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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Every single notable area of achievement in which white people have been heavily involved has been or will be labelled racist, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with any actual racism perpetrated by white people. I won’t live to see the denouement but I would not bet on it being pretty. I’d be building a ring of steel around majority white countries and making sure that our borders were secure, we were self sufficient in essentials and were making plenty of babies. It will either be an ugly war or a gradual slide into extinction. But I am obviously a horrible racist. The thing is, I’m in a majority black country as I’m writing this and I get no impression that the locals spend much of any time thinking about “racism” (the President is a white bloke with Lebanese roots) yet there are people stirring up trouble in the U.K. and elsewhere in the rich world.
Please listen to the young lady in this gem. This example is about science but it is not off topic as it doesn’t matter what the topic is as all SJWs use exactly the same words and arguments across the board.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14
Science Must Fall?
Listen to the part where she describes how Newton is part of the problem
In addition there is another story running under this insanity. Watch the young man on the left of the young lady and his body language. Gad Saad writes about this kind of male in his excellent book ‘The Parasitic Mind’. He writes: “In their infinite desire to appear empathetic, compassionate, and sensitive, many male SJWs are pursuing a duplicitous mating strategy that has been documented in the zoological literature as the sneaky f****r strategy…”
I can confirm that my experience as an anti-nuclear, and anti-apartheid campaigner in my teens was a pretty good way to meet motivated young women, sneakily or otherwise. Just don’t marry them.
I was only able to watch a few seconds.
I’m sure Gad Saad is right.
Apples only fall from a tree because of White Supremacy. Man can only land on the Moon because Rocket Science kept all the black people out of the room. Since Penicillin was discovered by a white Scotsman, it is racist even if black people get saved from death by meningitis. Maths is too accurate for black people so it is only a white person’s construct. ——-I watched 2 minutes of the video but don’t need to watch anymore of this anti western anti white bilge. But despite their disgusting bilge they all want to get into Europe by any means possible. —Funny that isn’t it? They want to come and live in among all the racists.
Maths is too accurate for black people so it is only a white person’s construct.
The foundations of modern mathematics (algebra) including the number system we’re using were developed by Arab scholars during the era of the caliphates and the very important concept of zero as a number came from India.
Correct, but in politically motivated agenda’s facts or truths are ignored.———-“for the greater good”
Every single notable area of achievement in which white people have been heavily involved has been or will be labelled racist, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with any actual racism perpetrated by white people.
It probably has something to do with this being the only topic these media-employed knotweeds are really familiar with. When at a garden show, they’ll start with asserting that gardening is structurally racist and try slide into familiar waters from there in order to hide the fact that they have no freakin’ clue about gardening and couldn’t care less about it.
There’s presumably a maximum IQ BBC hirees must not exceed and it’s certainly not in the above average range.
Yeah I doubt that anyone genuinely passionate about gardening would get past the initial interview stage
Just reading the title of this piece, makes you want to slope off defeatedly to the nearest window, stare blankly out, put your head to one side, drop your shoulders and sigh deeply in one smooth action!
Makes me angry and worried
This article makes me sad. It also makes me angry. Why the F. can we not just treat gardens as gardens? Has anybody’s happiness quotient been increased as a result of viewing what has become a political statement rather than a garden?
I can barely believe that I am passing comments on wokeism and Marxism when the topic really is gardening.
What the hell are we playing at?
Gardens cannot just be gardens because the race card players need every vehicle for their anti colonialist, anti west, anti white, Punch and Judy Show.
They’re really just a bunch of one-trick-ponies ignorant about everything except critical race theory¹, hence, that’s all they ever talk about. As that’s demonstrably sufficient to land comfy jobs with all kinds of ‘institutions’, why would they want to learn more?
¹ My guess would be they’re also ignorant about that but without being much more familiar with it than us uninterested bystanders typically are, we cannot really tell.
My thoughts exactly, does every subject have to be analysed through race coloured glasses?
Gawd elp us!
