In a Green Shade

 

Women and gardens

‘If Eve had had a spade in Paradise and had known what to do with it, we should not have had all that sad business with the apple’ (Elizabeth von Arnim)

In mid-June, as we sizzled towards Midsummer’s Day, plants were shrivelling, flowers were dying, water butts were empty, and hosepipe bans began to creep in. Gardeners despaired, and yet only few weeks previously, our television screens had been filled with the annual explosions of colour and spectacle of the Chelsea Flower Show.

From the Garden of Eden to Chelsea, gardens have inspired, delighted, frustrated and soothed us. But what about the gardeners? What do we know of them? And more specifically, for the purposes of this blog, what about the women gardeners?

Elizabeth von Arnim, who published her witty autobiographical novel ‘Elizabeth and her German Garden’ in 1898, was frustrated by pompous 19th century assumptions that ‘ladies’ should not do physical work in a garden. She describes how she would:

‘…slink out with a spade and a rake and feverishly dig a little piece of land and break it up …and run back very hot and guilty into the house and get into a chair and behind a book and look languid just in time to save my reputation.’

 

Women, gardening and creativity

Women have always been associated with gardens, no matter how much disapproval they might have faced. Ancient religions celebrated goddesses of fertility and abundance and from earliest times women have grown herbs, managed vegetable plots and tended medicinal gardens. Medieval art often shows women in enclosed, walled gardens and there is a long tradition of nuns taking responsibility for growing food within their communities and creating gardens for spiritual contemplation. Creativity can always flourish, even in the most restricted spaces – think of cottage gardens, knot gardens, flower painting, botanical studies and medicinal gardens, right up to allotments and window boxes. No wonder that garden centres are now so popular, for as well as taking your mum out for a cup of tea you can explore all the possibilities for creating your own mini oasis. Why not venture into radical and alternative gardening? A witchy garden? A pocket park? A Zen meditation space?

Blooming Fashion

Any reputable garden centre can offer you all the equipment needed to transform your plot of land, including sturdy gloves, wellies, fleeces and kneeling pads. But what to wear in the garden has not always been so straightforward. A fascinating article by Louise Harrison describes some of the changing fashions in garden wear for women during the last two centuries.

https://www.gardensillustrated.com/features/what-women-wore-garden-fashion

As she points out, the image of the Edwardian lady gardener, impractically clad in a large hat, feather boa and full-length dress did not quite equate with the earlier advice offered by working gardening women like Louisa Johnson, who recommended an apron ‘with ample pockets to contain her pruning knife, a small hammer, a ball of string and snippings of cloth’.

Elsewhere, at her College for Lady Gardeners, Viscountess Wolseley’s mildly eccentric fashion advice to students pointed out that ‘putting cabbage leaves in the crown of the hat should not be despised, should the heat be felt very much’.

And Vita Sackville West’s outfit of choice tended to be boots, jodhpurs, pearls and a silk blouse.

There was much excitement in London in 1896 when Sir William Thistleton Dyer, the Director of Kew Gardens, accepted women trainees. A strict disciplinarian, he insisted on the same uniform style for men and women, consisting of a brown tweed suit, a peaked cap and knickerbockers. They became a bit of a tourist attraction and Punch magazine noted:

From the roofs of the buses they had a fine view
Of the ladies in bloomers who gardened at Kew.
The orchids were slighted, the lilies were scorned,
The dahlias were flouted, till botanists mourned,
But the Londoners shouted, ‘What ho there, Go to;
Who wants to see blooms now you’ve bloomers at Kew.'

Unsurprisingly, the dress code was hastily changed.

 

Women with vision

Once you start digging for information about remarkable women gardeners, you find all sorts of interesting things. Wonderful women with vision and resilience. Of course, some of the names, like Gertrude Jekyll. Vita Sackville West, and Beth Chatto are more familiar, but many more deserve to be recognised and celebrated.

Fanny Rollo Wilkinson(1855 – 1955) for example, was a close friend of Millicent Fawcett and her sister Elizabeth Garret Anderson.

https://yorkcivictrust.co.uk/fanny-rollo-wilkinson/

She was the first woman in Britain to work as a professional landscape gardener, having managed, against all the odds in 1883, to be accepted onto a course, where she learned about ‘taking surveys, levelling and staking out the ground, drawing plans to scale and making estimates.’ Later, working for the Metropolitan Public Gardens, Boulevard and Playground Association, she was responsible for laying out 75 public gardens throughout London. She also encouraged the planting of plane trees in polluted urban centres. In 1904 she became the principal of Swanley Horticultural College, which eventually became a women-only college.

