Gardeners Are Racist! Or Is It April 1st?

This wasn't written by me but is a response to what was said by a stupid lecturer!

Not many things leave me speechless, but the claim by a university lecturer this week that the classic radio programme Gardeners’ Question Time is ‘saturated’ with racist language has me spluttering with disbelief.
My first reaction is to laugh at the sheer stupidity of the allegation. It’s ludicrous, it’s farcical and it’s an insult to our intelligence. I thought at first it must all be a joke.
But it is also profoundly sad that a senior academic can make such a claim on national radio and expect to be taken seriously.
Dr Ben Pitcher, who is a sociology lecturer at the University of Westminster, announced on Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed programme that the expert advice on horticulture meted out on Gardeners’ Question Time is, in fact, ‘layered with racial meanings’.
When gardeners talk of the purity of the soil or non-native plant species, it seems they are actually feeding far-Right fantasies of nationalism.
If a son or daughter of mine were studying sociology at Westminster under Dr Pitcher, I would be very worried. But I’m worried, too, that people want to impose a political dimension on an innocent, natural phenomenon — the wonder of gardening.
Tending plants and growing flowers is a marvellous escape and therapy from the troubles of the world for millions of people. It would be tragic if the poisonous nonsense of political correctness infected this tranquility.
When we look at a British garden, it would be a pretty impoverished thing if the only flowers were ones that had always been established British natives.
If this lecturer imagines the phrase ‘non-native plant species’ has anything to do with political boundaries, then he fails to understand anything about gardening or nature. The names of these plants are innocently free from ‘racial overtones’ . . . unless you are an academic with a cynical turn of mind.

