[T]hese other books, this literature on gardening! They are generally better than the garden itself. Practical they are not, but why ask it of them?. . . Through rockeries, ferneries, nut-groves, copses we wander as in a fairy dream.
—Maud Maryon, How the Garden Grew
The nineteenth century was an era of enormous changes in garden design and garden practice. A wealth of new and exotic plants, located and shipped back by adventurous plant hunters from southern Europe and other, warmer continents, changed the look and character of the garden beyond recognition. The repeal of the glass tax and advances in iron and glass production initiated the craze of the glass house.Footnote 1 “Bedding out” consequently became popular, a system in which delicate plants grown under glass could be planted straight outside in warmer months, producing instant colour and ending the frustrating months of bare beds during which gardeners waited for native perennials to bloom.Footnote 2 And there were many other important technological advances to ease the lot of the Victorian gardener, such as the patenting of the first lawn mower in 1830 and improvements in tool design.Footnote 3 Moreover, with huge advances in printing press technology and distribution, a slew of gardening magazines and gardening manuals sprang up to educate and aid the amateur gardener.Footnote 4 The rise of the middle class, housed in suburban terraces and villas with small gardens front and back, produced a ready market for such texts.
Alongside these well-documented shifts another, less well-known development was taking place – the rise of the woman gardener. Gertrude Jekyll at the end of the century was perhaps the era's best-known female gardener: in partnership with Edwin Lutyens, she produced many of the era's most important landscape designs and wrote numerous successful books and articles on gardening. But long before Jekyll, women were making serious contributions to gardening as both practitioners and theorists. For practical purposes women's gardening writing can be divided into two main phases, from the publication of Jane Loudon's highly successful works in the early 1840s until the early 1880s, and then from the mid 1880s to the turn of the century. The earlier garden texts tend to be pragmatic advice to the middle-class woman; later Victorian garden writing is indebted to New Woman and aesthetic prose and presents the garden as a varied scene of both energetic activity and dreamy, languorous contemplation. A second strand of later Victorian garden prose, penned by professional women gardeners, synthesizes the practical bent of the earliest works with the aesthetic consciousness of fin de siècle amateurs such as “Elizabeth” Von Arnim.Footnote 5 All phases of the tradition are vitally in dialogue with what Michael Waters has called, in Ruskinian language, “the Queen of the Garden role” (241) in Victorian culture.
Ruskin argues in his lecture “Of Queens’ Gardens” that women must extend their “benignant power” “over all within their sphere,” something which Ruskin never precisely defines, but which seems to mean society in general, possibly even England itself. This broad sphere, “the territories over which each [woman]. . . reigned,” Ruskin characterizes as “Queens’ gardens” (110).Footnote 6 Waters argues that, like the Angel in the House described by Coventry Patmore, the Queen of the Garden functioned to legitimize contemporary stereotypes of women as “guiding” rather than “determining” agents, contained within the private sphere, and consequently able to provide moral bolster to the inhabitants of the world of commerce (Ruskin 121). The garden has particular resonance in this ideological project because of its “peculiarly appropriate associations. . . with love, beauty, nature, and leisure,” and thus, Waters remarks, expanding his analysis to include fiction and poetry, “Victorian garden writers (of both sexes) never tire of asserting that women have an ‘instinctive’ love of gardens and a ‘native’ affinity with the plants they nurture.” Waters claims that Victorian imaginative literature tends, consequently, to show women in one of three main activities in the garden, all of which sanction and seek to further high-conservative ideals of woman's limited social role: as light gardener (cutting, tying back roses); as matronly garden supervisor, involved in Ruskin's “sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision”; or as ornament or decorative spectacle (Waters 241, 242, 242–45).Footnote 7
More recently, feminist critics have noted the possibilities of Ruskin's vision of the garden, in particular the ways in which it pushes at the separation of public and private spheres. Accepting Ruskin's distaste for radical feminism, for substantive reordering of women's and men's political and economic relations to one another, such critics have pointed to the ways in which Ruskin's ideal nonetheless contests Patmore's. The Angel was, after all, confined to her house yet, as Sharon Aronofsky Weltman argues, Ruskin's garden was both home and not-home; it was England, it was society, it was the civilized world. Women's occupation of the garden thus invites broad and potentially culturally challenging interpretations: Ruskin finally, Weltman contends, “urges women not to immure themselves behind their garden walls, but rather to redefine those gardens to include all of England, Victoria's demiparadise and sceptered isle.” Ruskin emerges in Weltman's essay as one who offers an “intoxicating” vision of “power and a wide venue in which to apply it” to “those to whom the radical possibilities proffered by women's rights were out of the question” (Weltman 119).
