What is it about BBC employees and the needless politicisation of gardening? Evidently not having read my piece on this website last week about this very topic, Kate Bradbury, the Wildlife Editor of BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine, went on-stage at the Cheltenham Science Festival on Sunday to claim there was some kind of innate divide between the sexes when it came to the topic of mowing one’s lawn, with attitudes towards such things apparently being “quite gendered”.
Who is Kate Bradbury? I think the following recent tweet of hers (complete with obligatory Pride Month Rainbow Flag) sums up the answer perfectly:
It seems the reason most of these lovely creatures like bees and toads are now beginning to “disappear” is because, under the toxic influence of the patriarchy, British householders are all mowing our lawns way too low for them to hide out and live in (even though bees live in hives and toads frequent ponds, not long grasses – still, as Kate says, “I’m not a scientist”).
Whilst promoting her deeply right-on-sounding new book One Garden Against the World: In Search of Hope in a Changing Climate, Bradbury professed herself to be of the opinion that women are more likely to value deliberately uncut long grass in a garden as resembling a “lovely” meadow, whilst men are more prone to just frown and ask “why are you watering those weeds?” Also proving that many females these days have little regard for law’n order was Rachel de Thame, a regular presenter on the BBC’s actual Gardeners’ World TV show, who told the Cheltenham crowd her daughter thought the family’s uncut lawn, filled with wildflowers/weeds (delete according to genitalia) was “beautiful”, whereas her husband thought it was just “messy”.
Men, like the hideous SS-style control-freaks they are, were more likely to prefer “order” in their gardens, the prize pair agreed, echoing earlier 2021 comments of another (male, but probably currently transitioning) Gardener’s World presenter, Monty Don, that cutting your lawn was a masculine “obsession” which was all about “control”. “Making a lawn that is pure grass without any filthy and foreign invading plants in there, making sure it’s stripy and neat” was an innately male obsession of “controlling rather than embracing”, explained the distinctly Pythonesque-sounding Monty, as if using a Flymo was akin to battering a helpless wife. Another BBC presenter, Chris Packham, has also described lawnmowing as “a very bizarre habit”; fair enough, my lawn would describe him as “a very bizarre man”.
Lawns With No Borders
What is wrong with those who run the West today? Can there ever have been a society as relentlessly obsessed with pointlessly politicising absolutely every single thing (quite literally) under the sun, even harmless lawns, flowers and gardens? Well, yes actually – Nazi Germany, as it happens. Or, at least, this is the claim of certain Left-wingers and eco-nuts these days.
As I discussed last week, certain horticulturalists out there seem preoccupied with asserting that those who insist upon planting native species of flowers, trees and shrubs in their gardens are some kind of secret crypto-fascists, obsessed with maintaining the purity of their own racial homeland, as well as that of their flowerbeds – ‘Blood and Soil’, as the Nazis used to say. An excellent example grew out of the annual conference of the California Native Plant Society in 2018, which concluded with the following photo of a breed of orange American caterpillar which happened to bear a remarkable resemblance to an equally orange breed of American President, Donald Trump:
“Make America Native Again!” blared the caption, as if to decry all who agreed with such sentiments as being big white racists (although in fact the lecturer who showed it was himself a native-plant advocate, and just intended it as a joke). Rather than merely inducing laughter, as would be the case amongst most normal people, however, this photograph instead prompted some very deep thoughts upon behalf of users of the U.S.-based Million Trees eco-website, which is devoted towards repudiating nativist narratives of the plant-world. As Million Trees explained:
This photo generated some discussion among the readers of Million Trees about nativism in the natural world. Is it related to nativism in the human realm? This is a timely question because American politics are presently consumed by anti-immigration sentiment, AKA ‘nativism’. As members of our communities [i.e., illegal Mexican immigrants] are unceremoniously rounded up in immigration raids and deported from America, this is an association that is getting more attention.
Accordingly, Million Trees commissioned Professor Art Shapiro, “a renowned expert on the butterflies of California”, to discuss the alleged rise of the phrase “native-plant Nazis” to describe those who like to plant American plants in America, French plants in France, and so forth – with particular reference to the idea of planting German plants in Germany. Was this practice really what led to the eventual ultimate rise of the Third Reich?
