This trope was often repeated in the James Herriot books. He was English, and many English people seem to know a lot about gardening and botany. Farmers tend to be hard-working and practical.
So, is there any truth to the trope Farmers care little for gardening?
One can imagine they have other things they consider priorities.
I wouldn’t doubt it. Growing outside and growing inside are two very different things. And that’s just gardening.
There’s a long tradition of farmers/farm families growing/preserving their own vegetables. Cottage gardens with flowers, vegetables and fruiting plants have a lengthy history among rural folk in Great Britain.
So the generalization about farmers being “bad” or indifferent gardeners strikes me as being a gross exaggeration at best.
well gardeners grow for pleasure and enjoyment and farmers used to do it mostly for survival and money and often didn’t get either …
Although back when i was on game FAQs I was discussing the latest game in farming sim series harvest moon one of the more prolific players and her husband were farmers and shed relate stories on how confused her husband was that shed want to play a farming game at night …(although there is usually quite a bit more than the farming aspect to the game) especially one where the makers had no clue on actual farming …(although it has gotten better in recent years)
Traditionally, farmers sow and reap. In planting and gathering seasons, they worked 18 hour days, then went home to sleep, leaving little time for gardening in the gardening seasons.
Their wives garden, grow vegetables and raise eggs – stuff you can do while staying near the house, which you need to do for your other tasks: cooking, laundry, etc.
Many heirloom roses and other treasured ornamental plants were brought to this country and transported by settlers to new territories. These were preserved and nurtured even though those early settlers had to spend most of their time raising crops and livestock.
They didn’t have tons of leisure time for large-scale ornamental landscaping, but some elements of gardening were obviously important to them.
Traditionally, the men were considered farmers, and the women were considered farmers’ wives, even when the wives were often doing fieldwork and sometimes when their end of the production was bringing in much of the cash income.
[ETA: Of course, it depends on whose traditions are being talked about. Among the Haudenosaunee, for instance, traditionally the women are the farmers.]
Almost every farm in this part of the country has a vegetable garden and at least some ornamentals. I was pretty freaked out, back in the late 1970’s, when I drove across the country and didn’t see a kitchen garden from somewhere around Ohio to somewhere around Oregon; miles and miles of field crops with an occasional farmhouse and not a garden to be seen. I don’t know whether it’s still like that; but it does appear to depend on where and when you are.
And then of course there’s what’s sometimes called “market gardening”; which is farming too. While most of what’s being produced will go for sale, the farmers will generally be eating cosmetic seconds and market leftovers and so on.
Farmers are efficient gardeners.
Yeah, that’s the division of labor I’ve seen referenced in a lot of pre-mid-20th-century literature: the farmer’s work is in the fields with the bulk crops, and the “kitchen garden”, and even more so any flower plantings, are the responsibility of the wife and children.
And as thorny_locust notes, this was so even when farmers’ wives also did fieldwork.
What I’m noting is that the men were called “farmers”, and the women were called “wives”, and that this had (and has) only a limited amount to do with who was actually doing what or how much cash they were bringing in.
True. I followed that usage in my post not because I don’t think that the wives in that situation were entitled to be considered farmers in their own right, but just to point up the gendered division of labor that often separated (male) farmers from household-garden tasks.
Slightly off topic, but if you’re interested in farming and the life of farmers, I highly recommend the book English Pastoral by James Rebanks. (Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year 2020, and many other awards, 5 star reviews everywhere.)
His family have been farmers in the Lake District for 600 years, or at least that’s as far back as the written records go. He’s still a sheep farmer on a family farm today.
The book tells about the traditional mixed farming of his grandfather’s time, the move to industrialised farming in his father’s time – and all the problems of modern industrialised farming, for both the environment and the farmers – and his successful move back towards a green, ecologically sound style of mixed farming today.
He’s now at the cutting edge of scientific, ecological, sustainable, mixed farming, and his farm is more profitable, as well as highly biodiverse, and his family is thriving there.
There is a very thin line between idealism and bullshit. …
Thankfully, we don’t have to recreate an impossible past, as many species actually thrive in traditional farmland – especially in areas like hay meadows, coppiced woodland and hedgerows. Many of our farmland species have now become rare, so we need to be careful not to lose the remnants of traditional farmed landscape that remain. … This isn’t to say that we don’t need wild places, and big ones – of course we do – but the complicated truth is that we need nature everywhere, even in our most intensive farmlands. To make them sustainable, we need to find workable compromises. In most of our landscapes there will never be perfect single-use solutions – pure wilderness or pure productivity. We need to put farming and nature back together, not drive them further apart.
– James Rebanks
Isn’t it an accepted generalisation that professionals are usually bad examples of their trade in their personal lives.
Electricians have ‘Christmas trees’ of extension sockets.
Plumbers have dripping taps.
The idea is that they spend all day at their work and don’t care to spend leisure time doing the same or similar stuff.
They were all dairy and corn farmers where I grew up, and they all had vegetable gardens, apple and cherry trees. It made no sense to buy groceries that you could raise yourself. While every farm did its own small engine repair, sewing, bookkeeping, small concrete pours, blasting out stumps with TNT, pet euthenasia 
; jobs that required specialized equipment like silo installation, roofing and painting barns were contracted out. Household self-sufficiency had its limits too: only the older farmers did their own canning, so everything was eaten fresh in season or frozen. A few made their own ice cream, but I never saw home-churned butter.