When it comes to taste, there are few elements of midcentury modern design that are not appreciated now. Fashion, music and interiors continue to inspire, while formerly retro flowers such as dahlias have moved into a higher sphere.
The same cannot be said of British garden style. Looking at old photographs, there is a stubborn and widespread menace in the gardens of our recent forebears: conifers. Large or small, they date a garden even more reliably than hybrid tea roses or weed-free rockeries, and, although the printing processes of the day exaggerate their unearthly yellow-green and blue-green hues, this doesn’t excuse their static artificiality. Bring on the gnomes.
Yet conifer gardening was an interesting idea in the 1950s, practised by free thinkers such as Alan