One thing that never fails to hit home when you're an American visiting the UK is the scale of things.
I am visiting friends near London, with a back garden ("yard") the size of a proverbial postage stamp. I dare say nearly all of them in this area are about the same size. Yesterday, their late afternoon chores included mowing the grass, which took (and I timed it) about two minutes with an electric mower which was plugged into the kitchen outlet. I thought of the average home in nearly every place I have lived since New York City, from Vermont to the Adirondacks to Montana, and the enormous time commitment involved in taming the grass in a yard that is often half wilderness anyway.
That's the thing about English gardens. Each of them is almost England in miniature...tiny, cultivated, groomed, beautiful, with a wall or fence (instead of the ocean) surrounding it. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of formal gardens writ small dot this country. Compact little flower pots and flower boxes and small patios create visual and textural variety. There often seems to be a little "Wales" or "Northern Scotland" at the back of the garden, a little spot where less time and effort has been taken to keep things pruned and neat. But the sense of peace, self-containment, and security in such a garden is unlike anything that I think I have ever experienced in the US.
Having said that, the world beyond is evident. Planes are circling overhead, neighbors are noisily extending their garden sheds or raising a roof, and the sound of sirens wail in the distance. Miles upon miles of what Americans would call "row houses" and their miniature gardens are interwoven with the rest of the world as are, indeed, America's more open, unconstrained self-standing homes and back yards. It's just so fascinating how these outside spaces seem to illustrate who we are and how we approach life.