I shall suggest in this article that prose advice texts aimed at the woman gardener furthered the Ruskinian vision of the garden as not-home, as a broader and even public realm for women's activity, in a variety of ways. Some might have found favour with Ruskin; others undoubtedly would not. Certainly, authors expand considerably upon the kinds of duties Ruskin imagines women's embarking upon in a garden, including advice on the rougher aspects of gardening such as digging, manuring, and soil cultivation; on design, layout, and construction; and on the duties and responsibilities of an active, fully-engaged garden manager.Footnote 8 For the garden is conceived in such texts as a freer space than the home in an entirely concrete and immediate fashion: consumers of these texts did not have to imagine the ways in which their influence could extend over the citizens of Britain and the empire but could see the impact of their actions legibly, daily, in their own soil. Authorizing women to engage in physical labour, aesthetic debate, and technological innovation, texts build towards a new vision of the social arrangement in which flowers sanctify and women act. Indeed it is, as we shall see, no mere accident that many of the later Victorian gardening texts by women were structurally innovative and politically radical.Footnote 9
Ladies’ Companions: The Literature of the Villa Garden (1840–80)
If the eighteenth-century was the era of the great country house, the nineteenth was surely the epoch of the suburban home. To this day, London's housing stock contains more Victorian-era buildings than from any other period, and many of these are either terraced houses or what the Victorians termed “villas,” substantial semi-detached or detached houses with about ten rooms, including a drawing room, dining room, library, and nursery, three bedrooms for the family, and several bedrooms at the top of the house for the staff (nursery maid, parlour maid, cook).Footnote 10 In 1903, Mrs. F. A. Bardswell described the spectrum of gardens associated with suburban homes:
Suburban gardens are of many kinds; there are all manner of notes in the scale. The squalid ones – alas! some are squalid – we see in London's shabbiest borderlands. They often belong to houses filled with many different families, and are a kind of no man's land. Hardly can we call them gardens; little enough is grown in them. . . Then there are the tidy patches of the fairly well-to-do workman; some made hideous by mounds of shells and grottoes, others filled with useful and pretty plants. So we go upwards, step by step, to the good-sized strip or more ambitious villa garden. Wonders are done in these. Many a busy City man, whose garden is not far from the Marble Arch, knows all about Roses, and might give lessons on Grape-growing and Orchid-forcing to his relations in the real country. (5)
In an era of nostalgia for an agrarian way of life, the villa garden was a little oasis in the midst of industry, a hint at an Eden that was now supposedly lost. As Bardswell mused, even those who loved the city and city-living delighted in the presence of gardens in the midst of the smoke and pollution created by industry:
Nor is it altogether unpleasing to have a garden near the busy haunts of men; the roar and rattle of the streets, that sound like the humming of innumerable bees, the strange glow of lights in the distance, the pealing of bells and the striking of many clocks, the thunder and whistle of the trains that link us with friends far off, the stir and throb of human life, that chimes in, not inharmoniously with the calmer life of Nature – all these things combine in making up the unexpressed enjoyments of the dwellers in gardens that lie close to the heart of towns. (Bardswell 6)
Of course Bardswell draws here on centuries’ old associations of gardens with lost paradise, and of pastoral gardens as alternatives to modern human industry, yet she refuses to perpetuate the old, morally freighted binary of country and city. The city is not morally bankrupt, its inhabitants spiritually bereft in her account; indeed, she stresses that the city-dweller in Marble Arch knows a thing or two about nature, and the hum of city life, rather than oppressing her, reminds her of the tranquil hum of insects. For, she argues, the energy of the city, its “throb,” harmonizes with “the calmer life of Nature”; they are notes in the same chord (to use Bardswell's modish phrase). The author's approach is, in fact, common in nineteenth-century gardening writing, which regularly celebrates the villa garden as a space that undermines the traditional country/city distinction. Today, garden writers pointed out, the delights of nature and cultivation are routinely found inside the city limits, and people across the nation are united in the pleasures of plant cultivation. The owner of a cottage garden and the City merchant buy the same publications, the same tools, and the same seed catalogues, and spend their evenings tending the same cultivars.
