This Gardens Trust talk on May 12 is the third in our 2nd series on Victorian Gardens on Thursdays @ 10.00 GMT. £5 each or all 6 for £30. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards. Register through Eventbrite HERE.
James Shirley Hibberd (1825 – 1890) has been called ‘the father of amateur gardening’. He wrote for those he called ‘plain people’ – those who had a town garden or a suburban garden that they looked after themselves It is through his writings that we get a vivid idea of what ordinary Victorian gardens were like.
He wrote books, he edited two magazines simultaneously and started a third towards the end of his life, he lectured all over the country on a wide range of subjects, he was a judge at horticultural shows, he chaired committees and celebratory dinners at which he was always called on to make a speech. Eventually he was involved with improvements at Kew and at the RHS Chiswick Gardens and was advising the Government on possible ways to deal with potato disease.
He deserves to be better known. Lecturer Julia Matheson says ‘All my life I have lived in a mid-Victorian suburban semi not far from London. I had always wanted to know what might have been in my own garden when the first owners lived there, and once I had retired I had time to look into the subject. My start in research began at the Garden History Society’s summer school at Ashridge, and my enthusiasm grew until I studied for an M.A. at the Open University with a dissertation on 19th century working class flower shows in London. Not content to stop there, I went on to a Ph.D. with a thesis on East End horticulture 1840-1900. It was in the course of this research that I first encountered Shirley Hibberd – who is now my Number One Gardening Hero’.
