Last week I was in a country church where, on the altar beside the cross, there was a small reading desk holding an open Bible. On it, a brass plaque stated in whose memory the lectern had been given. You can’t get closer to the Lord than that. Call it sentiment getting in the way of good taste. Call it vanity, even, although I am sure that the proximity to God was unintentional. It is a nice idea but in the wrong place.
Memorial plaque is a disease. Public gardens especially suffer from it, under attack from the many ageing, well-pensioned baby-boomers, who like to see their loved ones immortalised in brass on a tropical hardwood bench in a place that they loved.
But don’t most people go into a garden to be sensually provoked, taken out of themselves, not reminded of dead people every time they sit down? I therefore propose a national moratorium on memorial benches. Enough is enough. Plaque needs treating.
Free benches may well save money for a garden manager struggling to afford the upkeep, but they bring far more problems than a garden’s own benches. People problems. What will the donors say if a bench is vandalised, and what if it needs to be moved from the deceased’s favourite viewpoint? Gardeners have to be as tactful as undertakers.
The trials of memorial benches have sometimes led garden managers to propose, instead, memorial trees, which at least contribute to the life of the garden. It is a sensible use of goodwill, but it still causes problems: what if the tree has died when the donors next visit their arboreal shrine and why were they not informed? What if the label has been broken? What if changes in the garden mean that a healthy tree planted 20 years ago has to be chopped down?
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Of course, it is sad to see any beloved tree go but it has to happen in a developing garden. Even trees planted by the great and the good die in the end; you have only to enter the potting sheds at Osborne House and see the bucketsful of dead, lead labels bearing the names of half the European aristocracy.
How much better it would look if would-be donors of trees and benches simply provided the goods without a plaque.
Best of all would be for each garden to set up a fund, to which donors could contribute, to pay for real, live, badly paid and undervalued hands-on gardeners — a trainee, perhaps — someone who will help to keep alive the garden that the deceased so loved. What better memorial than that?
Stephen Anderton is the Times gardening columnist