Women and men were also united in thinking and writing about gardening from the very earliest years of the Victorian period, the marriage of John Claudius Loudon and Jane Loudon being the most obvious example of a supportive gardening partnership. Jane Loudon's Ladies’ Companion to the Flower Garden (1846) sold more than twenty thousand copies; the Dictionary of National Biography notes that by 1879 it was in its ninth edition ([Boulger], “Jane Loudon”). Addressed to “amateur florists,” the “possessors of small gardens,” it recognized the existence of literate women of comparatively limited means keen for instruction and advice on everything from soil culture to garden design (Loudon, Ladies’ Companion vii). A number of similar books sprang up around the same time, all of which conceived themselves as much-needed support for the struggling middle-class amateur, “the industrious and economical,” as Louisa Johnson subtitled Every Lady Her Own Flower Gardener (1839). “[B]ooks intended for professional gardeners, are seldom suitable to the wants of amateurs,” Jane Loudon remarked in Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies (1841); “It is so very difficult for a person who has been acquainted with a subject all his life, to imagine the state of ignorance in which a person is who knows nothing of it, that adepts often find it impossible to communicate the knowledge they possess” (v–vi). Gardening is conceived in these texts less as a hobby passed from one woman to another, like (for example) cookery or dressmaking, and more as a past-time a woman was likely to indulge on her own or, at best, with advice from a competent male relative or neighbour. The developing market of the how-to text put lone women gardeners in touch with one another and created a sense of community spanning geographical regions. Writers share their experiences of failure as well as their successes; texts invariably narrate the author's own evolution in a preface or introduction, for these are texts about becoming a competent amateur, a woman with expertise. “When I married Mr. Loudon, it is scarcely possible to imagine any person more completely ignorant than I was,” Jane Loudon begins sorrowfully in Practical Instructions; “I was soon heartily ashamed of my ignorance” (v). Loudon's numerous and detailed books attest to the author's transformation into a woman of experience, a woman with mastery over theory and practice alike, who has also found a niche for herself in the literary marketplace. Loudon may well exaggerate her lack of competence at the beginning of her married career, but her account of her triumphant upwards trajectory surely served to inspire a generation of struggling readers.
The early books authorize physical labour for women: although Jane Loudon admits that “digging appears at first sight, a very laborious employment” she insists that “by a little attention to the principles of mechanics and the laws of motion, the labour may be much simplified and rendered comparatively easy.” Pruning too she claims as an appropriate occupation for a woman: though it may look “a most laborious and unfeminine occupation. . . yet perhaps there is no operation of gardening which a lady may more easily accomplish” when armed with a good pair of shears (Practical Instructions 7). J. B. Whiting's Manual of Flower Gardening for Ladies (1849) similarly insists that spade-work is possible for a woman when well-equipped: “a little practice makes it comparatively easy, so that in a moderate degree it might be done with facility by a female” (14). Conscious at all times of certain conservative Victorian ideas about women's essential delicacy, authors suggest that heavy gardening is nonetheless compatible with femininity because of modern advances – in technology and industry, which has created better, more efficient tools, or through scientific thinking, which outlines “the principles of mechanics, the laws of motion” (Practical Instructions 7). Texts themselves work to disseminate necessary scientific and horticultural information to their readers and, to that end, writers openly discuss aspects of gardening one might expect a prudish Victorian to shiver at – the sex and propagation of plants, for example, and the possibilities and uses of manure (chapter 2 of Practical Instructions focuses in great detail on “manuring the soil and making hotbeds”). The garden is not simply a site of repose in these texts, a scene for a woman to beautify, but rather an opportunity for women to share in and experience what technology has to offer the contemporary Victorian.
Indeed, gardening is not just about pottering picturesquely in the herbaceous borders in these works, it is an opportunity both to act and to think. As Johnson remarked, “[i]t compels the reason to act, and the judgment to observe” (4). At times it is even represented as a positive engagement in national public debates, as writers locate their discussions of garden design in a wider social and political context. Texts reference the conflicts about colour and design that were raging in “mainstream” gardening publications,Footnote 11 including the debate between “wild” or “natural” and “formal” modes of gardening that was to smoulder across the decades before flaming into open conflict in the century's last quarter.Footnote 12 Loudon's short-lived periodical, the Ladies’ Magazine of Gardening, alludes to the controversy over “complementary colour” sparked by Michel-Eugène Chevreul – any woman with strengths in dressmaking understands colour well enough, Loudon sniffs – and issues a call to arms about the lack of species variety in suburban gardens.Footnote 13 “Bedding out” certainly had its advantages, but many worried that contemporary gardeners were becoming overdependent on scarlet geraniums (pelargoniums), blue lobelia, yellow feverfew, and calceolarias – that is to say, on showy annuals and semi-hardy perennials grown for maximum colour and maximum effect. Limited plant choice also frustrated those gardeners conscious of the new wealth of plants introduced into Britain and the new advances in cultivating and rearing those plants. Women gardeners like Loudon were as interested in these kinds of conversations as contemporary publications aimed primarily at men, and, in response, they introduced their readers to a range of new exotic plants and explained how best to grow them.Footnote 14 The books thus do not only introduce readers to political and aesthetic questions of the day but also encourage women to participate themselves through careful plant choice and garden design, turning the performance of gardening, as well as the experience of reading and writing about it, into self-consciously political acts.
