THUS FAR the focus of this book has been on the life and afterlife of British colonial gardens in India. Now it is time to put them in a larger context and try to tease out what they may tell us about British imperialism itself.
A passion for gardens was by no means limited to India or to the British. Rival powers, such as the French and Dutch, put their own stamp on their imperial landscapes, but none did so on the scale or with such lasting effect as the British. They created botanical gardens that doubled as public parks from Melbourne to St. Vincent, from Zomba in Nyasaland to Aburi in the Gold Coast. Thanks to the garden in Entebbe and its horticultural training programs, Nairobi and Kampala were in the years immediately after independence “the most lavishly flowered towns in the world,” in the view of an eminent British garden historian. Where fever-ridden colonials in India retreated to the Himalayas and the Nilgiris, in Malaysia they sought out Penang, in Africa the Jos Plateau of Nigeria and the Eastern Highlands of Southern Rhodesia. In a sense, Kenya’s Happy Valley, the White Highlands, was the ultimate hill station, inhabited not by birds of passage but by a perpetual population of self-proclaimed elite. Following the lead of New Delhi, planners dreamed up new “garden city” capitals in Canberra and Lusaka. And as late as 1955 a full-fledged durbar met the young Queen Elizabeth and her consort on tour in northern Nigeria, prompting her hosts to undertake the “thankless task” of growing grass on the hard-baked grounds and planting out geraniums in window boxes alongside the royal dais. After the durbar, with its display of mounted warriors in chain mail and “tribal” dancers, the Royals greeted a thousand guests at a garden party on the lawns of Government House in Kaduna.1
In the remotest corners of the empire colonials great and small lovingly tended their own approximations of English gardens—including Scots and Irish (but less commonly Welsh), who were very much part of the empire-building project and just as partial to “English” gardens. At Grote Schur, outside Cape Town, Cecil Rhodes ignored the advice of both Francis Bacon and Gertrude Jekyll that a garden should be in intimate proportion to the house and planted an acre of hydrangeas far from shade and water. Sir Stewart Gore Browne carved an imposing estate out of the Northern Rhodesian bush, with terraced lawns, a walled ladies’ garden, roses, and an avenue of cypress trees (Fig. 56). Ordinary colonials simply tried to grow lawns and a few flowers from home amid the jacarandas and bougainvilleas. Expatriated to Egypt with her banker husband, Penelope Lively’s mother created a garden that was “unashamedly English in design—it had lawns and a lily pond with a willow, pergolas and formal beds and a rose garden”—but the drive to the house was lined with thirty-foot eucalyptuses. More ambitiously, the Egyptian Delta Land and Investment Company laid out the garden city of Maadi early in the twentieth century, transforming a swath of countryside into an “English township, with neat little roads lined with vine-covered houses, each with its large garden filled with trees and flowers and surrounded by a hedge.” Settled by a large colony of Anglo-Egyptians, it also attracted “highbrows addicted to gardening.”2
In northern Nigeria, Muriel Bennett’s garden was home to a flower-loving monkey. Every morning he took her hand as she made her rounds and climbed trees to help her gather sprays of blossoms beyond her reach. Roses held a special place in the hearts of those far from home. The Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o describes the gardens of a high colonial official with their flame lilies, morning glory, sunflowers, and bougainvillea. “However, it was the gardens of roses that stood out in color above all the others. Mrs. Margery Thompson had cultivated red roses, white roses, pink roses—roses of all shades.” Alas, it was common wisdom in Africa that “planting roses was sure to lead to transfer.”3
Fig. 56. Front garden at Shiwa Ng’andu, Zambia, 1950s
[Photograph by Jo and Charles Harvey]
One of the few spots on the imperial map that appeared ungardenable was Aden, a bastion of solid rock guarding the sea route to India, but even here Baron von orlich found “indefatigable” English officers importing mold from Arabia in an attempt to grow flowers and bananas in the mid-nineteenth century. After the British acquired Ascension Island, halfway between Africa and Brazil, the Royal Navy brought in tons of earth and innumerable trees “to soften the volcanic landscape.” According to tradition, every officer posted to the garrison added some useful plant to the garden of roses, geraniums, and English vegetables. Indeed, the taste for English flowers overflowed the bounds of formal empire. On a plant-hunting expedition to remote areas of Tibet, Frank Kingdon-Ward was surprised to find a courtyard “gay with hollyhocks, asters, sunflowers, dahlias, pansies, geraniums, poppies, stocks and nasturtiums.” The Dzong-pen (local governor) had brought back a tin of Sutton’s seeds from a trip to Calcutta. Tibetans were very fond of such flowers, especially for monastery gardens. In fact the government requested Kingdon-Ward to send seeds for the Dalai Lama to grow in his private garden, “which he tends with loving care.”4