The German Romantic movement of the 1700s and 1800s did help foster a certain form of nationalism which some may argue prefigured Nazism, and Professor Shapiro pointed out how such Teutonic Romantics as Goethe, Wagner, Novalis, Caspar David Friedrich et al. stressed the ‘organic unity’ between the German Volk and their landscape. Apparently, this even became reflected in Romantic-era gardening books, which advocated planting “patriotic species” to create corresponding landscapes of “patriotic character”. Was it sick advice like that which ultimately led to the Nazi-era planting of landscapes like these?
Heinrich Strimmler
It seems that, as the German Völkisch (roughly, ‘Folk-ish’) movement of back-to-Nature and respect for an imaginary heroic native Aryan past grew during the early decades of the 20th century, so did the idea of Völkisch gardening. Anticipating the rise of the mad Austrian pseudoscientist Hanns Hörbiger’s Welteislehre, or World-Ice Theory (a sort of Nazi climate-change cult in reverse; see my previous Daily Sceptic article on it here), it was argued by writers, ideologues and naturalists alike that it was during the last Ice Age that the supposedly characteristic qualities of the German Volk were formed – qualities like hardiness, discipline, strength and coolness of character, all of which were necessary to survive the pitiless Pleistocene frosts. However, as Germany’s plants also evolved into their current form during the last Ice Age, they also should have shared these same qualities, making people and plants natural kin, it was spuriously asserted.
Consequently, Völkisch writers provided curious gardening advice along the lines not only of filling your rockeries with nice local alpine species, but also of recreating the presumed ancient natural homes of Teutons amongst clearings within the dark Germanic forests: translated, this meant rejecting the formal, neat, symmetrical-type designs of classic English and French gardens, and letting things grow a bit more wildly, like the grasses in the gardens of those who now work for the BBC.
Once the Nazis came to power, they appointed an official Reichslandschaftsanwalt, or ‘National Landscape Advocate’, the horticulturalist Alwin Seifert, who deemed which plants were and were not racially acceptable to be allowed to take root in the sacred soil of the Reich. Surprisingly, these did actually include some foreign, non-native species, deemed ‘racially acceptable’, in the same rough manner Austrians, Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians were in human terms.
SS chief Heinrich Himmler sponsored bizarre expeditions into the Tibetan Himalayas by his special paramilitary pseudo-archaeology unit the Ahnenerbe in search of plants growing strong amidst the Himalayan snows in conditions deemed similar to those his ancestors had once likewise grown strong in, back during the European Ice Age. Replanted in Germany, these ancient Welteislehre survivals could help restore the old Aryan Eden in German gardens of the 1930s.
Thus, concludes Professor Shapiro, as occasional importers of Tibetan plants from Asia, ironically enough, the Nazis “were never thoroughgoing ‘native-plant Nazis’” themselves at all, unlike some of their contemporary hardline U.S. and European counterparts these days. “Various observers have noted similarities in the rhetoric used by native-plant activists [in the West today] and that used by xenophobes,” observes Shapiro. Does that mean that those who want to plant an English rose in England c.2024 are actually even worse than the Nazis once were? Professor Shapiro (whose article is actually fairly measured, informative and reasonable) doesn’t say so – but certain others have come very close.
Pollan Sniffs At Pollen
An article often-cited by advocates of a non-nativist, wholly borderless plant-world utopia these days is ‘Against Nativism’, by food and plants writer Michael Pollan, which first appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 1994. Here, making reference to the then-leading nativist plant-advocate Ken Druse, Pollan warned darkly that:
Intolerance toward foreign species seems to be rising in the natural-gardening movement, if the progress of Druse’s own thinking is any indication. His first book allowed that “naturalised aliens” (he mentions daisies) “are welcome in the natural garden”. Five years later, he wants to close the border, because “even a short visit by a non-native can upset the balance of the community enough to cause extirpation or even extinction of a native plant”. He offers no scientific proof for this contention, leaving the reader to wonder if the darkening spectre of alien species in the garden might have less to do with ecology than ideology.