Politically engaged does not, of course, necessarily mean politically radical; the texts are far from straightforwardly innovative in their attitudes to the sexes’ responsibilities or, indeed, to the garden. Indeed, like much British literature of the garden, early Victorian women's gardening texts at times idealize gardens as spaces outside culture, as apolitical realms beyond or outside public discourse.Footnote 15 As Anne Helmreich puts it, the garden, “seemingly without politics,” “behaves as a myth, holding forth promises of harmony with nature” (2). The myth of garden-as-unconstructed-space, garden-as-Nature certainly operates when writers like Loudon evoke their gardens as a sort of heaven on earth, an ideal world in which the promise of balance and order are fulfilled. She displays a touching faith in the stability of ecosystems that is difficult for a modern gardener to entertain: a particular pest, the lackey caterpillar, rarely overwhelms the garden, she claims, because “with that beautiful arrangement by which all the works of our Great Creator are balanced equally with each other, and none allowed to predominate, these insects are such favourite food for birds, that not a hundredth part of them are suffered to reach maturity” (Loudon, Instructions 133–34).Footnote 16 Louisa Johnson stresses that to garden is to come close to God: observing the operation of Nature inculcates a deep appreciation for One “who created such pure and simple blessings for his creatures,” she argues (4). Unorthodox female behaviour – sweating, debating, self-making – becomes possible in the garden because it is (apparently) a space outside culture, and thus nonconformist activities avoid acquiring normative social meanings. The garden's claim to “natural” status works to depoliticize the activities of the women who operate in it.Footnote 17
Yet discursive passages celebrating the transcendent harmony of nature are invariably succeeded by more practical accounts of the “skill and ingenuity” a woman gardener needs to display if she is to control the unruly forces in her garden (Loudon, Instructions 359). Of course, gardening advice texts by their very existence constitute a recognition that a garden is, in fact, no utopia, and while gardening may be about appreciating the harmonious operation of Nature it is also about wresting control for oneself, about stepping in and imposing human ideals of order and aestheticism.Footnote 18 Early Victorian writers tend to be particularly attuned to the constructedness of the aesthetic sense because of the prevailing idea that the garden, once viewed as ideally a reflection of nature, was and must be “the child of art” (Scott 307).Footnote 19 The garden “is essentially artificial,” Jane Loudon tells her readers, its design and layout a matter of taste and perception; her texts give plans for different types of gardens and offer advice on different styles of structuring and planting gardens of varying sizes (Loudon, Instructions 255). This attention to the garden's artifice constantly threatens to disrupt the texts’ “naturalizing” project, repoliticizing the garden and women's activities therein. The woman gardener, adjudicating between different designs and aesthetic styles and (as we have seen) pondering debates about colour and plant choice, is no mere observer of God's great plan; these pragmatic texts are too conscious of the planning and labour a garden involves to idealize it consistently as a pastoral idyll. The texts’ vision of the garden as a trans-historical mythic space never dominates, therefore, but rather co-exists with a view of gardening as an occupation that benefits from modern innovation – tools and design books, gardening publications, scientific treatises. The representation of the woman gardener herself involves a similar tension. Evoked as naturally, essentially “feminine,” she is also celebrated as the beneficiary of technological advances which allow her to overcome her frailty.
The tensions in these positions are a product both of authors’ complicated visions of women's proper role and of the garden's own complex position in Victorian culture. As we have already seen, the garden complicates the public/private binary so central to the Victorian social arrangement: it is reserved, private, an extension of the domestic sphere, yet it is necessarily outside the home. The woman is the home, as Ruskin famously remarked: “The stars only may be over her head; the glowworm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot; but home is yet wherever she is” (Ruskin 122). She is not, however, the garden, with all its attendant implications in Victorian culture of the artificial and (within Ruskin's own scheme) the public. Moreover a woman's occupation of the garden is self-evidently a more complicated activity than Ruskin suggests. As soon as a woman begins to garden she gives the lie to Ruskin's ideal, for indeed, little gets done in a garden if she simply walks about the grass (“She should revive; the harebells should bloom, not stoop, as she passes. You think I am rushing into wild hyperbole! Pardon me, not a whit – I mean what I say in calm English, spoken in resolute truth.” Ruskin 142). Gardening may be about enjoying beauty, about observing nature, but it is about many more things besides. Early gardening advice texts never ignore (and indeed positively celebrate) the energy, labour, intellectual drive, and aesthetic decision-making involved in the creation of a successful garden. In the process Ruskin's vision of the garden as, in fact, a public space receives an intriguingly literal presentation. Less a reserved pastoral idyll, it becomes a scene of energetic action, modern innovation, and political debate.
