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Kate Fox - Watching the English.doc
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‘Your Own Front Garden, You May Not Enjoy’

In all typical streets of this kind, all of the little patches of garden, front and back, will have walls or fences around them. The wall around the front garden will be low, so that everyone can see into the garden, while the one enclosing the back garden will be high, so they can’t. The front garden is likely to be more carefully arranged, designed and tended than the back garden. This is not because the English spend more time enjoying their front gardens. Quite the opposite: the English spend no time at all in their front gardens, except the time necessary to weed, water, tend and keep them looking ‘nice’.

This is one of the most important garden-rules: we never, ever sit in our front gardens. Even when there is plenty of room in a front garden for a garden seat of some sort, you will never see one. Not only would it be unthinkable to sit in your front garden, you will be considered odd if you even stand there for very long without squatting to pull up a weed or stooping to trim the hedge. If you are not squatting, stooping, bending or otherwise looking busy and industrious, you will be suspected of a peculiar and forbidden form of loitering.

Front gardens, however pretty and pleasant they might be to relax in, are for display only; they are for others to enjoy and admire, not their owners. This rule always reminds me of the laws of tribal societies with complicated gift-exchange systems, in which people are not allowed to consume the fruits of their own labour: ‘Your own pigs, you may not eat . . .’ is the most famous and frequently quoted tribal example; the English equivalent would be ‘Your own front garden, you may not enjoy’.

The Front-garden Social-availability Rule (and ‘Sponge’ Methodology)

If you do spend time squatting, bending and pruning in your front garden, you may find that this is one of the very few occasions on which your neighbours will speak to you. A person busy in his or her front garden is regarded as socially ‘available’, and neighbours who would never dream of knocking on your front door may stop for a chat (almost invariably beginning with a comment on the weather or a polite remark about your garden). In fact, I know of many streets in which people who have an important matter to discuss with a neighbour (such as an application for planning permission) or a message to convey, will wait patiently – sometimes for days or weeks – until they spot the neighbour in question working in his front garden, rather than committing the ‘intrusion’ of actually ringing his doorbell.

This social availability of front-gardeners proved very helpful during my research, as I could approach them with an innocuous request for directions, follow this with a weather-speak ice-breaker and a comment on their garden, and gradually get them talking about their gardening habits, their home improvements, their children, their pets and so on. Sometimes, I would pretend that I (or my mother or sister or cousin) was thinking of moving to the area, which gave me an excuse to ask more nosey questions about the neighbours, the local pubs, schools, shops, clubs, societies and events – and find out a lot about their unwritten social rules. In front-garden interviews, although I might sometimes focus on a specific current obsession, such as, say, the estate-agent question, I would often just soak up a whole lot of random data on a variety of subjects, and hope to make sense of it all at some later stage. This is not such a daft research method as it might sound – in fact, I think there may even be an official scientific name for it, but I can never remember the correct term, so I call it the ‘sponge’ method.

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