The Medlar: My garden's many things, but it's not meant to be funny One garden that always made me (and many others) laugh was Great Dixter, where Christopher Lloyd used to delight in horticultural iconoclasm, placing banks of "naff" annuals at key moments in the visitors" itinerary - just to make sure his garden never descended into tastefulness. It was all done in the spirit of Quentin Crisp's dictum: "Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's a very English strand of humour. A generation before Lloyd, E A Bowles of Myddelton House in Enfield had an area of his garden which he dubbed "the lunatic asylum," filled with botanical oddities - it's still there, restored. Bowles also cultivated a rare fungus in a crack in his downstairs lavatory, but that's another story. Quite often, gardeners have little corners for their "funny" plants, which they like to show to fellow gardeners. I remember visiting one garden in a smart part of Cape Town about 20 years ago, where the owner was growing native grasses, reeds, proteas and so on "backstage" behind a hedge, while the rest of the garden functioned like a mini Sissinghurst - full of roses and box hedges, constantly watered. Given the political significance of native plants in "postcolonial" places, I suppose that counted as political satire. Highgrove, one of the most celebrated gardens, is replete with a devil-may-care sense of humour which stays just the right side of whimsy in the hands of designers Julian and Isabel Bannerman, whose own style apparently chimes with that of the Prince of Wales. The recently added monument to the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in the woodland, a rusticated column topped by a pyramid, with a bronze depicting Queen Elizabeth smiling in her gardening hat, treads this line affectionately. On the other hand, some things found in gardens which are supposed to be amusing, simply aren't. Trompe l'oeil is often wearisome. Novelty topiary is the kinky end of the gardening world. Automata, such as the metal frog orchestra at the Garden of the Four Winds in Quebec, are often scary and freaky. Kooky gardens made by Californian artists are usually irritating. Baroque water tricks, in the few places they still work, are about as funny as being squirted in the face with a water pistol. In fact, an Italian count told me that his ancestors used these devices as a way of getting women's clothes wet so they had to go and remove them in the orangery - a rare practical use for garden humour? The tragedy of my own front garden is that I didn't intend it to be taken as a joke. Scratch that: the official line now - and I'm sticking to it - is that it was all just a huge exercise in garden irony.