When one power redirects the economy of another to produce tea or cotton or opium primarily for the benefit of the rulers, no one disputes the term “imperialism.” But can we justify the term when speaking of the colonization of the world with English gardens? After all, this phenomenon was a composite of many elements, not least of them homesickness, nostalgia, love of nature, the pleasure of seeing things grow, a delight in beauty itself. The expatriate wife in Sara Duncan’s The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (1893) went down to the garden simply to “talk of home to her friends in the flowerbeds,” commending their bravery in toughing it out so far from England. Or, as Leonard Woolf’s sister Bella so aptly remarked, “It takes a primrose in the tropics to give one true nostalgia.”5 Nevertheless, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, these gardens in form and content contained an ideological message that reflected both individual personalities and cultural values. It may be a leap to argue that they were an integral part of the template of power relations, the ability of the British to govern so many with so few— at the height of the empire no more than 165,000 Europeans ruled 300 million Indians, for example, and the same ratios held elsewhere—but they were one of the most visible manifestations of British presence and British civilization. Perhaps John Mortimer was only half jesting when he commented that the herbaceous border, along with British law, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Lord Byron, was “one of our great contributions to the world.”6 For the colonials themselves gardens were, more often than not, a means of keeping the “other” world at bay, of creating an oasis of Britishness in an alien if not a potentially hostile land.
Conversely, subject peoples aiming for acceptance aped the ways of the British, not least of all their gardens. Just as Rajput princes had earlier adopted Mughal gardens, then English parks, so Madhur Jaffrey’s very middle-class father oversaw his family garden in twentieth-century New Delhi, with “vast lawns, a badminton court, a tennis court, a rose garden, mixed flower borders edged with sweet peas”—indeed an array of gardens growing just about any flower that might be made to flourish in a subtropical climate, from cannas to lupins. While the women in the family might stick to more traditional fare, he relished his breakfasts of fried eggs, toast in a silver toast rack, and jams in proper silver-lidded cut-glass jam jars; for a special treat, there was ham, bacon, or sausages. It was all part of the package, the colonial heritage that ran the gamut from public to personal.7
“A perennial theme running throughout Britain’s imperial experience,” notes the historian P. J. Marshall, “has been the relationship between the ideas about the ordering of society at home and ideas about the ordering of the empire overseas.” However obvious may seem to be the difficulties of imposing this order on very different societies, “generations of British people have tried to do precisely this.” Gardens are but one instance, and, as the garden historian John Dixon Hunt warns us, “we should not let all that ‘nature’ seduce us from registering their cultural self-construction.” If extensive greenswards and neat flowerbeds and banks of shrubbery were the ideal of civilized living at home, they were all the more so abroad, where the danger of losing one’s compass was so much greater and the need to set an example for subject peoples so urgent. “It was the Cotswold ideal, transplanted to the equator inflated in scale, and without the servant problem.”8
Were one to look down from the air on almost any British enclave in India, or indeed anywhere in the world, during the imperial heyday, there would have been no mistaking its identity. First of all, one would have been struck by contrasts: on whatever high ground might be available, spacious lawns and gardens surrounding ample bungalows, whether of officials or planters; clubs with their manicured golf courses, polo grounds, and tennis courts; on lower ground, tucked out of sight at some distance and packed closely together, the huts and bazaars of the indigenous population. One would also see Government House, with its “borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues.” Botanical gardens and public parks extended these attractions to the populace at large. And, with the advent of the automobile age, tree-lined thoroughfares interspersed with quintessentially English roundabouts, bedecked with flowers and greenery, in the city center (see Fig. 16).9 The irony of the whole scenario was that from start to finish it was totally dependent on a virtual army of “natives” to make it run.
This was the footprint of empire in India at high noon. But it had evolved from an earlier period of informal empire conspicuous in the layout of the presidency cities and their offshoots. Europeans were fewer, but they aspired both to grand city houses in the Palladian manner and garden houses on the model of country estates in eighteenth-century Britain, with their fine prospects and artfully positioned copses, streams and lakes. An aerial view would have underscored the contrast between high-density urban habitations and low-density suburban or rural, but without the full complement of clubs, playing fields, and other amenities so typical of later colonial life.
