Melanie McDonagh: Enjoy the Monet pleasures of having a garden

Inspiring: Monet’s Pond with Water Lilies Harmony in Green at the Royal Academy
Alex Lentati / Evening Standard
Melanie McDonagh29 January 2016
WEST END FINAL

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Obviously, it was complete genius for the Royal Academy — which, let’s observe in passing, doesn’t receive a penny of government money — to stage its Painting the Modern Garden exhibition at the end of January. Outside, grey and more grey; inside a riot of colour, a legal high of pinks, purples, reds, greens and oranges. Light on grass, light on water, light on leaves, with people an occasional feature — girls looking like flowers themselves.

Perhaps the most beautiful place to spend time in London right now is in the room given over to Monet’s early years at Giverny: a succession of views of his water garden. It’s impossible to stand there without a bit of emotional uplift, though — you’ll hate me for this — I did get to see it when it was almost empty.

Horticulture has a funny image in contemporary life, a bit Chelsea Flower Show, a bit Prince Charles at Highgrove, a bit Monty Don, bless him. There are trendy garden designers and trendier florists — even pot plants are having their moment — but the notion of gardening as another form of art, perhaps the purest form of art? Nope, it’s not where we’re at, not where art is at. Not even close.

But that’s what this exhibition does. It reminds us of the heady days when the art revolution was carried on with geraniums and nasturtiums and transferred to canvas by modernists who were as busy gardening as painting. Monet, Pisarro, Van Gogh, Matisse, Emil Nolde; they were all at it.

And I did say nasturtiums. Apparently they were avant garde in the 19th century. People thought they emitted light, and there’s us thinking they’re good for salads. The Impressionists were radical about flowers: riotous geraniums, blowsy dahlias and chrysanths; they were all for dynamic hybrids and exotic immigrants.

For Londoners there’s something poignant about all this because most of us are gardenless. It’s like showing still lifes of banquets to hungry refugees. We’re the horticulturally dispossessed, a lucky few apart, making do with allotments and gardens in bottles. The days when ordinary council houses came with a back garden are gone.

So... time for action. If gardens are part of our public aesthetic life, then we need to claim them. According to the Royal Horticultural Society, a quarter of the front gardens in Britain — five million — are concreted over and a further seven million partly paved. This is an outrage. Councils should ban the despoliation of gardens on environmental and aesthetic grounds. If you don’t use your garden it should be given to someone who will.

As for allotments, they are things of wonder but in quite a few, you’re not allowed to plant flowers, just veg, which gives a dull, utilitarian aspect to the enterprise. Liberate those plots. Jeremy Corbyn has one, you know.

On the bright side, lots of schools now have their own gardens for children, each year having its own little patch. Mostly they’re primary schools, which sends a message that gardening is like finger painting, something for the tots. What I’d like is for the art colleges to get stuck into public horticulture: if Van Gogh can get tonal contrasts from flowers so can they.

But for now we have this collection of Impressionists’ horticultural fantasies. It only lacks smell.

Rhodes is one of many who could come off their perch

So Rhodes doesn’t fall after all. The statue of Cecil Rhodes, imperialist, is to remain in situ at Oriel College Oxford, after giving the student body and the rest of us a most satisfactory opportunity to sound off about rewriting history/extirpating institutional racism to no effect whatever.

But for the thwarted supporters of Rhodes Must Fall there are almost unlimited examples of historical figures with unsound views who could retrospectively be toppled off their plinths.

This week, for instance, socially progressive Scots, including Nicola Sturgeon, came together to celebrate Burns Night. Yet as I think we all know, Burns was all set, in 1786, to set sail for Jamaica to take up a position as a slave overseer. The fact that he didn’t owed nothing to a change of heart.

So should Burns Night go? Or shall we just accept that back then they just weren’t like us?

The Euro club doesn’t need to be so tightknit

This week a group of prominent women — Karren Brady, Martha Lane Fox, Sally Greene et al — wrote to this paper as members of the pro-EU membership group, Women In. Their grounds were various. The River Café’s Ruth Rogers was all for keeping free access to Italian olive oil, ditto to European employees; Brady wanted to maintain rights to maternity leave which, she felt, the EU underpinned.

Some of this reminds me uneasily of Ken Livingstone’s attempts to stop the Tories dismantling the GLC. The very traffic lights had big stickers on saying: “GLC, Working for London.” The gist was that if it were abolished the lights would go out: result, anarchy.

But it wasn’t true, and it may not be true of some Euroenthusiasts’ more extravagant claims. It is possible for a non-EU country to provide generous parental leave — see Canada. And while all restaurant owners treasure their European staff, some might like to employ more Australians, for example. There are good arguments on both sides — but let’s not, er, over-egg the pudding.

Facebook tries to express emotion

Exciting, isn’t it, that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is trying out variations on its Like options. The new emojis include “love”, “ha ha”, “wow”, “sad” and “angry”. A button called “yay” with rosy cheeks and a smile was, it seems, widely misunderstood.

I’m not really an emoji person but I doubt that this quite does justice to the sheer range of emotions that Facebook users manifest — one for moral indignation (narrowed eyes) would be especially handy. The sad and angry faces don’t quite cut it really.

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