Herbs, tomatoes and tubers feed our hungry, recession-fearing minds and eco-based egos - while petals wilt and fall, writes Anne Marie Hourihane
RECESSION CHIC has arrived, and we didn't have to wait very long. The news from the Chelsea Flower Show is that for the first time since the second World War, sales of vegetable seed in the UK have outstripped sales of flower seed. Irish cynics confidently predicted that there would be no upsurge of similar strength here, what with every field in the country lying fallow and even our scallions imported from Israel.
But, as so often is the case, research has upset the most coherent theory. Woodie's executive marketing manager Peter Dolan provided the statistics, proving that the spike in our purchasing of vegetable seed has come just this year. According to Peter - and I chose Woodie's because they have 27 stores nationwide and because no one could accuse them of catering to a fanatic minority - in 2006 flower seed outsold vegetable seed. In 2007, the sale of vegetable seed was more or less on a par with flower seed. But, and I quote Peter Dolan: "This year to date, so far it's tracking about 60:40."
It is possible that the sales of vegetable seed have increased because so many people now buy their flowers as bedding plants, and it's less satisfactory to buy vegetables this way (less variety). But the fact of the matter is that with the vegetable farmers of this country now hunted to extinction, with the potatoes the Irish eat being flown in from every other country of the world and with your average shopper emerging from the supermarket with a full trolley but a heavy heart, your ordinary gardener now wants to grow something to eat themselves.
I don't know why I should find this so interesting. Perhaps you don't, in which case off to the Lisbon Treaty columns with you. Perhaps because gardening, although it is a multimillion-euro business, is not as closely watched as other barometers of contemporary taste. Yet almost every prevailing social trend blows through the mundane garden. Those of us who wondered what could possibly follow the tree-fern and the olive tree and the decking now have our answer. Parsley.
Because herbs are a huge part of the vegetable seed sales - but I haven't got the statistics, unfortunately. Herbs are allegedly (and there is an awful lot of lying in gardening) easy to grow.
They certainly take up less space than your average cabbage. They are also fast growers, and those packets of weary herbs from the supermarket are depressing.
Perhaps vegetable growing is on the increase because vegetables are great for boasting. Boasting is a huge part of gardening, and so is pride. There is a surge of egomania as you bring a single green tomato into the kitchen and place it on the windowsill where it will quite likely rot. There is a thrill when rocket germinates before your very eyes. Suddenly you feel as if you could invade Russia.
Of course gardening experts (see Jane Powers in last week's Magazine) have been encouraging us to grow vegetables for years. But why now? No less a gardening historian than Sir Roy Strong has said that the gardening public's turn towards vegetable growing signals the death of the money garden, which was laid out with a lot of hard landscaping at enormous expense, and then filled in with exotica.
Certainly when I visited the Chelsea Flower Show two years ago, trailing round it in the pouring rain with an awful lot of other Irish people, there were many concrete gardens for millionaires and an equal number of queues of us obedient amateurs forming to look at them. It was aspirational gardening. There were ranks of military-looking white foxgloves and stipa grasses planted round a water feature, on their best behaviour in case their owner came home and decided to sit on one of the stainless steel benches. The dreadful thing about these gardens was their neatness and their silence.
The Irish don't really do allotments: we're too lazy, and perhaps we have a psychological surfeit of land. You never see in Ireland, as you do in other countries, vegetables growing on the waste land that surrounds your average bus stop. We don't even grow our own sugar here anymore, so no one is seriously suggesting that we turn our suburban patches into small holdings that will provide ordinary families with a year's vegetables.
This new trend for vegetable growing is probably based on people who just want to grow a few things in the summer, most likely with their children. But it is a straw in the wind.
Recession is something dealt with on an emotional level as well as on an economic one, and gardens are strangely emotional places. Recession, like fashion, is international. It will be interesting to see what's on offer at the Bloom Garden Festival in Phoenix Park this bank holiday weekend (it drew 50,000 visitors last year).
On the macro scale, we have built over the best land for vegetable growing - north county Dublin - and all our vegetables are imported. But on the micro scale, the amateurs are having a go. No one could call it a protest - it is more an unconscious reaction. But it is heartening somehow.