Daily Archives: September 8, 2022

The Gardens Trust’s third set of lectures on the C19th garden takes us towards its heyday. As Britain’s empire expanded plant hunters scoured the world to bring home plants to fill the gardens and greenhouses not just of the rich but an ever-growing middle class. Gardening became a hobby, and indeed a passion for many in the working class too. As a result, gardening books and magazines flourished, and horticulture became big business. Garden design, like architecture became more and more eclectic. Labor was cheap so extravagance and display became commonplace in the private realm while public parks, often on a grand scale, were created all over the country, but especially in urban areas. Inevitably however there was a reaction against such artifice and excess, with a call for the return to more natural styles, and by the end of the century the cottage garden was vying with the lush herbaceous border to be the defining feature of the late Victorian garden. On Thursday, September 15 at 5 am Eastern time (a recording link will be sent, good for seven days, to watch at your leisure), Margaret Willes will start things off with The Challenges of the Victorian Working-class Garden.

Margaret Willes spent her career in book publishing, latterly as the Publisher at the National Trust. On retirement, she took up writing on various aspects of cultural history. Her gardening books include The Making of the English Gardener: Plants, Books and Inspiration, 1560-1660 (Yale University Press, 2011), A Shakespearean Botanical (Bodleian Publishing, 2015), and The Gardens of the British Working Class (Yale University Press, 2014). She cultivates her own garden in Hackney.

Her title is deliberately double edged. Gardening was indeed often a challenge to working-class men and women, who lacked spare time, money and access to sources of information, often denied them through lack of literacy. When asked to write a history of British working-class gardens, Ms. Willes also faced a challenge, though finding out about the 19th century was easier than for earlier times. She shall consider the sources that she found both useful and illuminating, from recreations of historic gardens to literature, photographs and oral history. She shall look at a wide range of what might be considered gardens, across Britain and Ireland, town and country, including shared spaces such as allotments. £5 each or all 6 for £30. To see the full schedule, and to register through Eventbrite, visit HERE