Wild Gardens: Fantasies and Frustrations in the 1880s and 90s
In the context of these remarks about early garden writing, the synthesis of gardening advice with sympathy for New Woman issues in later Victorian gardening texts seems less surprising than it otherwise might. Garden prose today – just as in the Victorian period – has a whiff of the conservative about it, seemingly bespeaking a nostalgia for a more peaceful way of life, a pre-modern, pre-Industrial existence.Footnote 20 Feminist politics, one might think, are likely to sit ill with the garden buff, yet indeed, long before Vita Sackville-West yoked her particular brand of feminism with glorious garden-making at Sissinghurst in the second quarter of the twentieth century, Victorian women writers were turning the garden into a scene of creative aesthetics and creative politics. Authors compared women's competence in the garden with their limited opportunities for advancement in the public sphere, and they consequently lauded women's entrance into the field of professional gardening. The garden itself is represented in such texts as a battleground not only between competing aesthetic styles, but also between men and women over cultural representations of women and women's responsibilities in both public and private life.
The tone and style of garden books began to change dramatically in the 1880s, becoming increasingly politically engaged and stylistically avant garde. H. M. Batson summarized the shift in 1900:
The garden book of this present century was. . . until lately entirely instructive; it cared not to amuse; its aim was gardening and nothing more. In the eighties there were indications of an approaching change in the purpose of garden literature, and the last half-dozen years have seen this change stereotyped into its present features – less instructive, perhaps, but certainly more entertaining than the old. (974)
One of the first books to herald the change in style, form, and function was Eleanor Vere Boyle's [“E. V. B.”] Days and Hours in a Garden (1884), a book that describes the author's experiences of gardening at Huntercome Manor in Buckinghamshire in the early 1880s. It chooses archaic terms and language to create a sense of the garden's timelessness: “The garden's story,” Boyle begins, precipitately. “It is only eleven years old, though the place itself is an old place – an old place without a history, for scarce a record remains of it anywhere that we have ever found.” The casual style of her prose reflects the character of her gardening style: in the middle of Huntercome's grounds there is what she calls a “Fantasie” where “all my most favourite flowers grow in wild profusion” (9).Footnote 21 Not for Boyle the hothouse geranium, the cultivated orchid from South America; the Fantasie, her little wood, is filled instead with native plants:
for the birds to build in, and with room for half-a-dozen wild Hyacinths and a dozen Primroses under the trees; with moss, Wood Sorrel, and white and puce coloured Periwinkles, and many a wild thing, meant to encourage the delusion of a savage wild!. . . This “fantasie” was a dream of delight during the past summer – from April, when a nightingale possessed in song the half-hidden entrance under low embowering Elm branches and Syringa – through all the fairy days and months, up to quite lately. (E. V. B. 10)Footnote 22
Boyle's rhetoric of her Fantasie must remind us of the use of the term in works by fin de siècle aesthetes who, as Talia Schaffer has pointed out, used such language to signal “that the story was adrift in time and space” (50). Huntercome was of course a real place, but Boyle's account transforms it into a lavishly entrancing realm, a dream of floral perfection, a fairy tale. There is always, of course, a space between a garden and a writer's account of the garden, a linguistic, conceptual, temporal, and geographic gap that drawings, plans, and photographs typically attempt to conceal.Footnote 23 But one of the biggest shifts in approach towards the end of the century is the increasingly self-conscious exploitation of this gap as highly ornate aesthetic texts, like Days and Hours in a Garden, were published, designed as ends in themselves. Jane Loudon's manuals were how-to texts written to assist the gardener experience pleasure outside, in her garden; E. V. B's books, and a score of woman-authored books that succeeded it, are designed to pass on advice certainly, but also to give a woman reader pleasure whilst reading on her chaise longue.
