A cottage garden, West Falkland. Photo by Mary Campbell. Used with permission.
Most gardens are in predictable places and are organised in predictable ways. On entering an English suburban garden, for example, one expects to see a lawn bordered by hedges and flowerbeds, a hard surface with a table for eating al fresco on England’s two days of summer, and a water feature quietly burbling in a corner.
In warmer places, such gardens are not necessarily expected yet are still there.
Some years ago I happened to be passing through the Iranian city of Abadan, at the southern end of the Iran-Iraq border. It is one of the hottest populated places on the planet, and in 1964 a heat burst raised the temperature to a record-breaking 87°C (189°F).
During the Iran-Iraq war the city was shelled, bombed, and burnt. Gardening was not a high priority. When I travelled through the town on a warm winter’s day, my bus was diverted because of construction, and I found myself in a residential area inhabited decades ago by British employees of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The houses are now occupied by Iranians, some of whom have maintained English gardens. I saw one man clipping his hedge, and another pruning roses.
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I would love to know whether one of the existing English gardens was attached to the house my father lived in when he was employed by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in Abadan.
The Wikipedia article about the A-POC does not paint a pretty picture of British and American behaviour but as a naive 11-year-old I knew nothing of this.
