Nobody doubts that the British are brilliant at gardening. We absolutely love the whole mucky business of growing things and we do it all the better thanks to our genial climate. But oh, how we lose our nerve when it comes to gardens themselves.

We just can’t quite take them seriously. We call them lovely and romantic but after that we’re lost for words. Or if there are more words, they are said to be pretentious. Gardens, art? What nonsense! They’re . . . well, they’re just gardening, aren’t they?

If we only realised that we could have it all and enjoy looking at gardens with an analytical eye just as much as we enjoy the gardening itself. You wouldn’t go to a gallery and think only about the painter’s technique but ignore the painting’s narrative, cultural context and emotional power.

You wouldn’t go to a Mozart opera and talk about what fun he must have had putting all those dots so nicely on the page. But that’s what we do with gardening.

We quietly ignore so much of what makes a garden interesting. We are so in love with the means that we forget to explore the end.

It used not to be that way. In the 18th century (O heavens, let me not be arty) gardens were a source of intellectual stimulus to poets and painters and philosophers, so why not now? Gardens still use all the same tools – light, colour, space, time, narrative, symbolism, expressions of the gardener’s social standing. We simply have to learn it all again, to think bigger.

Now times are tough, I know, and you may say that this is not the time to be going arty. We should be growing our own and digging for victory and covering the White House lawn with vegetables. But there’s that unnecessary stand-off again. There is no either/or about it, it’s just that we could usefully, pleasurably raise our horizons and enjoy thinking about gardens in more depth.

Really, it’s a win-win situation. And if we think more about the gardens that we visit and how they work and what they have to say and why we like them we will be more ambitious about what we do at home. It’s a culture change that we need.

The trouble is that we are all too busy gardening, which is why ThinkinGardens and the London College of Garden Design are stepping in to fill the gap, by running a series of symposiums in Soho to look at how we struggle to find the language for discussing gardens, and whether garden design is remotely important in straitened times and whether you can make a decent garden without plants at all.

But here’s the rub. The people that ThinkinGardens most want to attend the symposiums are interested editors, music critics, art college professors, economists, sculptors and craftspeople. Any shift in attitude will probably come through them. When gardens appear regularly in arts magazines then we’ll be getting somewhere; gardens will be given a chance to show what they can offer.

For more details of the programme of symposiums, which could be expanded in the autumn, see www.thinkingardens.co.uk.

Explore Gardens

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