Boyle's text does not criticize society, men, or her husband (the garden is if anything represented as the product of a happy marital partnership) but the aesthetic sensibility she expresses aligns her with those women who were using new literary forms to express new visions of women's place in the world. Other writers expressed open frustration with their lot, representing the garden as a contested space in the broader cultural conflict over the sexes’ respective responsibilities and capacities. Perhaps the best-known book of this kind is “Elizabeth” Von Arnim's Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898). The text is, as Talia Schaffer points out, in many ways a dissection of the author's unhappy marriage to the Count von Arnim, who appears in the book as the “Man of Wrath,” sneering at his wife's gardening efforts and memorably advocating wife-beating. “[Yo]ur garden is not your Duty, because it is your Pleasure,” he remarks at one point, high-handedly, and Elizabeth's response is pointedly sarcastic: “What a comfort it is to have such wells of wisdom constantly at my disposal! Anybody can have a husband, but to few is it given to have a sage, and the combination of both is as rare as it is useful” (Arnim 80–81). Yet the book is not just an allegory of a miserable marriage, as Schaffer too quickly suggests; her interpretation is rich and arresting, but she is inclined to reduce the garden and gardening to mere symbols (“the garden represents Elizabeth's life, and her emotional state is represented by descriptions of her flowerbeds and seedlings”), instead of appreciating its contribution to contemporary discussions of women's gardening practice (Schaffer 68). For it is one of a genre of books published around this time that describe in modish language the personal fulfilment a woman enjoys through active gardening (these include Theresa Earle's Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden [1896] and its successors; Boyle's The Garden of Pleasure [1895]; Helen Milman's In the Garden of Peace [1896]; Alice Dew-Smith's Confidences of an Amateur Gardener [1897]; and Maud Maryon's How the Garden Grew [1900]). The garden may indeed allow an author to develop a veiled account of her lived experiences in these books, but it is also represented as a crucial outlet for her energies, an opportunity for creativity, and an escape from social and cultural expectations.
The garden is typically celebrated in later Victorian texts as the author's own space, a place the woman gardener can plot for herself. Elizabeth's account of first entering her new garden celebrates its very emptiness – it is a blank canvas, so to speak, onto which she can paint her past and her future: “wandering out. . . into the bare and desolate garden, I don't know what smell of wet earth or rotting leaves brought back my childhood with a rush and all the happy days I had spent in a garden. Shall I ever forget that day? It was the beginning of my real life, my coming of age as it were, and entering into my kingdom” (Arnim 6–7). Of course on one level the description of the rotting leaves evokes the emptiness and decline of the protagonist's marriage, but this is surely to miss the author's excitement, the sense of promise proffered by the garden. It connects the past with the present; it rekindles the excitement and possibilities of childhood and youth for the adult; it is an opportunity for self-creation as much as garden creation. Simone de Beauvoir talked in the middle of the twentieth century about how nature and the outdoors form a sort of private kingdom for an adolescent girl, who at home suffers the constraints of family and society; Arnim makes a similar point when she evokes the garden as “my kingdom,” a world outside the “gray stone house with many gables where I pass my reluctant nights.” (Arnim 3, Beauvoir 386).Footnote 24That world is ruled by the Man of Wrath, but the garden may – apart from the gardener, of whom more presently – be artistically arranged by the woman, giving her much-longed-for autonomy. Notably Elizabeth locates her “coming of age” in the garden, although she is already a married woman; this is a moment of accession to a kind of independence, a moment in which she discovers how to leave her mark on the world. It is because of her sense of the possibilities the garden offers that Arnim does not resent her husband for their life in the country, whatever else she finds frustrating and distressing about their partnership. She describes a scene in which a group of married women refuse to believe that she has not been “buried” by the Count in the country, and her own inability to communicate what she loves about her life: “how could I talk to them of the happiness I felt when the sun shone on the snow, or of the deep delight of hoar-frost days?” (Arnim 32–33).
Elizabeth, like E. V. B., admires nature unkempt, uncultivated; her preferred style of gardening is one that affects to operate in harmony with nature. This aesthetic is typical of later nineteenth-century women's gardening texts, which invariably reference the contemporary battle between “formal” and “natural” gardening styles and strongly champion the latter. The major combatants in this conflict tended, as many critics and scholars have noted, to talk past one another; they were not, perhaps, as different as they liked to imagine themselves, both viewing themselves as defenders of “old-fashioned” gardening, both turning against garish colour schemes and specimen-style planting.Footnote 25 But the realities of the other side's position or indeed of garden practice generally seems rarely to have troubled the adversaries: William Robinson, author of the enormously successful The Wild Garden (1870) and arch proponent of the “natural” style, worked hard to perpetuate the myth that the bedding system (a feature of many formal gardens, which often included box parterres planted with single colour annuals) had all but wiped out native plants and the mixed herbaceous border. They could however still be found, he indicated somewhat romantically, in humble cottage gardens, and so a key feature of the late-Victorian gardening aesthetic was born: the image of the simple dwelling, surrounded by hollyhocks, English roses, and lavender, untouched and authentic, a repository of all that was threatened by modern life with its love of “forcing” and of hothouses, of instant gardens filled with blazing colour.Footnote 26
