GARDENING: Gardening Women: Their Storiesfrom 1600 to the Present By Catherine Horwood Virago, 436pp. £17.99
'THERE ARE already many and excellent books about gardening; but the love of a garden, already so deeply implanted in the English heart, is so rapidly growing, that no excuse is needed for putting forth another." So wrote Gertrude Jekyll on the opening page of her influential Wood and Garden(1899). No excuse needed, indeed – nor for the present volume. Gertrude Jekyll's, says Catherine Horwood in her excellent study of "plant heroines", is still the first name that springs to mind whenever the subject of women and gardening luminaries arises.
Jekyll’s wonderful collaborations with Edwin Lutyens made her famous – one thinks of the enchanting garden at her own house, Munstead Wood, or the rose arbour at Hestercombe that she designed in 1906 – just as her Mrs Tiggy-Winkle figure, complete with bonnet and flower basket, set the image of the elderly female gardener in the popular mind. (“The Queen Victoria of horticulture,” Horwood calls her.) But in fact Jekyll had many predecessors and even more successors, and part of Horwood’s aim in the current book is to give due credit to English female gardening pioneers, to rescue some from total obscurity and to underscore the achievements of others.
She begins with Thomasin Tunstall, who dug up some hellebore roots near her home in Lancashire and sent them to her friend and gardening correspondent John Parkinson, at Long Acre in Covent Garden. The year was 1620, and at the time – and indeed, for the next 200 years and more – to make any headway at all in the field of botany, women had to be exceptionally resolute, rich or enterprising, or married to diplomat husbands whose postings abroad enabled their wives to engage in foreign fieldwork and bring home significant discoveries.
Many early women gardeners and plant collectors were Lady this or that, marchionesses or countesses, wives of earls and lieutenant-governors and commanders-in-chief of the British army. Wives first and foremost – and it was a long time before they’d be applauded for their own expertise, or gain even a toehold in learned horticultural societies such as the Linnean. It was only in the late 19th century that women were accepted as students at colleges such as Swanley, in Kent, or became eligible for employment at leading botanical gardens, such as Kew.
Among earlier gardening aficionados were those who, like Lady Dorothy Nevill, supply rich anecdotal material on top of horticultural feats. Having lost her reputation after being inveigled into a summer house by “a well-known rake” (and then hastily married off to an elderly cousin), Lady Dorothy turned her attention from summer houses to greenhouses, undertaking the upkeep of 13. She caused an infestation of caterpillars at her London home when she took it into her head to start a silkworm farm, but she gained enough silk to make one dress – which, unfortunately, caught fire while she was wearing it. She saved her life by rolling on the carpet, a practice with which she may have been familiar in a different context. Rumour attributed the parentage of Lady Dorothy’s fourth son to her friend Disraeli, a great “horticultural admirer” of hers.
Intrepid gardeners sometimes imported not only exotic plants from abroad but exotic plant curators to go with them, such as the female Japanese garden designer installed by the Edwardian Ella Christie at her Perthshire home. Other diggers and sowers, faced with the rigours of a Scottish winter, resorted to the occasional dram of sherry while merrily propagating saxifrages, primroses, pinks and auriculas. But there are as many stories here as there are gardening women of all varieties – or bluebells in a wood – and one of the problems faced by the indefatigable author is the danger of ending up with a list of names, each allotted its paragraph or two of biographical and botanical assessment.
Horwood evades this outcome by arranging her book thematically rather than chronologically (allowing scope for all kinds of additional pursuits, such as arranging flowers and designing fabric). She knows everything there is to know about gardening as an outlet for women’s energies, and about garden flowers, their cultivation, champions, enthusiasts, their close association with the whole idea of Englishness – or at least, Britishness. Ireland does not get much of a look-in in her book: Maria Edgeworth is mentioned, and Mrs Delaney – though the latter principally as a “flower mosaicist”, not a scourer of local ground for plants and herbs.
When Horwood touches on the gardener's constant battles with slugs and snails, it's hard not to be reminded of Constance Markievicz and the very peculiar gardening notes she contributed to the magazine Bean na hÉireannbefore the first World War, when she advised her readers to regard the English in Ireland in much the same light as slugs in a lettuce bed.
Gardening Women
brings us up to the present, to the surge in popularity of television gardening programmes and the conferral of celebrity on stars of the profession, from Vita Sackville-West on. The author commends those who spoke out, presciently, against the incontinent use of pesticides and the like, upholders of the organic ideal. Organic farming and plant growing are benefits to set against the importation of ghastly supermarket flowers and the destruction of much of the countryside – but conservation needs to be embraced on a larger scale. It’s unlikely that any contemporary gardener would be in a position to declare, with Gertrude Jekyll, “I have learnt much from the little cottage gardens that help to make our English waysides the prettiest in the temperate world.”
Patricia Craig is an author and critic. Her memoir, Asking for Trouble,was published in 2007