• Slurs
• To a sociology lecturer, though, it probably seems akin to apartheid that white currants and blackcurrants don’t grow on the same bushes. From now on, no gardener should ever refer to a spade in case we are accused of racial slurs — the more neutral ‘digging implement’ is preferable. And blackfly is a derogatory term that must never be used, except between one blackfly and another.
• The truth is that plants don’t know about man-made national borders. Such things don’t exist in their world.
  The glory of the British garden is that it is an eclectic mixture of plants from all corners of the globe, for which we can partly thank the good old British Empire — whether that was a racist entity or not.
  In an earlier era, when the British controlled a large proportion of the planet, the Victorians sent their plant collectors to the furthest-flung corners, and they brought back the plants that now enrich our gardens — the monkey puzzle tree discovered in Chile by botanist William Lobb, or the azaleas collected in Japan by Charles Maries, to name two examples from thousands.
  ‘Monkey puzzle’ is probably a politically incorrect phrase, of course. The bearded Lefties might say it implies all primates are stupid, or that ‘monkey’ is a racist euphemism.
  Some foreign imports have turned out to be better adapted to British soil than anyone had expected. You might even say they turned on their owners, quite ferociously.
  One was the notorious Japanese knotweed, or Fallopia japonica, which many gardeners will recognise with a shudder. It has broad, oval leaves, small, cream flowers and hollow stems, somewhat similar to bamboo.
• The great gardener Gertrude Jekyll recommended enthusiasts to plant it as an attractive ornamental. Now it is regarded as one of the worst invasive plants, whose roots eat into the foundations of buildings and undermine roads.
• Perhaps Dr Pitcher would defend it, though, and accuse us of denigrating the Japanese. It may be unforgiveably racist to associate one nation with a particularly virulent weed.
  Then there’s the Giant Hogweed from the remotest depths of the Himalayas — another species recommended by the Victorians as a statuesque garden ornamental. It grows up to 20ft high and suppresses all the other vegetation round it.
  So, too, does another native from those mountain ranges, the Himalayan Balsam — brought here as a garden ornamental before it escaped into the wild. If you walk along an English riverbank you’ll see it covered with the pink flowers of this rather appealing plant, with curiously shaped and attractive blooms. It’s lovely, but it has taken over.
  All these Himalayan associations are thoroughly libellous to the Sherpas, I suppose. And Dr Pitcher might contend that since the Nepalese tend to be short in stature, to refer to the ‘giant’ hogweed amounts to a hate crime.
  Not all plant imports are deliberate. Many found their way here by accident, perhaps on cargo ships or via natural factors such as wind and rain.
  Dutch elm disease (is that some terrible racist slander on the good people of the Netherlands?) was accidentally imported on elm logs from North America, and devastated the British landscape.
  It was ever thus. Nature won’t stand still just because we would like it to. The history of horticulture proves it, and that’s the fascination of the subject for me and millions of others around the world.
  Diverse
  It doesn’t help, however, that the BBC is inclined to treat gardening as a white, middle-class enclave. It isn’t — I know brilliant botanists and dedicated amateurs from all classes and ethnic backgrounds.
• Japanese knotweed: It is regarded as one of the worst invasive plants, whose roots eat into the foundations of buildings and undermine roads
• But Gardeners’ Question Time, which has been around since 1947, has often failed to reflect this.
• I’d be the first to deride ‘tokenism’ if the panellists were chosen for their ethnicity rather than their expertise, but it is a pity the programme doesn’t feature more people from diverse cultures on its panel of experts.
• It’s a shame, too, that the producers can’t find more Afro-Caribbean and Asian people to challenge the panel with their questions. During my 12 years as a panellist and then the chairman, I can remember only one occasion when a black gardener asked a question — and that was a disaster.
  This man asked something about tropical varieties of plant, and I was delighted — it looked like a chance to quietly demonstrate the wide appeal of gardening.
  Unfortunately, one of my colleagues, who will remain nameless, was prone to rush into answers without thinking. He was charming, knowledgeable but hopelessly gauche, and he launched into a reply that took in the Mutiny On The Bounty, breadfruit and the slave trade.
  The rest of us were listening with our heads in our hands. It was fortunate that we had an experienced producer who edited out the question.
  On another occasion, I got caught up in an outburst of mischief on a day when unfortunately we had a trainee producer who lacked the experience to know which bits of the show were better left on the floor in the editing suite.
  Spiteful
  A question came up about a pest called the cockchafer, which is a large green creature, a type of beetle, that is sometimes called a June bug.
  The adults are harmless but dramatic, because they come crashing into your windows on a summer evening. But their larvae are pests that live in the soil and can damage plants.
  The best response would have been to answer what was, after all, a sensible question, with a straight face.
  Instead, some of my colleagues gave into temptation, and there were a lot of jokes about chafing. It became a pretty risqué conversation that should never have been aired.
• Inevitably, we had complaints and an apology was broadcast. I was secretly pleased that one correspondent chastised the rest of the panel and noted that: ‘Dr Buczacki, wise man, kept his counsel!’
• These days, I seldom listen to Gardeners’ Question Time. I disagree with the panel’s answers so often that it’s bad for my blood pressure. But the irritation they cause is nothing compared to the fury I feel at Dr Pitcher’s divisive, spiteful nonsense.
• If he wants a political lesson, I’d show him the rose — the most marvellous example of ethnic diversity in the garden.
  When we look at a British garden, it would be a pretty impoverished thing if the only flowers were ones that had always been established British natives
  Originally, it came from the other end of the world. Yet, in many cases, its roots will come from a native English plant while the top bit might have been introduced from China.
  This is because roses, like many other plants, do best when grafted on to root stocks. Quite often the most beautiful flowering varieties will not produce very good roots without the intervention of a gardener.
  To help the flower thrive, we graft it on to the roots of a plant that is much more adapted to the local environment. So the rose is an international triumph — it originated in the Far East, but it has been strengthened and bred in this country.
  What would our native gardens be without these gorgeous, fragrant blossoms?
  When you look at a rose, you are looking at a microcosm of gardening and social history; and probably take in more sociology than you will in a lifetime of listening to Dr Pitcher.
  

 

Profound.