Women gardeners were almost uniformly ranged on the side of Robinson and later Gertrude Jeykll, who in some sense achieved a harmonious synthesis of the two ideals (house and garden were planned in relation to one another, as the formalists insisted, but in Jekyll's schemes the garden was organized not by an architect but rather by a gardener committed to softening, massing, naturalizing).Footnote 27 Women gardening writers celebrated the cottage idyll, the “return” of native plants, and natural planting schemes for a range of reasons, some obvious, others perhaps less so. It is easy to suggest that they were, on some level, simply picking up on a common cultural phenomenon, sharing in a general anxiety about the pressing advances of modernity and the inauthenticity of bourgeois culture.Footnote 28 But the ways in which they expressed the conflict are interesting, and hint at some other, more particular motivations. First, they conceived the conflict between mid and late-Victorian gardening as a conflict between men and women, nested within a conflict of social class; many texts enact scenes between the heroine and her gardener in which the latter stubbornly refuses to plant in masses and uses his position as a man (and thus the planter) to shore up his aesthetic preference for rows and formalized displays of specimen plants. Second, women defended the naturalizing style of planting and criticized formal rows and hothouse forcing as part of a broad claim that the latter took gardening away from the domestic scene. Formal bedding is practiced, texts suggest, only by those who aim for public display; similarly, forcing and indoors cultivation is beloved by the professional alone. By contrast, writers argue, women amateurs prefer to watch and nurture the gradual and seasonal unfolding of native plants. The account of the formal/wild garden debate found in many women's texts should thus be seen partly as a form of resistance to men's adoption and professionalization of women's arts and crafts in the later decades of the century.Footnote 29
Maud Maryon's How the Garden Grew (1900) is typical in this regard, waging war on formal designs, on bedding out, on greenhouse-reared annuals.Footnote 30 Her fictionalized protagonist Mary, who has been given five pounds for a year's garden cultivation by her father (“His Reverence” as she terms him playfully, in clear homage to Elizabeth's Man of Wrath), searches local gardens for inspiration, and is horrified by the formally laid-out grounds of a well-to-do neighbour: “One grand garden filled me with anything but envy. It was so terribly trim, such rows of variegated geraniums, big calceolarias, featherfew and lobelia. I determined never to treat any bed or border to edgings; to mass even lobelia together and only break it with taller plants, such as geraniums, of the pure good colours quite possible I found, or salvias or fuschias. Here was line after line, pattern after pattern. . .” (Maryon 183–84). She is similarly disgusted by the display of forced plants, which strongly suggest the gardener's hands at work: “Grand beds of coleus and begonias there were, but these were beyond me, savouring too much of the greenhouse, and all the flowers in the rooms spoke of gardeners and hot-houses” (Maryon 184). Mary sees her neighbour's garden with a moral as well as an aesthetic eye: colour should be pure, not brash or vulgar, plants should not be too large (calceolarias were invariably criticised in late-Victorian texts as having “no natural grace or refinement,” as Gertrude Jekyll put it in 1901 [Home and Garden 149]), and grand instant display should be eschewed in favour of organic growth. Mary, not surprisingly, adores perennials: “The thought of their permanence delighted me. Dear, nice things! they would not need sowing year by year, but would yearly grow more and more ‘in favour with God and man.’ So I hoped, even as a mother hopes it for her children” (Maryon 106–07).
Her adoption of the maternal role is significant, and characteristic of Victorian women's gardening texts, which often cast the mother-gardener as the ideal antithesis to the professional gardener.Footnote 31 Male gardeners aim for display, size, the unusual and so forth, according to writers like Maryon; they love hothouses and greenhouses, and they insist on rows and order. Throughout the text Mary struggles to get Griggs, the gardener, to stop planting in lines and to eschew his modern geraniums in favour of “old-fashioned” plants like stocks and sweet peas. Women amateurs, by contrast, she suggests, prefer simple, naturally-reared plants and act in harmonious consort with them, nursing them rather than forcing them: as she pats down the soil around her sweet pea seeds, she remarks, “I felt like a mother who tucks her child in bed. Surely the pat did good!” (Maryon 65). Arnim's Elizabeth, a mother of three romping children, depicts herself similarly as the protector of her plants, defending them from the cold and rigid treatment of the gardener who, like Mary's Griggs, constructs “borders of beautiful exactitude and [arranges] the poor plants like soldiers at a review” (Arnim 20). Elizabeth, again like Mary, also finds the use of greenhouses troubling:
I don't use it for growing anything, because I don't love things that will only bear the garden for three or four months in the year and require coaxing and petting for the rest of it. Give me a garden full of strong, healthy creatures, able to stand roughness and cold without dismally giving in and dying. . . . No doubt there are many lovely flowers to be had by heat and constant coaxing, but then for each of these there are fifty others still lovelier that will gratefully grow in God's wholesome air. (Arnim 59)
Schaffer reads this passage as a submerged comment on women who falter and droop in uncongenial circumstances and unhappy marriages, but this is only part of the story. For Arnim is also privileging an aesthetic that both she and Maryon conceive as essentially feminine – for native hardy perennials, for plants that require patience and attentiveness rather than professional skill. Gertrude Jekyll, enormously skilled gardener though she was, placed great emphasis on domestic moral virtues in garden endeavours; at around the same time as Arnim and Maryon were writing, she argued that a gardener must display “constant restraint and constant sacrifice” in order to achieve “the best free gardening” (“Idea” 38). Such conceptions of ideal gardening practice involve characteristics – patience, sacrifice, restraint – typically gendered feminine in Victorian culture as authors worked not only to authorize women's gardening but also to champion women as, in fact, the ideal agents in a garden.
