Garden fashions change, and in any case it would be a mistake to be too precise and attempt to classify a garden socially on the basis of one or two flowers or features. The 'eccentricity clause' applies here as well, as Quest-Ritson observes: 'Once a garden-owner has acquired a reputation as a general plantsman, it is quite permissible for him to express a tenderness for the unfashionable, the plebeian and the naff'. I would say that being firmly and unequivocally established as a member of the upper- or upper-middle classes would be enough, with or without plantsmanship, but the point is much the same. The odd garden gnome or zinnia does not necessarily result in automatic demotion, but may be tolerated as a personal idiosyncrasy.
To gauge the social class of a garden owner, it is therefore better to look at the general style of the garden, rather than becoming too obsessed with the class-semiotics of individual plants - particularly if you can't tell an old-fashioned rose from a Hybrid Tea. As a rule-of-thumb, gardens lower down the social scale tend to be both more garish (their owners would say 'colourful' or 'cheerful') and more regimented in appearance (their owners would call them 'neat' or 'tidy') than those at the higher end.
Higher-class gardens tend to look more casual, more natural, less effortful, with more faded or subtle colours. Like the 'natural look' in make-up, this effect may require a great deal of time and effort to achieve - perhaps more than the pastry-cut flower-beds and disciplined rows of flowers of the lower-class garden - but the effort does not show; the impression is of a charming, uncontrived confusion, usually with little or no earth visible between the plants. Excessive fretting and fussing about the odd weed or two, and over-zealous manicuring of lawns, are regarded, by the upper classes and upper-middles, as rather lower class.
The wealthier uppers, of course, have lower-class gardeners to do their fretting and manicuring for them, so their gardens may sometimes look rather too neat - but if you talk to them, you will find that they often complain about the perfectionism of their gardeners ('Fred's a dreadful fusser - has a fit if a daisy dares to rear its ugly head on "his" lawn!') in the same patronising way that some businessmen and professionals mock the tidiness of their super-efficient secretaries ('Oh, I'm not allowed near the filing cabinet - I might mess up her precious colourcoding system!').
The Ironic-gnome Rule
Leaving aside the proletarian neatness of nanny-gardeners, if you do spot an unexpectedly and unmistakably plebeian feature in such a garden, it is worth asking the owner about it. The response will tell you much more about the owner's class than the feature itself. I once expressed mild surprise at the presence of a garden gnome in an upper-middle-class garden (I said something intelligent like 'Oh, a gnome'). The owner of the garden explained that the gnome was 'ironic'. I asked him, with apologies for my ignorance, how one could tell that his garden gnome was supposed to be an ironic statement, as opposed to, you know, just a gnome. He rather sniffily replied that I only had to look at the rest of the garden for it to be obvious that the gnome was a tongue-in-cheek joke.
But surely, I persisted, garden gnomes are always something of a joke, in any garden - I mean, no-one actually takes them seriously or regards them as works of art. His response was rather rambling and confused (not to mention somewhat huffy), but the gist seemed to be that while the lower classes saw gnomes as intrinsically amusing, his gnome was amusing only because of its incongruous appearance in a 'smart' garden. In other words, council-house gnomes were a joke, but his gnome was a joke about council-house tastes, effectively a joke about class. A subtle but clearly very important distinction. Needless to say, I was not invited back.
This man's reaction to my questions clearly defined him as upper-middle, rather than upper class. In fact, his pointing out that the gnome I had noticed was 'ironic' had already demoted him by half a class from my original assessment. A genuine member of the upper classes would either have boldly admitted to a passion for garden gnomes (and eagerly pointed out other examples of the genre dotted about his otherwise effortlessly elegant garden) or said something like 'Ah yes, my gnome. I'm very fond of my gnome.' and left me to draw my own conclusions. The upper classes do not care what a nosey anthropologist (or indeed anyone else) thinks of them, and in any case do not need ironic gnomes to emphasise their status.
HOME RULES AND ENGLISHNESS
Can the unwritten rules of English homes and gardens help to clarify, refine or expand our 'grammar' of Englishness? Have we found or confirmed any more candidates for 'defining characteristic' status? Given that our homes and gardens are two of our principal obsessions, it would be surprising if an analysis of their underlying rules did not yield some helpful insights into our national character.
All humans have a territorial instinct, but the English obsession with our homes and mania for nestbuilding goes much further than this. Almost all commentators have remarked on this English home-fixation, but none has yet offered a satisfactory explanation. Jeremy Paxman comes closest to an understanding of this characteristic when he says that '"Home" is what the English have instead of a Fatherland'31, but this does not entirely explain why we should be so neurotically obsessive about our homes. Attempts to attribute our home-fixation to the English climate are unconvincing - other countries have weather conditions much more likely to drive their inhabitants indoors, but do not share our fanatical nesting tendencies.
I think that some insights into our home-obsession can be found in the 'rules of Englishness' that we have identified in this and previous chapters. The moat-and-drawbridge rule represents the fifth 'sighting' so far of the English fixation with privacy (a preoccupation also evident in the awful estate agent rule, the front-garden rules and the back-garden formula) and at least the ninth or tenth occurrence of the reserve/social inhibition theme. My hunch at this stage is that these are likely to qualify as 'defining characteristics' of Englishness, and that they are closely connected. It seems to me that our home-obsession is directly related to our almost pathological need for privacy, and that this in turn is inextricably bound up with our problems of social inhibition, reticence and embarrassment - our lack of ease and skill in social interaction.
The English seem to have three main ways of dealing with this 'social dis-ease': one is the ingenious use of props and facilitators to overcome our inhibitions and mask our incompetence; another is to become aggressive; the one that concerns us here is the tendency to retreat into the privacy and sanctuary of our castle-like homes, shut the door, pull up the imaginary drawbridge and avoid the issue. Home may indeed be our substitute for a Fatherland, but at another level, I would suggest that home is what the English have instead of social skills.
The class rules reveal a new aspect of our acute class-consciousness - which I call the 'adjacent classes problem'. We noted that it is always safest to choose one's eccentricity from a class at the opposite end of the social scale, rather than from an immediately adjacent class. Each English class particularly despises the one immediately below it, and the prospect of being mistaken for a member of this adjacent class is therefore especially abhorrent.
The brag-wall rule reflects another kind of typically English hypocrisy, and brings us back to the recurring theme of humour. In this case, we see the use of wit and humour as a sort of cover for breaking the modesty and anti-earnestness rules. The house-talk 'nightmare' rule reminds us, again, of the English penchant for moaning, but is also yet another manifestation of the modesty rule, which must surely be a strong contender for 'defining characteristic' status. The nightmare rule is also a hypocritical 'cover': a way of boasting without appearing to boast.