I was a member of the RHS for over 30 years and still subscribe to one of its journals – which used to be called ‘The Plantsman’ before being rebranded ‘The Plant Review’ a couple of years ago.
When I joined, it seemed incredibly posh to me, its journal bristled with letters from lords and ladies and plant shows were in Westminster. It’s certainly changed now, although still very much reflecting an elite view.
On the positive side, the funding for ridiculous show gardens (‘Project Giving Back’) is supposedly drying up in a couple of years so silly Prostate Cancer gardens with dribbling water features should become a thing of the past.
Looks like an illustration from the Voynich manuscript. If you move to a new country you can’t expect to have the same connection with the land as the natives aven after several generations. It is written in to the language and the naming of things. Robert Graves wrote a remarkable book called The White Goddess which discerned the evolution of the grammar of our islands to have come about from a battle of the trees. I am not a fan of empire but I don’t have a problem with acknowledging the colonial aspect of this country’s past. As Kipling said, “Ship me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst. Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst.” Some hell hole in the sunshine where you could get your throat slit at any minute.
The entire plant and animal world is a battle for survival and in many case domination. I am almost in constant battle with the various plants that colonize our flower beds and lawn. In fact colonization is the main strategy of life in general.
In relation to ourselves, we are also of nature and not something separate and inferior as Master Attenborough would have us believe. As a consequence of the huge abundance created by modern industrial farming and manufacturing it has been possible for most people across the planet to escape the normal fight for survival and to have the luxury of escaping not only being colonized but the need to colonize. Industrialisation made conquest and colonisation irrelevant – and it most definitely wasn’t colonisation that created the modern world – that makes no sense.
They are looking for a first cause, an original impetus and then they supply an unconsciously selective view of history. There is no first cause or reason. In my view there is such a thing as the development of the human spirit and it will go through all kinds of horrors and absurdities along the way because there can be no other way.to iron out the kinks.
Absolutely
“Among the multitude of animals which scamper, fly, burrow and swim around us, man is the only one who is not locked into his environment. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment, but to change it. And that series of inventions, by which man from age to age has remade his environment, is a different kind of evolution—not biological, but cultural evolution. I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man. I use the word ascent with a precise meaning. Man is distinguished from other animals by his imaginative gifts. He makes plans, inventions, new discoveries, by putting different talents together; and his discoveries become more subtle and penetrating, as he learns to combine his talents in more complex and intimate ways. So the great discoveries of different ages and different cultures, in technique, in science, in the arts, express in their progression a richer and more intricate conjunction of human faculties, an ascending trellis of his gifts.”
Jacob Bronowski
Sounds like a few holidays I’ve been on.
Off-T
https://off-guardian.org/2024/06/05/spief-24-multipolar-world-order-converges-on-st-petersburg-to-take-pcr-tests-chat-about-sustainable-development/
“It’s happening. Again. It happens every year, unfortunately.
I am of course referring to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, (SPIEF) which is an annual gathering of the world’s most anti-globalist minds.”
Obviously this is about a gathering of globalists plotting the destruction of the world.
Mind you Rumble is banned in Russia, yet Youtube is not. They must have a deal with the Russians. Before they accused Rumble of Russian connections, but they don’t claim the same for Youtube. Funny that!
This article really made me laugh.
The observations at the beginning of the article about the Chelsea flower show display gardens really amused me. It sounds like the judges are evaluating the quality of the written description of the garden, rather than the garden itself. You could just display any old rubbish and, voila, by dint of giving it a suitably DEI leaning, you have a woke garden with which to impress the judges. It has made me view my garden with new eyes. The couple of broken paving slabs are not just slabs, they are a comment on the fracture of society. The washing line is an example of how learning to live with limited power is important. I could really get into this – perhaps I’ll just move the whole garden up to Chelsea next year and chance my arm.
