Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Swedish gardening standards

This photo is called "Garden planning" and was taken by Daniel Morrison. You find his flickrprofile and more pictures here.


To follow up a thought after the last post I took a look at the homepage of Svenska Standardiseringsinstutet (Swedish Standards Institute). SIS is mostly dealing with industrial standards and coordination with ISO and european ones, but they are also diving into every subject that might need some 'common language'. Some years ago they did, for example, issue standards on swedish Christmas by, among other things, publish guidelines for paper, strings and meassurement of a christmas gift.

I did find a project for swedish gardens. It's a kind of top project with the goals to safeguard swedish interests in the european and international work for gardening standards as well as contribute to the process. The task is to be active in the following projects:

  • Compost, composting and composting equipment
  • Water pipes, drainage and sewers
  • Water preservation
  • Garden equipment
  • Portable machines and pedestrian controlled machines
  • Powered lawn and garden equipment
  • National horticortural variation (There is a difference between a garden in Spain and one in northern Sweden. If I read the page correctly they are working for at least three national cultivated plants and three national decorative plants. The swedish plants should in this case be potatoes, carrots and redcurrants plus tulips, lilacs and rugosa rose.)
  • Pest and disease control
  • Garden design and decoration
(I hope you'll excuse that I didn't include ISO, CEN and/or CTnumbers - they were too many and too complicated.)

When reading this I realise that swedes are more prone to anarchic behaviour than we think ourselves. Did we ever notice this in the constant flow of information? No. Will we care? No and yes; if we think the standards are wrong we will. Or perhaps even worse: if they are almost right ("Why rugosa rose? It shoulld be Rosa Majalis!"). Some will fight like the guidelines are compulsory laws (they are not) and others will blame everything on the EU.

Whatever happens you may be interested in checking out the international standards on our favourite way to spend time.

2 comments:

Sue Swift said...

I'm not clear what you mean here. That the govt is legislating on what must be grown in the garden??? I hope this is an April Fool's post, otherwise I'd suggest migrating to another country!

Rosengeranium said...

Yes, it's an April's Fools post :). I doubt swedes would have cared if SIS actually had set standards for gardening - noone ever cared about their guidelines for Christmas at least. (They issued them as a way of raising awarness of their work.)