it you’re being kicked out cause you’re no longer adequate. This is happening in organizations and governments across the board. And it is our fault that we allowed such a hateful and hostile ideology to take hold. Now there’s no purging it. The people that should do the purging have already been replaced. They’re now protected by law. I don’t see any way out of this other than convincing a majority of the population to fight back against this, to all demand of their employers to cleanse this virus from their HR departments. But we’re a decade away from that. By the time everyone catches on, it might be too late.
Other observation about diversity: The concept is inherently anti-democratic because it maintains that qualification for public offices and similar posts ought to depend on people’s pedigree.
Well here’s some people who are definitely dismissive of ”diversity”. Or at least in the Clown World context. I can’t believe they got fined 18,000 euros for stating a fact. There should be a law against this, but when the judiciary are epic woketards who act like they’d be better off banged up in a nut house due to being a liability to rational and sane folk then you’ve got no chance.
”Bayer Leverkusen has been fined €18,000 by the German Football Association’s (DFB) sports court after its supporters unfurled a banner that stated there are only two genders — a move deemed to be discriminatory against the LGBT community.
The Bundesliga club was indicted by the DFB for “discriminatory, unsportsmanlike behavior on the part of its supporters” for the incident that occurred during the team’s away match against Werder Bremen on Nov. 25 last year.
A huge banner unrolled by fans displayed the slogan, “There are many styles of music but only two genders.”
The financial penalty was imposed in a ruling by a single judge who ruled that €6,000 of the fine could be used to fund “preventative measures against discrimination.”
The club and the DFB have agreed to the judgment, which is now legally binding.
Julian Reichelt, the former editor of Germany’s largest tabloid Bild, slammed the judgment and claimed the banner “simply states the basic biological fact of our existence.”
“The spirit of our institutions is being eaten away by an ideological virus,” he added.
Conservative commentator Anabel Schunke said the judgment was indicative of Germany entering “peak madhouse.”
https://rmx.news/germany/there-are-only-two-genders-bayer-leverkusen-fined-e18000-for-discriminatory-supporters-banner/
There are actually three genders in German but Germans still have only two sexes (the German term for both gender and sex is Geschlecht, though).
Apart from that: Professional football is notoriously corrupt. And the corresponding institutions have long since been bought by the usual suspects. Hence, that’s not an indication of Germany entering peek mental asylum, it just confirms that the multinational companies sponsoring football via open advertising and hidden direct payments have the power to punish people for making public statements their executives consider disagreeable.
“The BBC is not a welcoming place for those with conservative opinions.”
That is very interesting, because I read somewhere years ago that US medical schools were quietly ensuring that no applicants with “conservative” views would ever be accepted, regardless of their abilities. Only applicants demonstrating left-wing views were allowed to become practicing physicians. I wonder if the same sinister vetting system is being used in UK and other western medical schools.