Was Ken Druse an undercover Nazi, then? In my own opinion, the one who is actually more ideologically motivated in his position regarding non-native plant-species here is Pollan, not Druse. He continues:
Am I implying that natural gardening in America is a crypto-Fascist movement? I hope not … [However] The German [i.e., Nazi] example also suggests we would do well to beware of ideology in the garden masquerading as science. It’s hard to believe that there is nothing more than scientific concern about invasive species behind the current fashion for natural gardening and native plants in America — not when our national politics are rife with anxieties about immigration and isolationist sentiment. The garden isn’t the only corner of American culture where nativism is in flower just now.
Pollan concluded his piece thus:
But if we must have a national garden style, there’s no reason it has to be xenophobic, or founded on illusions of a lost American Eden. Wouldn’t a more cosmopolitan garden, one that borrowed freely from all the world’s styles and floras, that made something of history rather than trying to escape it — wouldn’t such a garden be more in keeping with the American experience? … Here’s to multihorticulturalism.
So we have multihorticulturalism now, too, do we, to go along with plain old Left-mandated human multiculturalism? As I say, this particular article did appear in the New York Times…
Soiling Themselves and Wetting Their Plants
An interesting 2003 academic paper on this whole subject, ‘The Native Plant Enthusiasm: Ecological Panacea or Xenophobia?’, by a pair of (non-Nazi) German academics, explains how, from the early 1900s onwards, a laughable-sounding new ‘academic’ discipline called ‘plant sociology’ was born, which is now generally derided as a pseudo-scientific expression of evil white supremacist ideologies and thought-patterns of the day. One 1928 book was called Plant Sociology: The Study of Plant Communities, and it seems the term ‘communities’ here was not to be taken entirely metaphorically.
Not all ‘plant sociologists’ were German Nazis. One prominent such odd-bod was Jens Jensen, an American landscape architect, who, according to the paper, “believed that plants communicate and associate like humans”. In a 1923 article in a German gardening periodical, Jensen implausibly claimed of native plants that “it was them amongst whom we grew up… they taught us a particular language without interruption since the earliest days of our tribe… they are interwoven with the soul of our race” and so no garden “will be able to reflect the soul of a tribal people” if it does not contain only those very same ancient domestic plants with whom their ancestors grew up and communed. Distinct echoes of King Charles chatting to his daffodils.
Non-native plants, meanwhile, were, Jensen warned, “Strange things… grotesque things… Freaks are freaks, and often bastards – who wants a bastard in the garden, the out-of-door shrine of your home?” He sounds like he may well have been quite a bastard in the garden himself, to me – and probably indoors or in his potting-shed too. Despite being the self-appointed Flower-Führer of the USA, by the way, Jensen himself was actually born and raised in Denmark.
Clearly, people like Jensen were gigantic horticultural lunatics. Yet, in expressing their profound desire for total nonsenses like ‘multihorticulturalism’, aren’t the woke gardeners of today, whether working for the BBC or NYT, equally as lunatic themselves, just from a directly opposing political perspective, of extreme Left rather than extreme Right? Some of these people can often seem just as vehemently anti-white as the likes of Jensen were once vehemently pro-white. I repeat a tweet here from my previous ‘racist gardening’ article from another leading BBC gardener, James Wong:
That’s just Jens Jensen upside-down, isn’t it? The whole Nazi-era non-subject of ‘plant sociology’ (in the sense I’m talking about it above – there is a legitimate, wholly non-political, discipline of this same name) is not dead after all, as many may have naturally presumed – it has just mutated into its own inverted mirror-form anew.
When I see a plant, or a lawn, or a tree, I just see a plant, a lawn, or a tree. When people like Jensen, Wong or Pollan see them, they seem instead somehow to see entire ideologies, in coded green-leafed form. Political extremisms of the past are being reborn anew en masse, just relabelled as being ‘progressive’, when in actual fact they are anything but. BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine is not the only aspect of our rapidly rotting society in dire need of urgent root and branch reform, I fear.
