Gardens are shut down this time of year, but you’ve got the whole winter to plan to fit out your plot with “Cotswold stone retaining walls; vaguely Spanish wrought iron gates; crazy paving… colored yellow, green, and pink; irregular ponds of pale blue fibreglass fed by streams of impossible source; gnomes, fairies, and animals, usually plastic.”
When you take your garden to that sort of extreme, there’s a word for it: “godwottery.” The description above is from the Guardian newspaper, and in 2006 the Denver Post seconded it: “If you’d like to create a godwottery of your own, you might consider sundials, gnomes, fairies, plastic sculptures, fake rockery, pump-driven streams and wrought-iron furniture.”
It’s not particularly common to run across gardens with such a collection of accessories, so it’s probably not surprising that it’s also pretty unusual to run across the word “godwottery.” For once, though, everybody agrees on the origin of the term. In 1876, the schoolmaster of Clifton College in Bristol, England — his name was Thomas Brown, but good luck narrowing down a search to one particular “Thomas Brown” — wrote a poem. It was not a particularly memorable poem, and it bore the pedestrian title My Garden. The first line, though, still reverberates through the world of kitschy gardening: “A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot.”
Even in 1876, “wot” was an archaic word. It comes from Old English, and it was never widely used. It meant “to be aware of” or “to know”, and by the time modern English came along, the word had essentially disappeared, except for a bit of an echo in “know” and “wit.”
We don’t know anything in particular about Thomas Brown’s garden, but maybe it was the talk of the district for its elaborate construction. For whatever reason, the first line of My Garden produced the term “godwottery,” which was used here and there for decades. It’s unclear whether it ever really entered common usage, or whether it was trotted out by publications like the Times Literary Supplement (“Many readers..can enjoy a little godwottery”) and Architectural Review (“He plays fast and loose with the average Englishman’s sentimental leanings towards godwottery”) just in an effort to do a bit of linguistic godwottery of their own.
