In the Renaissance and Baroque periods, Italian villas and French formal gardens such as Versailles turned landscape design into theatrical displays of wealth and power. As horticultural knowledge spread through printed manuals and garden writing, first addressed to “gentlemen” and then to a broader reading public, these elite practices seeped into the rising bourgeoisie.

By the late 18th century, the garden had become an imagined space of retreat and creativity, which is how we arrived at the enduring image of the slightly bohemian writer in a rumpled jacket, pottering about in a little garden like a character from a Beatrix Potter illustration. From early on, gardening attire held a certain romance.

Despite its bourgeois associations, gardening has always had its rebels and heroes. In the late 19th century, Irish gardener William Robinson declared war on Victorian respectability with his “wild garden”, replacing billiard‑table lawns and rigid bedding schemes with drifts of hardy perennials that blurred house, garden and countryside into one half‑tamed field.

During WWII, Britain’s Dig for Victory campaign turned vegetable plots into acts of resistance, giving ordinary people a way to fight fascism with compost bins and carrot rows instead of rifles and bullets. Open spaces everywhere – public parks, backyards, even scraps of municipal land – were transformed into vegetable patches. The wartime posters from that era often showed men and women in fuller‑cut trousers and simple white shirts, looking improbably stylish with a spade over one shoulder.

Today, organisers at community gardens carry that spirit forward by reclaiming derelict lots and hauling out rubble by hand so that their neighbours can have fresh food and a bit of beauty. A shovel and a seed packet become instruments of direct action and community building, and the clothes worn for that work – stained jackets, patched trousers, sun‑bleached hats – carry the memory of each task.

Perhaps this is why it’s so easy to look on gardening attire with a certain fondness. The gardener is suspended between pastoral fantasy and logistical necessity. On the one hand, you have figures such as Monty Don, whose older mode of dress relies on the same workwear classics that have been popular for generations. He commonly wears high‑waisted cotton drill or corduroy trousers paired with popover shirts made from hardy materials. These are teamed with a French bleu de travail that has faded to a soft, agreeable blue or heavy cotton-canvas chore coats in the same colour as his golden retrievers.

On the other end, you have a more contemporary take on gardening attire. Flower farmer Alfie Nickerson wears scuffed round-toe Chelsea boots and abbreviated shorts, which suggest a body in motion. His carousel of sweaters and jackets in flower-bed colours telegraphs a playful insouciance, especially when worn at his family’s Norfolk estate, where blooms push through soil improved by his Aunt Ann’s alpacas’ droppings. Similarly, Gardeners’ World presenter Ashley Edwards’ technical shells in chlorophyll greens and aqueous blues wrap him in a soft exoskeleton. His style makes him appear less like an Arcadian dreamer than a systems manager, coordinating seeding and irrigation schedules like a plant scientist.

Gardening attire appeals partly because it solves an important menswear problem. Ever since the coat-and-tie look retreated from daily public life, men have wondered what they’re supposed to wear to look good. Business casual can sometimes feel flat and uninspired; certain modes of workwear can occasionally feel archaic. Gardening attire – battered chore coats, rumpled corduroy trousers, chambray shirts, sweatshirts with stretched collars and the occasional technical jacket – promises all the romance we appreciate about other aesthetics while looking perfectly at home in contemporary environments.

Look closely and you see familiar menswear tropes: patina, mending, layering and ease of movement. In the garden, these aren’t just aesthetic gestures, but a visible record of one’s labour, lending the attire the most potent of menswear spells: authenticity.

If there’s a lesson here for modern wardrobes, it’s that gardening clothes model the virtues menswear enthusiasts often talk about. They normalise dirt, repair and longevity. They prize comfort and function over novelty, while still allowing for a little theatre in colour and silhouette. Dressing for the garden means accepting that clothes are tools first, symbols second, and that the most satisfying outfits are the ones that make you forget you’re wearing them.

Many of us who covet dirt‑stained jackets and patched trousers can barely keep a potted herb alive on a windowsill, but the clothes let us borrow a bit of that imagined competence. In the end, gardening dress is simply the wardrobe’s most eloquent argument that the things we wear are at their best when they are quietly, stubbornly put to use.