Gardening - where have all the men gone?

First of all - Happy New Year!

A recent piece in Gardens Illustrated, by the always interesting and perceptive Ambra Edwards, discussed the role of women in garden design, and in particular that all-too familiar problem, that it is always a small number of men who dominate at the 'top' of the profession, and that women in the profession tend to be stereotyped in what they do. Both are issues in many professions.

Here, I'd like to address a problem at the other end: the demographic both of hobby gardeners and of the horticulture professions more generally. Where are the men?

The audience. Whenever I do a talk, I always do a quick mental survey of the gender – how many men, how many women? All too often these days there is a shortage of men. Men are a particular rarity in my all-day workshops, usually 20 or so people, quite often there are no men. Occasionally, I do a public lecture – 50 or so people, and no men at all. I find that profoundly depressing – all those chaps who could be enjoying gardening, and getting something out of a event, and who aren't there.

I grew up in the 1960s when gardening, as hobby, was dominated by men, and as profession, overwhelmingly by men. My father was a working-class Welshman who just loved gardening. He was also something of a Victorian throwback whose backward views on gender did not see any role for women in the garden. Garden culture at the time was undeniably very male-dominated. Although having said that, Vita Sackville-West and Margery Fish were extremely influential as writers in the papers. There were some women who ran nurseries, very often characters who attracted adjectives such as 'redoubtable', such as Mrs. Desmond Underwood and her silver plant nursery; my father came back from an RHS flower show one day and he was clearly terrified of her. Does anyone else remember her? (I also remember my father being completely nonplussed by a very butch lesbian friend of mine). BTW, I may have got my love of gardening from him but I did not get on with my father.

When I had my nursery, back in the 1980s-1990s, I could see a gender shift. One of the things I really liked about the whole horticulture world was that it did seem a relatively egalitarian one, in which male/female roles were pretty irrelevant compared to so much else. But there were some groups I used to sell plants at, which did strike me as having a very distinctly female bias. Which has just gotten more and more so over the years.

I am not the only one to have noticed that there has been a considerable male turning away from gardening in the last decade or two. Part of it is to do with the collapse of traditional working class culture – of which the allotment (i.e. community garden) was an important part, and a certain kind of gardening-as-craft. Mind you – the passing on of that whole generation of older working class men (who often sexist attitudes like my father) has created a space for a completely different

demographic – for all the families, couples and women who now crop these places, which were once so overwhelmingly, and almost aggressively, male.

Ornamental gardening was almost certainly an invention of women in the first place. I am thinking of all those little peasant plots around the home, full of vegetables and medicinal herbs – it was here that a few plants would be grown for colourful flower and leaf. You can see this today in many developing countries – a narrow strip of annuals along the wall of an adobe house, or pelargoniums in cooking oil cans arrayed along the path to the front door. But I suppose, as ornamental gardening became organised, commercial, and competitive, the boys took over. Victorian values (which seemed to have been quite general across the industrialising 19^th century world) marginalised women, and in the middle-class or aspirational home, tended to keep them out of the garden – anything which involved women getting dirty fingers was a slight on a man's perception of being able to pay someone else to do it.

Another reason perhaps is the way the media present gardening. In the past garden TV and magazines were very much focussed on gardening as a craft – how-to stuff, getting it right, dealing with pests and diseases. The 1990s saw the beginning of the shift to a much greater focus on design, how to make it look right, rather than grow it perfectly. This had the effect of shifting gardening into a much more aesthetic territory, making it more attractive to many women, but less so to many men. Gardening, in some senses, became 'girly'. There is nothing guaranteed more to put a lot of men off. Particularly in making career choices.

The huge boom in vegetable growing has helped bring more, and younger, men back into gardening. Part of the reason I am sure is that it is about craft and skill rather than looks. Many of these veggie gardeners will end up growing ornamentals, especially since there is now so much of a focus on the importance pollinator plants and bee populations. I certainly hope that this will happen.

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If you like this blog, why not check out my e-books, which are round-ups of some writing I did for Hortus magazine back in the early 2000s, along with an interview with the amazing Beth Chatto. You can read them on Kindle, or Kindle packages for smartphones or the computer. You can find them on my Amazon page here. You will also find my soap opera for gardeners - currently running at eight episodes.