Absolutely U.K. gardening culture has racism baked into its DNA.

It’s so integral that when you point out it’s existence, people assume you are against gardening, not racism.

Epitomised, for example, by the fetishisation (and wild misuse) of words like ‘heritage’ and ‘native’. https://twitter.com/eddwall/status/1337690633365037057

I was once asked to present a planting concept for E London to a room of (100% white) critics.

Feedback was that international planting ‘didn’t fit the area’ and I ‘should do native wildflowers’

The site was founded by Romans & an immigration epicentre for +2,000 yrs.

The idea of field of ‘wildflowers’ (they ironically meant non-native cornfield weeds) was ‘more in keeping with the area’ is not just historically fucked.

It also is predicated on often unconscious ideas of what and who does and does not ‘belong’ in the U.K.

That’s before the ‘advice’ to me afterward about how I could make it more ‘fitting’ the ‘British’, ‘genius loci’.

And that I had a ‘lot to learn’, not about horticulture (they were all planners and architects) but about Britain.

I was born like 2 miles away from the site.

This is the kind of exhausting shit you have to go through everyday if you work in U.K. horticulture.

Unless of course you internalise these unquestioned (often unconscious) ideas that are predicated in large part on a bedrock xenophobia and racism.

I believe it’s precisely this stuff that holds gardening back from being treated on par with other forms of high art, like painting, music & film.

And excludes huge swathes of society from enjoying (and contributing) to the enormous creative potential.

Meaning we all miss out.

Can you imagine this mindset in, for example, fashion?

“No, no, that smart Italian suit isn’t in keeping with the local area or British genius loci.

Have a Celtic headdress, a scythe and this Boudica costume.’

That’s literally the equivalent.