By Brian Viner

PUBLISHED: 16:35 EST, 12 July 2012 | UPDATED: 16:36 EST, 12 July 2012

Staggered: Lesley Cherry came back from holiday to find she was wanted by police

Staggered: Lesley Cherry came back from holiday to find she was wanted by police over her garden decking

The heart goes out to Lesley Cherry, who came home from holiday to find that her 4,500 wooden decking at the back of her house had been torn down by the council.

But my heart only goes halfway out. Not as far out as her decking, anyway, which rather evoked a five-star safari lodge in the Serengeti.

It was decking from which, to adopt Basil Fawlty’s words, one might expect to see herds of wildebeeste majestically sweeping the plain, not a row of back gardens in Stockport.

That Mrs Cherry now faces a 1,500 demolition bill, having failed to secure planning permission for what Stockport magistrates were told was a ‘considerable and substantial decking area’, is surely cause for sympathy.

But some sympathy is also due her neighbours, who hadn’t done anything to deserve their walk-on role in a suburban remake of Out Of Africa.

No more or less than Mrs Cherry, they were victims of a burgeoning sickness sweeping Britain’s back gardens. Lawns are disappearing under acres of hardwood and reclaimed York stone, and Dutch Elm Disease has been supplanted by Indonesian Furniture Disease.

The humble garden gnome, once symbolic of questionable taste himself, has looked on aghast as the nation’s patios have filled up with rattan and teak. Where once we turned to documentary series Whicker’s World for an insight into faraway lifestyles, now we have our own back-garden world of wicker, in an attempt to  claim those far-away lifestyles  for ourselves.

But there is a reason why people in far-off places live differently from us, and one of them is the weather. The classic Mexican-style, clay chimenea barbecue is so-called because it comes from Mexico. It is never going to look right in Mexborough. Terracotta-roofed pizza ovens are just the ticket in Tuscany, much less so  in Tadworth.

We know this, really, but we don’t care, because we are driven by the very British — and specifically, very English — impulse for one-upmanship.

Outdoor living: Lesley Cherry's decking under construction in her back garden. The council tore it down and sent her a 1,500 bill for its removal

Outdoor living: Lesley Cherry's decking under construction in her back garden. The council tore it down and sent her a 1,500 bill for its removal

Measure: Stockport council said the decking was 'completely unneighbourly' because it was raised more than 30cm above the ground

Measure: Stockport council said the decking was 'completely unneighbourly' because it was raised more than 30cm above the ground

Naturally, it was an Englishman, Stephen Potter, who invented the term ‘one-upmanship’. More surprisingly, the phrase ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ derives from a long-ago comic strip in the New York Globe newspaper. It might instead have been coined as a motto for English suburbia.

Yet while one-upmanship once cast its giant shadow over the fronts of our houses — over stone-cladding and frosted-glass front doors and new family saloons in the driveway, polished to a restored gleam every Sunday morning — now it has snuck around the back, where the six-burner barbecue with rotisserie attachment stands proud, looked down upon by the hammered-bronze patio heater.

And, of course, peered at by the next-door neighbours, whose extensive ranch-style verandah might have upset us when it went up, but at least affords them a perfect view of our own new set of chairs and the twin-engined, executive hot tub.

One might expect us, of course, to be wallowing not outdoors in gently bubbling water, but indoors in self-pity, thanks to the twin curses of a rubbish economy and even more rubbish summer weather. So maybe there’s something to be said for Britain lavishing money on its back gardens, for installing those pizza ovens and pergolas where once there was only a shed.

Maybe it bespeaks our admirable ability to cock a snook at the dark clouds of misfortune.

Or maybe we’ve just gone a bit daft.

Competition: One-upmanship - once confined to the front of properties - has now crept to the back, with gardens becoming an increasing conversation point

Competition: One-upmanship - once confined to the front of properties - has now crept to the back, with gardens becoming an increasing conversation point

Either way, in the meantime, garden designers have never had it so good.

A landscape architect friend of mine, based in the still-affluent Home Counties, tells me that he won’t even look at a job worth less than 100,000.

He’s a fine fellow, who employs 40 people, so I shouldn’t knock him or his means of making a very good living. But really, he, and others in the same business, are trading off silly delusions of grandeur, endlessly fuelled by magazines, Sunday newspaper supplements and home-design television programmes.

If Capability Brown were still with us today, he’d be working not on the parkland of a stately home, but on the back garden of a four-bedroom semi in Maidenhead, doing something with railway sleepers. And, of course, he’d have his own series on BBC2.

It used to be only the rich who employed garden designers. Ordinary British people used to dig up and plant their gardens themselves, not employ firms to do it for them. Dads used to build tree-houses for their kids with a few spare planks; now they look online and commission a structure with its own postcode.

Decking, water features, and the appropriate set of outdoor dining equipment have become must-haves for any family wishing to compete in this 'garden-off'

Decking, water features, and the appropriate set of outdoor dining equipment have become must-haves for any family wishing to compete in this 'garden-off'

In a way, it’s pleasingly democratic that more and more of us offload these jobs. Yet designer gardens, and the furniture in them, have become microcosms of suburban life, reeking of envy, enmity and snobbery, registered by endless peeking through the net curtains or over the fence.

We see it every time there’s a hosepipe ban, Mr A telling on  Mr B, and both of them privately rejoicing as Mrs C’s expensively planted herbaceous border withers and dies.

Much of this unfolds not so much in the spirit of keeping up with the Joneses, as leaving the Joneses for dead.

Yet it is as tacky to spend too much money on your garden as it is to spend too little. Tackier, in fact. According to a new garden-furniture taste guide on the Middle Class Handbook website, bulky wicker sofas and Spanish mosaic tabletops should be avoided at all costs, and more should almost always be eschewed in favour of less.

That said, the guide reserves its greatest vehemence for cheap, plastic white armchairs. ‘Alfresco dining is all about beauty, nature, lightness of touch. These are the opposite,’ it says, recommending ‘doily-like’ white, ornate cast-iron tables, which evoke ‘cream teas and scented herb gardens, chilled wine and English roses’.

Furniture factor: Cast-iron tables remind me of village tea-rooms while plastic chairs are considered naff

Furniture factor: Cast-iron tables remind me of village tea-rooms while plastic chairs are considered naff

Actually, I’m not at all sure about that. White, ornate cast-iron tables to me evoke the gardens of twee village tea-rooms, occupied by dozy wasps and late middle-aged couples focusing intently on the Victoria sponge rather than each other. That’s not what I want when I step out of my back door.

And in the end, what  I want is all that  matters, as long, Mrs Cherry, as I have planning permission. Taste is sometimes good, sometimes bad, but always subjective.

Moreover, even more fundamental to our overwhelmingly suburban society than keeping up with the Joneses, an Englishman’s home is his castle. If he wants a remote-controlled portcullis, or plastic ducks in his moat, or a satellite dish on  his battlements, then by golly he should have them.

This might be the point at which I should admit that we have in our Herefordshire back garden a bench shaped like a boat, with twiddly carved bits at both ends. I bought it as a surprise birthday present for my wife after she admired it in a reclamation yard near Ledbury.

When it was delivered, I asked the man if he’d made it himself.  He laughed, and said no, that he was pretty sure it had been made in Bali.

So there we are; there’s a strain of Indonesian Furniture Disease in my very own back yard. And beware, because if we can catch it, so can you — if you haven’t already.