Alongside the gardens themselves, garden metaphors and metonyms have a venerable history in the rhetoric of politics to express ideals and failures of government; the well-kept garden is the symbol of good stewardship, the unkempt tangle, of anarchy. Shakespeare’s Richard II found England a “sea-walled garden . . .
full of weeds, her fairest flowers chok’d up,
Her fruit-trees all unprun’d, her edges ruin’d
Her knots disorder’d and her wholesome herbs
Swarming with caterpillars10
Mughal rulers progressively extended images of gardens and flowers to the language of politics. As Akbar’s manifesto in occupying Kashmir proclaimed: “The sole idea of wise kings is day by day to refresh the garden of the world by the streams of justice, and assuredly this design is accomplished whenever extensive countries come into the hands of one who is just and of wide capacity.”11 On another occasion, he insisted that “cleansing of the four bangs of India [a reference to the Mughal division of India into seven climes] . . . and the sweeping away of the weeds and rubbish from this garden . . . did not proceed from self will and self-indulgence, and that we had no object except to be kind to mortals, and to obliterate their oppressors.”12 Given his own views, it is not implausible to read Kipling’s “Glory of the Garden” with its famous opening lines, “Our England is a garden,” as an allegory of empire. Its reminder that “the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye,” that it depends on the unsung toilers in potting shed and dung-pit—“Told off to do as they are bid and do it without noise”—can refer just as well to the unsung sahib or BOR (British Other Ranks: enlisted men), insuring, as the poet would have it, that the empire as glorious garden “shall never pass away.”13
The long-serving district officer Henry Sharp invoked the metaphor of the garden to characterize the stages of British rule in India from mercantile to imperial. At first, he points out, they did not try to interfere with the natural flora of the land, but gradually all that changed: “The scorching beams of centralized authority withered its hardiest growth. Moreover the gardeners themselves consciously and deliberately began to interfere with the natural flora and, in the hope of making improvements, to sow the seeds of exotic plants.” Some of these proved beneficial but others either perished or choked out “useful native herbs and sometimes bore fruits which disagreed with the inhabitants. Thus the whole nature of the garden began to change.” Taking leave of India, Sharp returned to the garden metaphor, hoping that the new India will find “a pleasance more natural to their bent and nearer to their heart’s desire.” When asked by a nawab what the use of a viceroy was, another official ventured the epigram that “India was the plant and the Viceroy the flower.”14
The question remains: Why are gardens so much a part of English identity, why are the English such “plantaholics”? Some four-fifths of households in Britain have their own garden or access to one, by far the highest proportion of any European country. “Is there something peculiarly English in their response to nature?” asks the garden historian Edward Hyams, answering in the affirmative.15 It is worth remembering, however, that the English garden did not really come into its own until the eighteenth century. Although garden historians make much of earlier styles—Tudor, Jacobean, Queen Anne—these were largely beholden to continental designs and even continental designers, with just a little tweaking here and there to suit national tastes. What came to distinguish the jardin anglais were the great expanses of verdant parkland with well-placed clusters of trees and copses, streams and ponds, a neatly unnatural simulacrum of the “natural” in which flowers and flowering bushes played a minor part. Only toward the end of the century did flowers stage a comeback, leading to the full-fledged Victorian and Edwardian gardens with their various configurations of beds and shrubs, all set in extensive and neatly trimmed lawns. “Green lawns and flower-beds with superb trees which obscure the view, that is what the English like, and what one finds everywhere here,” remarked the Duchesse de Dino with some wonderment on a visit to England early in the nineteenth century. It was a green and pleasant land with a vengeance, so much so that when Flora Annie Steel remarked to Walter Pater on the loveliness of the green fields around Oxford in the spring (which would have struck her with particular force after her years in India), he replied, “Don’t you think they are almost offensively green?”16
A number of commentators have argued that the eighteenth-century English park encoded an ideology of liberty in contrast to the autocratic constraints of, say, the French formal garden. Paradoxically it also coincided with the most expansive phase of empire-building and was financed to some degree from imperial revenues. The multiple incarnations of the nineteenth-century garden, on the other hand, are an ideological jumble; they encode a confusing welter of ideas, from free trade (the flood of exotic plants and exotic styles), to the ascendancy of the middle classes (every villa set in its own garden), to the wanton historicism of the age, with one revival after another. In the free-for-all of expanding democracy, garden professionals fought as fiercely over contending styles as any politicians on the hustings. Perhaps the underlying message is simply that gardens matter, just as politics matters.
