"Harold Walker" wrote in message
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"Scott L. Hadley" wrote in message
...

"Harold Walker" wrote in message
...
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Just spent a couple of weeks in what once was "Great
Britain".....would
not give tuppence for living there now....it aint what it used to be
and
not by a long shot....I used to love to ride the trains to see the
beautiful looking gardens at the back of the houses along the railroad
tracks....no more....most of them looked ugly with huge weed patches
and
broken down greenhouses etc....looks as tho the pride that once was
there
has gone elsewhere.....walked around a couple of other weed patches
that
the locals called 'allotments'. Perhaps one day it will rule the waves
again.

Sad. I spent two glorious weeks in southern and western England in
1990---most of us looked up to that land as a garden heaven---a place
where some of us US garden types got our inspiration. And learning. I
certainly did, before our trip and during. And I noticed the patches of
flowers in the most unlikely places, as you mention. To think things
have
slid so far in the intervening 15 years---We'll be back again
eventually.
Some things must have lasted---

The slide began with the introduction of the automobile to the
masses.....prior to around the late forties to early fifties the average
'working class person' had never even been in a private car...I remember
being based in Nuneaton as a lower deck rating and was the only lower deck
guy with a car and only a couple of the 'other types' had one.......the
working class found out the pleasures of owning and driving a car and thus
was the beginning of the decline in gardening interest...at least in my
humble opinion.

Nowadays, there is little either novel or pleasurable about owning or
driving a car in and around our towns and cities, and I doubt it diverts
many people away from gardening. Interesting you didn't mention other
changes which have occurred since the 1940s and 50s, including ubiquitous
televisions, videos, dvds, hi-fis, computers, games consoles, which may just
have taken up a little leisure time. Another change is that the sort of
people who used to live in houses backing on to urban railway lines in the
40s and 50s probably moved on decades ago. I suspect that if you were to
compare some city neighbourhoods in the USA of the 40s/50s with the same
areas today, you might notice a few changes, too.

("Working class"...I hate that phrase...to me it sounds
belittling or inferior in a way....is not a doctor or a lawyer etc. a
working person...albeit a higher paid one than many others but neverless a
working man....I wonder when the "common folk" are going to stop being
'common' and become just plain old citizens.)




'Working class', now that's a blast from the past, one seldom hears the
phrase nowadays, and, when one does, it's usually used by someone successful
wishing to stress how far they've come from their 'roots'. How many people
did you meet on your recent visit who, unprompted, referred to themselves as
'working class' or 'common folk', I wonder?