The suburban front garden

Abstract

Few of us think twice about the ornamental front garden, and yet no element is more ubiquitous in the context of our suburban lives. For some, it is no more than a background nuisance, a ritual of work on infrequent weekends. For others it is a devotion to beauty and nature, a painstaking dedication to colour and season. But in whatever form, the ornamental garden has been, and remains synonymous with Western civilization.

What then has conferred this resilience that in the face of tumultuous change, the ornamental garden has continued from antiquity to the present? Part of the answer lies in the nature of the garden itself. It is not so much a form as an idea a symbolic representation of nature in the Western mind. As such the garden is a living expression of the intimate relationship between the creative spirit (God), humanity, and nature.

The purpose of this dissertation is to further explore the nature of this relationship in order to understand the metaphysical origin and meaning of the ornamental front garden. The approach is both descriptive and interpretive. The text begins with a history of the front gardens of Christchurch, and proceeds to classify these into seven garden types. These types are compared with categories hypothesized by Allchurch and Densem in 1987. They are then compared with social and environmental factors in order to detect whether frequencies have changed over time. In the text 'ornamental' and 'front' gardens have been used interchangeably, although it should be recognized that ornamental gardens are not always confined to the front yard.

In the final section, the history of garden-making in the West is critically reviewed in order to understand the nature of the relationship between God, humanity, and nature. Far from being one of spiritual paucity, it is revealed that Western society is rich in spirituality. Not only is the suburban front garden an expression of this spirituality but also a transcendent window through which Western society may recognize its vulnerability, and spiritual identity.