The Curious History of Vegetables (eBook)

2

Tools, Potting and Pests

The Kitchen Gardener

Spade, Hoe and Hook

How Big is my Garden?

Under Glass

The Potting Shed

Pest Control

Mr Henry Doubleday’s Solution

The Slug and Snail War

THE KITCHEN GARDENER

Children raised on the writings of Beatrix Potter remember the guardian of the garden in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. ‘Your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor,’ warns Peter Rabbit’s mother at the start of the story. The young rabbit comes face to face with the curmudgeonly Mr McGregor after the rabbit ate ‘lettuces, and some French beans, and then he ate some radishes; and then, feeling rather sick, he went to look for some parsley’. At one point the bearded Mr McGregor endeavours to stamp Peter Rabbit to death.

In the post war years of World War Two an equally sanguine figure featured in an instructional cartoon column in the Sunday Express. This was Adam the Gardener, who, like Mr McGregor, had about him an almost detectable smell of stale pipe smoke, charity shop clothes and underwear that received irregular washing. Both vegetable growers, Adam and Mr. McGregor had, as their antecedents, the garden staff of Edwardian England, those churlish servants who would do only what they would do. How did this stereotype arise? And what became of them?

The hortolanus or gardinarius was a person of status in medieval Europe. The hortolanus administered the monastery gardens, overseeing the workers who tilled the soil, planted the garlic and the beans, grafted the fruit stock and ensured that the cloister garden remained free of moss and weeds. The workers were often lay gardeners for, although the early Benedictines and Cistercians exhorted their brethren to till the soil themselves, believing that hard work and abstinence brought one closer to God, they were also very good at recruiting novices from the nobility. The noble brother, however devout, preferred to pay a lay person to do his digging for him. Outside the monastery walls, meanwhile, people looked after their vegetables plots as and when they could in the evenings and, as religious rules permitted, at weekends.

In the 1500s as the prosperity of the Elizabethan age edged across Britain from the south-east to the north and west, Britons spent their new-found money, as they always will, on smart homes and fine gardens in what the landscape historian W.G. Hoskins described as the Great Rebuilding of Britain. We can only assume that women were the mistresses of these gardens: as William Fitzherbert noted in his 1534 The Book of Husbandrie: ‘… the beginning of March … is time for a wife to make her garden.’ Although evidence of the woman’s role as the kitchen gardener goes largely unrecorded (apart from occasional accounts of women paid as weeding labourers), common sense suggests that the housewife who managed the household would have kept a close eye on the productive vegetable garden. Early garden authors such as Thomas Tusser – they were all men – suggest that women’s work was confined to the flowers, herbs and medicinal plants. Yet in 1617 William Lawson brought out the Countrie Housewifes Garden giving kitchen garden advice on such matters as the ‘Planting, Graffing, and to make Ground good for a rich Orchard’, and on the ‘Husbandry of Bees, with their several Uses and Annoyances’. A century later Charles Evelyn, son of the garden writer and designer John Evelyn recognised a gap in the market and published his The Lady’s Recreation which included ‘directions for the raising, pruning, and disposing of all lofty vegetables.’

In the early 1800s women gardeners began to gain a higher profile. When Jane Webb, the daughter of a Birmingham engineer, married the prolific garden writer John Loudon, she helped her husband with his books and encyclopedia and wrote a series of books for women gardeners including Gardening for Ladies and The Ladies’ Flower-Garden. She also edited The Ladies’ Companion, which was founded in 1849. Loudon, twenty-four years her senior, made little concession to the role of the women in the kitchen garden. A labourer’s garden, he wrote for example, should be large enough to occupy the man in digging and planting and those of ‘the female part of the family’ or the ‘wife and children in hoeing, weeding and watering’. It echoed the attitude of the times epitomised by the King of Sweden’s alleged aside to his wife: ‘Madam, I married you to give me children, not to give me advice’.