We go to the Tate now and then as we enjoy looking at paintings – mainly old stuff. I occasionally read the blurb some poor sod has been asked to write about what they think was in the mind of the artist when they produced the picture- usually seems like projecting their 21st century obsessions onto someone from 200 years ago
You might not be a Bob Dylan fan but he released a song a couple of years ago called Murder Most Foul -about the JFK assassination and all that followed it. It captures the spirit of the darkness of our times. If you haven’t already listened to it then you should.
Great article!
BMWs also drive from the rear and can easily get very out of shape
Some prefer the BMW 7 inch, I mean series.
OFF-T. GB News on D-DAY — They shown a clip of the fascist Macron and King Charles who is a prominent WEF stooge. Him and his mates want us ‘serfs’ to own nothing and be happy! And we must HONOUR these people among the real heroes who are the veterans. These technocratic Globalists represent the dark forces that they died fighting against.
Like OMD said, Enola Gay, you really should’ve stayed at home that day. Perhaps things get bad and we long for annihilaton. We must never long for nuclear war regardless of how bad things seem. There is still hope of bringing back quality of life. A long struggle perhaps but the tempation towards doom needs to be avoided. It isn’t that difficult to get back to truth and beauty with the right impulses. Once there is a sense that there is an energy moving in that direction then so much positive energy will joln us.
Surely what the two writers in the BBC Gardener’s World magazine were seeing was horticultural multiculturalism. Or horticulturalism. All those communities of plants growing harmoniously in one space.
If it is really horticultural appropriation, what is the remedy? Safe spaces for rhododendrons? Saving fuchsias from the microaggressions of oak trees? Would it be the removal of all plants from a garden except those found naturally in the British isles? Or would that be horti-fascism? Horti-nativism?
Marvellous.
As far as Monty Don is concerned, it seems like he is the feeding hand being bitten back. Gardeners World has become increasingly ideological, it seems, and I heard that Monty is looking to be replaced, when he retires, by someone more diverse (black face, brown boots, green fingers, I suppose).
Once upon a time, Percy Thrower assumed that his views loved gardening and knew why, so he just sought to help them do it. Now the important thing is that you’re the first woman to win the national begonia prize, that your multi-racial community garden brings people together, that your compost absorbs CO2, and most of all that gardening is seen as the second line after Springwatch to preserve all that endangered
wildlifemental health. “A garden is a moralistic thing, God wot.”I’ll be planting my Gertrude Jekyll white garden later this year then…
To follow this fatuous logic of everything that has come from somewhere else needing to be returned, then all those transplanted humans ought to stop being racist imports and take themselves back from whence they came, no?
Repatriation has been rather in the news lately. Why stop at the Benin Bronzes ?
Re-open the lunatic asylums… there’s a very long waiting list.
Is all this woke stuff valid, and am I an old bigot/ racist/ transphobe?
No. It is plain daft
Having searched for some compelling meaning to it, I have decided it is meaningless.
As Alice says to the King about the White Rabbit’s testimony ; “i don’t believe there is an atom of meaning in it “. And the king says; ” Well, if there’s no meaning in it, you know, that saves us a world of trouble, because we shan’t have to look for any”.
If there is a factor that one ignores, it is the growth of the status of the informative process in understanding, to become nearly total, and definitely total in AGI.It does this because it is more efficient to represent meaning than it is to maintain it originally.
That original meaningfulness is proportionality, and it is a sense, not a process. The process of understanding, thought, can join the dots any old way, and increasingly does so.
I look at this issue as one where lunatics can say what they like as long as I don’t have to pay for them. As a result there are many products and services I access from different sources as far as possible. The problem is a lot of these morons are only capable of finding paid employment in government funded (taxpayers) or charitable (can be taxpayers) institutions. We need to object as much as we can where this behaviour is supported by government in any way. The BBC is a good example, my vote will go to the first party that promises to defund the BBC and let it make its own way in the media/news world. As for giving grants (people’s taxed income) to charities or similar NGOs, who politicize their raison d’être, then we should raise hell until it stops.
Blow me!! The very next article is this – https://dailysceptic.org/2024/06/05/taxpayer-funded-trigger-warnings/ – sums it up perfectly.
Black tulips matter.