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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What we have is an over abundance of non-jobs where these kinds of people have to justify their salary by sitting around all day thinking up problems for which they can then propose solutions, whilst making more cash on the side by writing about it in the left-wing press or securing a book deal from gullible publishers.
I’m a bloke and I am the one that cuts the lawn in our house because my Mrs can’t start the petrol mower (which surprises me as she is pretty strong). Someone gave us the mower and we’ve not adjusted the height setting, nor have we discussed it. It seems to do the job. I dare say that on average males and females might have slightly different approaches to gardening and at times, like many things in a marriage, it may lead to conflict – that’s life! Some people have too much time on their hands.
I’m the only one that bothers with the gardens here, and that’s usually only when the back garden starts to resemble Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. However, the spiders do a grand job of colonising the garden at this time of year so I usually delegate the job of getting the tools out of the shed to the huz ( Fat Suzy lives in there, Big Johnny’s in the garage
), then I proceed to apologise to all the spider community whose hard work 
I’m about to decimate due to letting the garden get too ‘free range’.
I am, however, grateful to the excellent work of the star pollinators for giving us surprise flowers every year that I didn’t even plant. They do a very effective job at masking the aroma, on a globally boiling day, of baked cat turd, seeing as there’s a number of Cats Without Borders where I live. As long as the bees and butterflies continue to outnumber the Jihadist wasps then it’s all good.
Mind, I’ve still no idea why slugs don’t like weeds.
Yeah my Mrs doesn’t like spiders either, but other than the lawn she’s the one that does the outside greenery – I can only be trusted with pot plants!
Yes I’m not sure if that’s another difference in the brains of males and females, though I’m better than I used to be and would never harm creepy crawlies. I do have to give myself a good talking to and be aware to not mirror being a complete fanny to my daughter, so I remove my ‘big girl’s blouse’ and don my ‘big girl pants’ instead. But god help me when it’s time to rummage around the shed, past the retired old bikes, to retrieve the paddling pool.
It’s weird as my Mrs is generally a lot less squeamish than I am. It’s all relative though – insects don’t bother me hugely but I do find them irritating, especially wasps. My future son-in-law is completely oblivious to them. Probably twits that think gardening is political could find some kind of interpretation for that
I have gratuitously killed fewer spiders since I took up macro photography than before, but, they still send a shudder down my back. Rough, tough ex-soldier terrified of the f’ugly wee beasties. Not a good look. Wasps and bees, no problem. I stand in the middle of swarms of those and never a qualm. Unless there is booze or fermented fruit lying around. Apparently the wasps are like us, get sozzled and want to fight everyone. The only time I have been stung was in such circumstances.
I didn’t know that about wasps – thanks for the info!
Some weeks ago, I was about to close the door to my microgarden when I heard an extremely loud buzzing close to my head. I pulled out of the door to investigate this first before doing anything impetuous and found myself almost vis a vis an actual hornet, the first I’ve seen in at least 20 years, in the process of making itself comfortable on the door frame. I then used a broom stick to convince it to seek a greener pasture elsewhere. I’ll take an ordinary wasp over thay any time. They’re so clumsy that it’s easy to hit them mid-air which usually makes them go pester somebody else.
Spiders are always welcome because they eat all kinds of insects otherwise feeding on me.
Problem with Spiders is the cleaning around the windows & doors, webs with the carcasses of flies etc, not pretty. I saw a Hornet last spring, it seemed to have orange on it. The European Hornets have a yellow back and brown body.
Cleaning away cobwebs with a vacuum cleaner every now and then is easy enough. I usually have 3 – 4 large garden spiders in my garden in late summer/ early autumn which build architecturally really impressive webs and I quite like them.
Last night on GBN….Fear of Islam is just propaganda according to this man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcUL5JJT0sg
Your book title contains a phrase that is appropriate to many other organisations, not just the Nazis or the Soviets. It’s not limited to science though. Manipulating some peoples knowledge by surreptitiously changing the meaning of things seems to be a tactic in use by certain groups. Changing the official definition of something, so as to exploit common understanding of it as a sales tactic is a case in point.
