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The Victorian Gardener

People enjoyed gardening in Victorian times for the same reasons we do today – an escape from stressful working lives and a way to create your own private and enjoyable leisure environment.

A new book, The Victorian Gardener, by Anne Wilkinson, charts the emergence of popular gardening from the 1860s, from a time when gardening was largely the preserve of professionals working on big estates to the growth of a new breed of gardener - ordinary householders - whose gardens ranged from cottage and rectory gardens to those found behind terraced houses in towns.

The book is about 'ordinary' gardeners and the development of amateur gardening which was closely related to the growth in Victorian housing. Victorian gardening was an art of extremes - from formal flower beds and borders to wild rockeries, ferneries and wildernesses with the added novelty of exotics in conservatories and hothouses. Eventually small suburban gardens became an essential part of the town landscape.

Anne Wilkinson's painstaking research enlightens the reader about the
Gardeners themselves, how our Victorian forebears learnt to garden, when initially there were few gardening publications, how they created their gardens and some of the hardware they used. Illustrated with original adverts the reader is captivated by the Birkenhead Beetle Trap, said to catch 2,000 cockroaches in one night and Jensen’s Guanos fertilizer!

There is still much we can learn from those gardeners who have gone before us and the chapters on the fruit garden, the vegetable garden and roses will be of particular interest.

There are tips and comments from Victorian gardeners but the real appeal of this book is in its careful charting of the evolution of our gardens. Bob Flowerdew writes the foreward.

The Victorian Gardener, by Anne Wilkinson, is published by Sutton
Publishing, in hardback.

© Reckless Gardener Magazine 2005 Mill Cottage New Media