Work in any old garden for long enough and it inevitably begins to offer up something of its secrets and the stories of those who once loved and tended it. Over the years, I’ve inadvertently unearthed innumerable tiny pieces of garden history while working in other people’s plots: miniature glass bottles in shades of amber, jade and cobalt blue, countless fragments of stoneware, and shards of Victorian and Edwardian pottery in a myriad of delicate glazes and elaborate patterns, as well as the occasional object so deeply personal that it makes you momentarily catch your breath and pause for thought.
Digging in one Victorian walled garden recently, I uncovered the broken remains of a 19th-century porcelain watercolour palette used for mixing paints, its old Winsor & Newton crest still clearly visible. Holding it in my hand to gently rub away the encrusted earth, I wondered what its former owner had been painting in the seconds before it tumbled. That same garden also yielded the remains of a Victorian clay pipe – perhaps that of a former head gardener – its small, cupped bowl neatly stamped with the symbol (two linked hands) of “Dublin United Trades Union”, one of Ireland’s short-lived, earliest trade unions, founded in the 1870s.
I'm not, of course, the only person to be intrigued by such finds. In the UK, a seasoned "bottle digger" and university lecturer by the name of Dr Tom Licence has written a fascinating book, What the Victorians Threw Away (Oxbow Books), in which he casts a light on some of these little fragments of history and what they tell us about the people who came before us. The book includes the case study of the garden of a Victorian rectory, where all manner of everyday household objects were unearthed from the ground: fragments of pottery as well as wine, champagne, mineral, spirit, ink, medicine and sauce bottles, with their makers' stamps (some of them German and French) still intact, mustard and blacking jars, broken tiles, even oyster shells. The Victorian rector clearly had expensive tastes . . .
Here in Ireland, I know of one professional gardener who was involved in the discovery of a Viking grave: not only the human remains, but the spear, sword, armlet and brooch of a Viking warrior.
My own finds, by comparison, are modest, and yet I love them. So when I discovered that some of them had disappeared from the bookshelf where I’d placed them, I was irate. It turned out a family member had dumped the lot, in the belief that it was rubbish. Yes, it was rubbish, I roared indignantly, but it was Victorian rubbish. I’m not sure that they appreciated the difference.