The article doesn’t mention that some of these foreign johnnie plants are swamping the country, threatening the natives with extinction. We’ve long known about the Japanese sending their unwanted knotweed across to squat in our gardens. But round here in the sticks it’s an Asian invasion of Himalayan balsam that’s taking over all the waterways and verges, so veteran military orchids can hardly find a place to grow. Almost as bad is that unnatural product of modern Nephilim cross-breeding – the variegated archangel.
What we need is a consciousness-raising exercise for our true-blue aboriginal species: Black Bryony month, or London Pride week… though the latter appears to be an immigrant too, but at least it’s from Europe.
Apart from plants, this one, Vespa Velutina https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/asian-hornet-uk-sightings seems to be the latest invader. There is a poster about it on the gate at the entry to the allotment site where I have a plot..
I have seen a film about these things. They leave a hole in you like a .38. The local army incinerates nests with a military flame thrower from a safe distance when they locate them.
Lockdown now!
I’ve seen horror movies about such things. Are you sure you’re not referring to a Demogorgon?
You decide.
That’s a really small one which is just about the size of a wasp (or someone with unusually large fingers, that’s also a possibility). They’re usually larger than bumblebees, about 1.5 to 2 times the size, just waspish looking.
I wouldn’t hold that n my finger!
C’mon, that’s not real, surely??
And if it is real then who’d be that mental to have it on their finger? Look at that stinger!!
This is very interesting because I never knew bees could do this. They’ve got skills. And if you can see the comments section there’s some fascinating videos people have shared;
https://x.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1800593220239262016
Great how in Asia the Bees have adapted to using their heat to kill off Hornets, check it out somewhere on Youtube.
Not sure if this is Asia but just saw this. Wow, you do not wanna mess with these badass bees;
”A group of bees take revenge on a giant hornet for eating one of them.”
https://x.com/Motabhai012/status/1800593595948577085
That’s something Japanese honeybees do to defend themselves against Asian hornets. European honeybees cannot do that.
Yet.
I used to have an allotment years ago, but then I lost the plot….
The following video shows an ingenious Japanese method for getting rid of Giant Hornets using sticky traps. You cannot kill a hornet because it will release pheromones to attract attention from the rest of the gang making you a target. These sticky traps work by first catching one (you have to engineer that) and then the stuck hornet sends out an alert that attracts others which then get stuck and more alerts get sent out etc. etc. A very destructive insect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D00mEROqKwU
Aha! The MAGA moth!
The first picture, ‘Make America Native Again’ gave me a pause. I thought some Native American gardener had relieved ‘The Donald’ of his scalp. I suppose you can’t get more native than that.
Botanists have even more than fun than epidemiologists at inventing names for some newly-designated variant of a life-form, based 97% on politics/celebrity and 3% DNA. That new moth, Neopalpa donaldtrumpi, whose mugshot is pictured above, will cause panic in The Left, even if there is only one isolated outbreak. It’s the same pattern every time the Left sense a setback in the Long March Through The Institutions.
I see where we are going with moths and lawns. Some variant of a moth is deemed to be “of interest”, “dangerous” but at the same time “endangered” by human behaviour, such as cutting grass in our backyard with petrol mowers or extirpating weeds with Roundup. We are locked down, forced to binge on Netflix Bugwatch all day, and forbidden to mow unless we are key workers. An army of clip-boarded, masked Karens is recruited who patrol suburbs looking for striped, weed-free lawns, and grass up the owner to the local council. A counter-protest movement develops, in which lawn-lovers take to the streets chanting “Weedom, Weedom” or “Ten men went to mow” but are ignored or denigrated by the media as being “hooligans”, “conspiracy theorists” and “far-right Mowists” in the pay of Putin. The government will ban petrol mowers, but subsidise electric mowers. Eventually the whole hysteria will die down, until the botanists get bored or run out of funding, and search for a new project.
World Horticultural Organisation?