A few more names among the many women gardeners of interest from the last century include Beatrix Farrand, who was an American landscape architect, Laura McLaren (Lady Aberconwy), a suffragist and horticulturalist, and Kitty Lloyd Jones, a Welsh born garden designer and nurserywoman.

There are still battles to be won now in 2025, as women gardeners continue to take on the structural and climatic challenges of a profession where gender inequality remains an issue.

A hotbed of inequality!

In May 2023 there was a flurry of excitement around the Chelsea Flower Show, when it was announced that for the first time, there were more women garden designers than men. An exhibition about ‘Heroines of Horticulture’ – including Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville West and Beth Chatto seemed to suggest that Chelsea had achieved some kind of gender equality.

Well, not quite. The majority of the women designers were involved in the container and balcony categories. These are always interesting of course, but the shows in the large spaces in the main avenue, where the limelight always falls, remained male dominated.

This year, Jo Thompson, who was the only woman to design a garden on the main avenue, had a few pithy remarks to make when interviewed by Alice Vincent. She mentioned the paucity of sponsorship for women, the lack of women’s toilets and the barriers to women with children (children under five are banned, as are prams, buggies and pushchairs – babies in arms are permitted but discouraged). When organising the building of a garden, she said: ‘you have to stick to your convictions. And that requires a core of steel’.

A year ago, Alice Vincent wrote about similar issues.

https://www.gardensillustrated.com/chelsea/chelsea-feminism-gender-divide

She revealed that many women volunteer to plant up the designs, but they are usually not paid, whereas the landscapers, who are usually male, do get paid.

‘These gardens are literally built by unpaid female labour. In that context, celebrating the work of horticultural women from history feels a little awkward.’

 

A green thought

The title of this blog is part of a quotation pinched from Andrew Marvell’s brilliant 17th Century poem The Garden, where he speaks of:

Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade

The names of excellent women gardeners from the past have lingered in the shade for too long – but their gardens are still there, out in the open air, for us to admire and enjoy. And it’s encouraging to see increasing opportunities to pursue specialist training. Organisations like the Working for Gardeners Association, originally founded in 1899 as a women’s association, offer bursaries for horticultural and agricultural projects. It is nice to see, by the way, that there is a fund dedicated to the memory of Christine Ladley, a committed gardener who was local to Milton Keynes)

https://www.wfga.org.uk/join-the-wfga/christine-ladley-fund/

Whether you are quietly weeding your back yard or contemplating the plan for a major public park, gardening requires hard work, imagination and patience. It’s encouraging to learn about the determination and strength of the women in the past and to know that a new generation of women designers - women like Charlotte Harris, Sarah Eberle, Arit Anderson, Kristina Clode and Jo Thompson, together with many many others, are taking on the challenges in ways that will not go unnoticed.

JUNE UPDATE ON THE MK FAWCETT CAMPAIGN FOR A SAFER, HEALTHIER, FAIRER MILTON KEYNES

• We have begun an update of background papers with baseline evidence of the need for making MK Safer, Healthier and Fairer, ready to disseminate in the Autumn.
• We have now met for a second time with Emily Darlington, Callum Anderson and Chris Curtis, our MK MPs.
• We have now met three representatives from party groups on MKCC and discussed our campaign with them. They are Cllr Lauren Townsend (Deputy Leader of MKCC and of the Labour group); Cllr Jane Carr (Leader of the Liberal Democrat group); Cllr Shazna Muzammil (Leader of the Conservative group).
• A couple of our members have taken part in a consultation on a draft of the Council’s new Domestic Abuse Strategy, following on from a recent contribution to MKCC’s Housing Policy.
• In conjunction with the OU’s Centre for Protection of Women Online we have contributed to Ofcom’s consultation on their draft guidance for tech companies, ‘A Safer Online for Women and Girls.’
• We have met with the Deputy Head of Communications and Engagement at MK Hospital for an update on the new build Women and Children’s ward.
• We have attended a meeting of the BLMK Women’s Health Network to better understand what advances in service provision are being made to address inequality in women’s health.
• We will continue to promote the manifesto campaign and encourage people to become more involved with the political process.

We will include an update in every blog. Thank you for supporting us in our campaigns for gender equality and women’s rights.