Like the democratization of British public life, too, the democratization of gardening was a gradual process, although it moved a good deal more quickly than parliamentary reform. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Keith Thomas maintains, there was “no country in which flower-gardening had as socially wide an appeal as in England.” The working classes regarded gardens almost as a right. In fact, Thomas makes the provocative claim that “the preoccupation with gardening, like that with pets, fishing and other hobbies, even helps to explain the relative lack of radical and political impulses among the British proletariat.” In any random catalog of what constitutes “Englishness,” gardens would surely be right up there with fair play, roast beef, and Thomas’s “sentimental view of animals.” And hot baths.17
The farther one ventured from home, the more such traditions gained in intensity—Maria Graham and others, we may recall, did remark on the excessive chauvinism of her countrymen in Calcutta, a sentiment echoed by Lady Henrietta Clive, who could not restrain herself from exclaiming “What a wonderful people we are really, having the command of the whole world.” Others, too, have noted the tendency of the English abroad to carry with them the “habits and customs of their own country.” As Byron’s friend Lady Blessington observed, “It would appear they travel not so much for the purpose of studying the manners of other lands, as for that of establishing and displaying their own.”18 This was surely true of expatriate gardens that visually proclaimed the superiority of their owners, individually and culturally. And if the adoption of gardens and gardening could “civilize” the British working classes, the same should be true of subject populations, guided by the example of their colonial masters.
Although at home notions of what constituted an “English garden” were both ever-changing and hotly contested, at a distance they tended to resolve themselves into more generic forms: the parklike gardens of the eighteenth century yielding to variations on the classic Victorian in the period of high colonialism. There is little evidence that the “eclectic bandwagon” of styles vying for acceptance in nineteenth-century England had much resonance in India.19 There was always a time lag, for one thing; for another, most colonials were too impermanent in their postings to sink time and money into an fashionable garden; for a third, they had enough to do simply to get the flowers of home to grow in an alien land without worrying about the latest fad in topiary or balustrades or weeping willows. The British gardens that characterized high-colonial India and survived the end of empire, however precariously, tended therefore to be variations on the basic Victorian pattern of lawns, defined flowerbeds with as many English flowers as possible, and ranks and ranks of potted plants. Shrubs and trees of necessity were indigenous rather than imported from home.
As far as I know, only the Mughals matched the British in the intensity of their love of gardens and certainty in their own models (although the British—some British—have had a sense of humor about their horticultural addictions that seems quite lacking in the Mughals).20 One is hard put to it, however, to explain why two such different peoples should share this obsession: in the one case, restless invaders from the uplands of Central Asia, in the other, merchant adventurers morphing into civil servants from a small boreal island. There were of course differences, both in outcomes and in ideological underpinnings. The British came to see gardens not only as aesthetically pleasing but also as a means of moral improvement for all classes at home and all peoples under the Union Jack, an idea that would have seemed quite alien to their Mughal forebears. Moreover, Mughal gardens were essentially male domains, although a few highborn women such as Nur Jahan, the wife of Emperor Jahangir, oversaw the design of several. The Victorian rulers of India, it has been remarked, personified a masculine ideal, the public school ethos writ large. They lived, worked, and played in a largely male environment, married late, and often experienced long periods of separation from wives and children. Gardens, however, were a largely female contribution to imperial life—one might even say that gardens were to empire as women were to men, softening and taming the excessive masculinity of the enterprise.21
But why create a garden at all? “Logically the pleasure garden has no excuse for existence,” comments one writer, “but the charm of living plants seems to respond to some basic human need.” Or divine need: as Bacon reminds us, “God Almighty first planted a garden.” Robert Pogue Harrison has mused that the existence of gardens means that there are aspects of our humanity that nature by itself does not fully accommodate—we must go nature one better. For some the garden has provided a sanctuary from history, either a referent to the prelapsarian world we have lost or to the Paradise that we hope awaits us.22 For others, the garden is an “exercise in memory,” a way of getting to a past that may be one’s own or more distantly related. A garden is also a very tangible display of wealth and power. Just as there are many reasons one creates a garden, there may be many reasons one chooses its form and content. The Rajut princes of Udaipur and Amber who laid out Mughal-inspired gardens may have wanted to curry favor with their Mughal overlords, as did later Indian elites in adopting British architectural and garden styles, along with cricket, Marmite, and public-school educations. The Kew-trained gardener became a fixture, along with the English tutor. One might even label gardens the “soft face” of imperialism, a manifestation of power by other means and part of the agenda stated most baldly by Thomas Macaulay in his famous “Minute” on education of 1835, namely to form a “class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”23