Monty Don in a dress is just plain wrong, not as hideous as Cherie Blair but close. Chris Packham should just Pack ’em and Push Off, sanctimonious nobody: you can tell what he is all about by how he wears his horrible polo shirts.
Anyway, if we plant all these different things from all over the world instead of our species is it not cultural appropriation?
Which leads to a thought: is it not the case that encouraging immigrants to come here, thereby depriving their native lands of their talents, the worst form possible of appropriation? Can any Leftie explain to me how it is is a Great Thing to take thousands of poor countries Doctors and Nurses to work here? How come it is good that we, in the West, appropriate all the food and fruit pickers and the Left cheer this as the people in their homelands starve?
Not to worry as we are taking in all those that aren’t doctors or engineers.
As to division of duties, my marriage is pretty even. My wife likes gardening more than me. I can fix, make, install pretty much anything. I can put together furniture and correct her mistakes when she tries. She can stand up to cook better than I can but when she is not well, I cook.
I put the bins out and bring them back in. I’ll also sort out the neighbours bins when they are on holiday. How is this sexist? My next door neighbour was out clearing snow once because she knows I can’t bend very well. Is she sexist?
There are too many people in the world today who, quite frankly, should find a religion that suits them. That is the root of all of this: they eternally search for something to believe in. For a few years it was “Ohhh! Jeremy Corbyn” but he did not turn out to be the Messiah: wrong sandals.
I note a number of articles mentioning the EU results and how youngsters are moving Right: believing in the Left failed them so now they search a different field for that something they can hold onto and believe in.
I don’t what Monty Don’s politics are, but Lib Dem has often popped into my mind.
Wildflowers. When I lived in France, I owned a property with very poor topsoil… such as it was… mostly moss, rocky and clay. Flowers just wouldn’t grow.
I hit upon the idea of wildflowers and bought a mix of seeds specifically for poor soil, tree-shaded areas.
First year, beautiful, by the third year just a mess of ugly weeds. That pesky thing called nature and evolution, the best adapted for the environment thrived and choked out the less successful.
The problem with folk like Bradbury, the Attenborough creature is they think the Earth is a zoo and a garden and they the keepers and gardeners and they can arrange nature ‘as it should be’ and Humans are pests to be eliminated.
The New Zealanders have always ruthlessly protected their indigenous environment from any non New Zealand genetic plant/microbe material, even under the auspices of arch woke Liberal Jacinda. I don’t notice anyone accusing them of being Nazis.
Rumours have it that Packham self-identifes as male and will start transitioning to a man soon.
A quote from Scientific American May 12 2023 and what must now be a Nazi publication? The language is rabidly xenophobic and therefore far right.
Rats Are Finally Gone from This Vulnerable Island
Efforts to eradicate invasive rats that have decimated native species on islands around the world are beginning to bear fruit.
Just a year ago, the tiny islet of Irooj in the Marshall Islands was crawling with invasive rats. The hungry rodents had been on the rampage there for decades, gobbling up native seabird eggs and threatening the local biodiversity.
But as of March, the little island has been declared rat-free. That’s thanks to a yearlong campaign to eradicate the rodents and restore the island to its natural condition.
The effort was conducted by the Republic of the Marshall Islands’ Ministry of Natural Resources and Commerce, with help from the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Program, an intergovernmental organization focused on climate and environmental issues on small islands in the Pacific, and nonprofit Island Conservation, which works to remove invasive species from islands around the world.
“The island feels alive again,” said Kennedy Kaneko, the Republic of the Marshall Islands national invasive species coordinator, in a statement. “Careful monitoring showed zero signs of rats on Irooj. In fact, seabirds and crabs were found in abundance.”
Could it be that the supposed loss in biodiversity, if it exists, is because of invasive species?
It must be women in charge of cutting our suburban grass verges, because most are currently uncut and a complete mess. Last year they had their first cut in July! Needless to say, those outside my house and for hundred yards around have been cut twice this year by this MCP.
I am very much a female. We have a wonderful gardener who keeps our lawns mown (yes, with stripes) and weed (sorry, ‘wild flower’) free. It is the envy of our neighbours – both male and female. What tosh gets press!