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Robin Hood and garden design
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Robin Hood and garden design

Category: gardening and old home restoration | Posted: Mon Jul 26, 2010 4:32 pm



Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding thru the glen,
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men,
Feared by the bad, loved by the good,
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood.

Those are more of less some of the opening words of the song that opened one of my favorite television programs of the 1950s. But I will return to that thought in just a moment.

A prolonged illness has kept me from this blog for far too long, and I mean now to return and to remain, using - as luck would have it - the Robin Hood television program to ease me back.

A few days ago Public Radio ran a feature story on the blacklisting of communists, would-be communists and supposed pinkos during the halcyon days of Macathyism. In the course of that report, listeners heard once more about how artists of various hues - including lots of writers - were blacklisted, losing their livelihoods in this country. They simply could not find work in their native land.

Which brings me to "Robin Hood."

The program I so loved as a kid growing up in Baltimore was actually filmed in England and produced by a woman who apparently was a genius at creating a TV series on a shoestring budget. One of the ways she managed to do that with "Robin Hood" was to hire several of the blacklisted American writers at bargin rates to develop quality scripts.


The Public Radio story made it pretty darned clear that some, if not all of those writers were certainly of a very socialist bent, and they worked their social ideas into the story lines, which could not have been all that hard given that the series involved a man and his gang who "took from the rich and gave to the poor.' In other words, Robin Hood was the forerunner of today's IRS, except Robin never had the luxury of taking from the middle class as well as the rich, something the IRS has perfected. But that is another story.

Anyway, I listened to that very interesting Public Radio story, learning that as a child I had been unknowingly subjected to a spectrum of ideas more reflective of the script writers' ideology than anyone might have suspected, and I saw how the "socialist agenda" supposedly espoused by Robin Hood and his band of merry men has come to impact my thinking about garden design. For decades, I have been very much influenced by the formal, grand gardens of Great Britain, the kind paid for by decadent capitalist-types to adorn their ill-gotten estates from Surry to the far reaches of Scotland. I have many a book that captures the beauty and the allure of those gardens, and it has been my goal all these years to someday develop a garden along the lines of those formal masterpieces, albeit on a less grand scale since I have the beneficiary of less grand (read that as meaning less rapacious) capitalism.

About 15 years ago, I had the opportunity to do that very thing, having essentially a large open space on which I could put any kind of garden I wanted. A formal English garden was my goal; I set about creating one; and I have about finished one that pleases me and those who visit it.

But somewhere along the line my taste morphed into a wilder, less structured, more proletarian approach to garden design, and that is where I blame or credit Robin Hood. Decades of an orientation to formalism have melted away, possibly the result of pink-shaded ideas implanted without my knowledge or that of my parents as Robin wooed a fair maid and thwarted Prince John.

I have had an architect design an informal, Tuscan-country style home that I hope to build as soon as the right piece of land comes available. Since the inception of that idea for a Tuscan-style home, I have given intense thought to what stye of garden ought to accompany it. Just as I now live in a Georgian home with Georgian trimmings and a formal garden, my desire for a home of the Italian countryside has been accompanied by a desire to move at warp speed away from garden formalism and toward a large meadow garden. I envision a socialist, common-man meadow, more comfortable for rabbits and ground hogs than for exotic birds and hedge hogs.

I hope sooner rather than later to have that meadow garden, with wild flowers and the scent of hay (though, regrettably, also with deer, the occasional raccoon and perhaps even a coyote). What I owe to "Robin Hood" for that vision I cannot say with certainty, but given how impressionable kids are, placing blame on a TV program scripted by blacklisted writers cannot be easily be thrown in the compost bin.



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Comments

 

Netty wrote on Tue Jul 27, 2010 8:48 pm:


So glad you are feeling better!
A large meadow garden sounds wonderful and I hope you get it "sooner" too :)




brombear wrote on Thu Jul 29, 2010 3:49 pm:


I really enjoyed this blog; a garden can tell a little or a lot, and yours, it sounds has many stories in the making. yes, also I suspect that a mind like yours needs the conceptual ground of a more natural garden open to influence of the many and varied sways of nature than to a rigidly artificed structure. Formal gardens, although beautiful in so many ways, aren't really places of dynamic quality; they tend to stay the same for long periods. I hope you enjoy muchly your meadow. It sounds like a wonderful idea. Best of health to you also : )





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