Still, we should not overdetermine the matter. Cultural boundaries are immensely permeable, and one should also recognize that the delights of other garden traditions have appealed to many for purely personal motives. To think otherwise is to sell the Nehrus, the Sujayas, and the Mrs. Mahesh Kapoors short. Their love of English gardens and English flowers was and is genuine. On the British side, the exceptions may be as interesting as the stereotypes. What accounts for the openness of a James Forbes or William Jones? One can to some extent understand the insularity of an Emily Eden, cocooned as she was in the protocol enveloping the entourage of her brother, the governor-general, but what are we to make of Charlotte Canning’s quite opposite response, although she was even more isolated and straitjacketed in her contacts? Or Fanny Parks, who started out with the usual prejudices but allowed herself ultimately to be caught up in all that India had to offer? To be sure, Parks spent much longer in the country, but it was nevertheless highly unusual for a woman to go off traveling on her own as she did so happily. Just as Edward Lear was to find the picturesque he so eagerly sought in the luxuriance of India, others on both sides of the imperial equation have been able to separate the wheat from the chaff in their colonial heritage. Perhaps no one offers a better example of cultural openness than the “white Mughal,” Colonel William Linnaeus Gardner. Passing his twilight years with his beloved Begum, he summed up the recipe for his happy life: “New books, a garden, a spade, nobody to obey, pyjamas, grandchildren, tranquility: this is the summit of happiness, not only in the East but the West too.”24
True, such boundary-crossing figures as Gardner became scarcer in the bureaucratized India of a later generation. Nevertheless, Constance Villiers-Stuart was such a one. She saw in the study of Indian garden craft a larger purpose than mere antiquarianism. In urging that an “Indian garden” be part of the plan for the Viceroy’s House in Delhi, she held out the hope that gardens might bridge the divide between peoples, not only between East and West but also within India, voicing a Gandhian ideal of social harmony:
In a vast continent where temples, churches, mosques, forts, and even palaces but serve to mark off and divide men and creeds, all might yet meet in a garden. Hindu and Muslim might both recognize their own symbols there, where the fountain mists and whispering trees would murmur to us of that power, the bhakti, which for all our restless Western cleverness we miss. . . . The Lilies of Our Lady and the Lotus of the Good Law would share the gardens with the pink rose of the Persian poets and the red rose of England. . . . New needs and our modern wealth of flowers would give fresh life and added beauty to ancient symbols and ideas, charms to rival and surpass all the older Shalimars.25
The history of British colonial gardens in India shares with imperialism itself the lack of a clear theoretical basis, even clear aims. While not really created in a fit of absentmindedness any more than was the empire, they happened piecemeal, reflecting changing views at home, changing circumstances abroad, and individual taste. As an historian of empire has observed, “what was distinctly English about the enterprise was not peoples’ motives for going where they did but what they believed themselves to be doing when they got there.”26 And what they did almost from the first moment was to lay out gardens. Calcutta itself mirrors this, with its evolution from garden houses to bungalows, and the constant redoing of the gardens of Government House and Barrackpore, but always with the imprint of individual tenants. The acquisition of the Himalayas and Nilgiris opened up gardening possibilities undreamt of in the plains, making exile both more familiar and more acceptable. The long reach of Kew catalyzed the founding and expansion of botanical gardens with their impact on both England and its outposts, but here, too, policies and practices varied with individuals. Without Curzon’s autocratic intervention, India’s monuments would not be landscaped as they are today. New Delhi is at one and the same time an abstract vision of Empire, a very finite translation of English ideas about garden cities circa 1910, and the work of individuals such as Sir Edwin Lutyens and William Robertson Mustoe— even at several removes, the influence of Gertrude Jekyll. Sometimes the forces at play were more impersonal. The insatiable demand for tea in the United Kingdom simultaneously stimulated the ruthless industrialization of opium production and the spread of a plantation economy from the Western Ghats to Assam and Ceylon. Had it not been for the Uprising of 1857, neither Lucknow nor Cawnpore would have been etched on the British memory through their memorial gardens.
There is a historical contingency about particular gardens but less so about the need to have gardens; conversely there seemed to be a horticultural response to just about every historical contingency. By the nineteenth century if not earlier, gardens and gardening seemed bred in the English bone; like tea, they offered colonials reassurance in situations of stress and cemented a community of shared interests. And those who aspired to join this heaven-born host might hope to do so through the garden gate.