Semantics Matter
So, just as the corporate garden entities have started advertising for their hoards of retired professionals/kept wife/husband volunteers as the incoming garden season kicks off, so too has Monty-Fucking-Don been a twat. Publicly espousing his belief that people who call themselves “horticulturalists” are; “pompous” and the term as being; “unnecessary”. .. Strange that isn’t it. Coming from an eye-browless freeloader of the English middle classes who presumably was born with the god-given right to claim the world of horticulture as his own with no more qualification than being able to afford to buy four season’s worth of Whichford terracotta in every size.
You see, the two things correspond in an almost poetic way. It doesn’t take long working in professional horticulture to realise that unlike ANY other industry, profession or trade it has a crisis of being taken seriously. On the one hand owners of large estates are crying out for “professional”, “experienced”, “trained”, “qualified” horticulturists and on the other hand they bitch and moan about the idea of paying them a professional wage or occasionally even fail to appreciate the level of skill involved.
A retired solicitor happily planting up a bed of Daffodils or weeding vast swathes of self-seeders out for free, because it’s (*insert impressive estate title) would piss their pants at the very idea of having a situation of “volunteer solicitor” days!.. “But we can give them a days crash course by a professional solicitor to get the basics! they’d only have to file cases, they only need to know how to read, listen and type!”
The act of merely “gardening” is something old ladies do, or old men who like growing giant cauliflowers. It conjurs images of whimsy, pansies and curly kale, neat lawns and garden centre aisles packed to the gills with pre-mix round-up and growmore and plastic butterflies to pin on your wall. Or perhaps, if you’re of a different class, “gardening” is the joy of watching your be’tweeded “gardener” buff the water feature or receive instruction on how to tweak your hand chosen Cedric Morris Iris collection.
The term “gardener” is a colloquialism that cheapens the profession. Bearing in mind “gardening” is a profession that until recently was filled primarily with those of us from poorer backgrounds, perhaps that’s where Monty’s disdain of anyone who uses the term “horticulturist”stems from, his deeply rooted and bred-in loathing of the working classes. Who do we think we are giving ourselves a professional term to differentiate ourselves from “man with a van and a bottle of glyphosate”, we must stay in our “gardener” boxes! Or perhaps he just doesn’t think of the skills as worthy of a professional title in a romanticised way only the very privileged, socially mobilised, privately educated can. Gardener is a much better word! It’s earthy and real and ever-so.. homely!
So yeh. Semantics matter. Those of us who have spent years grafting, learning our profession, giving a shit in ALL WEATHER, laying in bed at night running over latin nomenclature or imagining how a bed should be laid out and managed, put the hours in studying for qualifications in every aspect of horticulture from botanical science, geology, latin, landscaping, soft landscaping, pulled shoulders hips and backs in the hard graft, popped the blisters, celebrated at the first rare plant germination, cried at the lost tender things, shared our absolute passion with anyone who wants to know, go fuck yourself Monty! We have earned the right to define ourselves by our professional titles, as much as an engineer or an author isn’t just a builder or a story writer or a pharmacist a shop-keeper.
And for volunteers? I get that it’s a nice thing to do and in a charitable setting in gardens that are people run and have limited funds and give back to the community, work away. But please think twice about providing your free labour to large estates run by massive corporates. These are positions that should be covered by workers who are paid accordingly by organisations that can afford to pay it. Volunteering keeps the profession of horticulture as a low paid one. “Gardening” volunteers are not horticulturists, they are “gardeners”.
While large businesses who can afford to pay for trained/training staff find it so easy to “employ” free workers with the promise of tea and cake and a look round the big house, it will be difficult for the value of knowledgeable horticultural workers to be taken seriously and people like Monty will find it perfectly acceptable to freely humiliate trained and experienced professionals who dare define themselves as “Horticulturists” (or “Horticulturalists” but that’s another blog post.)