Times would change. In 1913 women suffragettes attacked the clubby men’s world of the garden in their campaign for votes for women by destroying plants in the orchid house at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. Fifteen years earlier the heiress Ellen Willmott (who died penniless after spending her fortune on her gardens), was awarded the coveted Victorian Medal of Honour for her horticultural work. She shared it with ‘the rather fat, and rather grumbly’ Gertrude Jekyll, who herself managed a substantial kitchen garden at her home in Munstead Wood, Surrey. The description of Miss Jekyll came from another woman gardener who would become one of the most influential voices in gardening, Victoria Sackville-West.

However, although Gertrude Jekyll and Ellen Willmott both had a reputation for hands-on gardening, their most useful gardening tool was the jobbing gardener himself (Ellen Willmott employed over a hundred gardeners at her Warley Place garden in Essex). For two millennia at least, jobbing gardeners who, in the kitchen garden, were the ones ‘grubbing weeds from gravel paths’ as Rudyard Kipling put it in his poem The Glory of the Garden in 1911. Cheap, and good at all those back-breaking jobs such as manuring, digging and weeding the vegetable plot, the jobbing gardener was also the ideal tool for planting out and protecting tender seedlings, and harvesting and storing crops.

Jobbing gardeners, like lighthouse keepers and clergymen, were a curious and sometimes eccentric breed. Too isolated by their livelihood to have formed a trade union movement, their pay traditionally hovered around the agricultural wage. They were often illiterate: Richard Payne Knight, the scholar who made a name for himself when he attacked Capability Brown’s landscape style, ran his estate at Downton, Herefordshire with the aid of gardener who ‘is an extremely simple laborer. He does not know a letter or a figure.’

When things went wrong in the garden, the jobbing gardener could, and often did, take the blame: ‘If those who have private gardens were a little more difficult to please in selecting a gardener, and in the quality of the produce sent to table, the consequences would be an improvement in that produce, and more scientific gardeners,’ insisted a haughty Mr Loudon.

However, while most paid gardeners had to be content with their servitude, some, especially in Victorian and Edwardian times, rose through the social ranks to become men of status and influence. When the bachelor gardener William Robinson died in 1935, he left a 360-acre estate, including an acre of kitchen garden, and the Elizabethan manor house of Gravetye in Sussex. He was the wealthiest garden writer of his time yet he had begun his working life as the garden boy at Curraghmore in Ireland. By 21, he had risen to the rank of foreman in charge of the precious glasshouses on an estate in County Laois. Said to have abandoned his hothouse charges in the middle of the night, the windows open and the fires extinguished, after an argument with the owner, Robinson had set off to Dublin to find a new post. It was a good story, if an unlikely one, for he soon found a job with the Royal Botanic Society in London’s Regents Park and began contributing articles to The Gardener’s Chronicle. The Times sent him to Paris as their horticultural correspondent and by 1868 he had published his first book, Gleanings from French Gardens. The once-poor, apprentice gardener never looked back. He set up a magazine, The Garden, in 1875 recruiting that other influential writer, Gertrude Jekyll who would herself edit the magazine at the century’s turn in 1899. The Garden was sold and merged with House and Gardens in 1927, but Robinson had already founded another magazine, Gardening Illustrated, aimed at the up and coming suburban and villa gardeners. By 1838 this gardener turned publisher was employing his own army of gardeners when he bought Gravetye Manor. His relations with his gardening staff and head gardener Ernest Markham were said to be good. (When he died his last wish, to be cremated, was fulfilled: he had been an early campaigner for cremation.)

In Robinson’s day the gardener’s craft was handed down from generation to generation. When the late George Watkins, a former head gardener on a Shropshire estate, started work in the early 1900s, his education was a hand-me-down affair: ‘I worked under a very clever gardener, George Crew. He had a wonderful way of teaching. He’d give me some packets of seed then he’d keep an eye on me, like, and I got to grow those seeds on, potting on and that sort of thing. With this coaching, he never did anything without he told me what he was doing and the why and the wherefore.’

As a boy the gardener-to-be would join the house staff as pot washer and apprentice, spending a...