Perhaps as part of this assertion of the pre-eminent value and integrity of the woman gardener, authors regularly reminded their readers of the richness and longevity of the tradition they inherited, adjuring all to find and read the texts of authors like Loudon and Johnson.Footnote 32 Women are not only ideally constituted to gardening, writers suggested, but they have been doing it for a long time; by contrast the professional gardener or jobbing nurseryman, with his modern preferences for plants grown using technological innovations, is a fly-by-night, nouveau presence in the garden.Footnote 33 The aesthetic privileged in texts like How the Garden Grew and Elizabeth and Her German Garden is thus indubitably landed, upper-class, and exclusionary; both Elizabeth and Mary draw on stereotypes of labourers as culturally unaware and constitutionally blind to “higher” aesthetic delights. Mary, Maryon's protagonist, is deeply condescending in her relationship with the hapless Griggs: she expects us to cheer her on as she learns to become more authoritarian in the garden, informing him he cannot return home to his family one day because she needs him to water her plants: “‘Griggs’ – and my voice held dignified rebuke – ‘you are gardener here, and these flowers are your first duty’” (Maryon 167). Elizabeth's gardener becomes so frustrated by his mistress's many requests (for changes in garden design and plant culture) he takes to wandering around with a pistol, and is finally committed to an asylum. Horrific for the modern reader, these scenes are clearly designed to elicit a Victorian reader's sympathies for the protagonist based on a shared understanding of class privilege. This putatively collective vision of social hierarchies provides an apparently safe platform on which to stage riskier gender conflicts – for indeed, the battles between gardener and mistress are routinely conceived as battles between one imagined to act freely and one who is hampered by social constructions of her gender. “If I could only dig and plant myself!” Elizabeth remarks wistfully at the beginning of the text as she watches her gardener plant in rows (Arnim 21), and then again later:
I wish with all my heart I were a man, for of course the first thing I should do would be to buy a spade and go and garden, and then I should have the delight of doing everything for my flowers with my own hands and need not waste time explaining what I want done to somebody else. It is dull work giving orders and trying to describe the bright visions of one's brain to a person who has no visions and no brain, and who thinks a yellow bed should be calceolarias edged with blue. (Arnim 83)
Class, gender, and aesthetics intersect in this passage, bolstering and reinforcing one another; the reader is expected to share the author's aristocratic viewpoint (the frustration of resigning control to one who has “no visions and no brain”), together with her aesthetic sense (who could think of planting calceolarias in this day and age!), and is thus led by the nose to agree that modern women should be able to take up their spades and plant things themselves. “And why not?” Elizabeth asks disarmingly; “It is not graceful, and it makes one hot; but it is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in Paradise and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that sad business of the apple” (Arnim 22). Of course, Elizabeth's humour is a sop to the reader here, who is in fact being presented with a challenge: if women are not given the spade soon, they will cause modern-day Adams as much trouble as Eve once gave her mate.
Aesthetics and The Professional Woman Gardener at the Fin de Siècle
Some women were, in fact, by the final years of Victoria's reign, taking up the spade; women had been describing their experiences of gardening in the literary marketplace for decades, and now at last women like Gertrude Jekyll took on the public role of professional gardener. Cultural caché was embodied in the phrase “a Lutyens house with a Jekyll garden” in the early decades of the twentieth century;Footnote 34 Jekyll is surely one of the earliest examples of a woman's entering a man's profession in the nineteenth century and quickly becoming one of its foremost exponents.Footnote 35 Jekyll worked to synthesize the aesthetic sense of garden amateurs like Arnim and Maryon with a more thoughtful and conscientious approach to the profession she was entering. The relationship between male and female professional gardener is deftly cast in her work, and in writings by her peers, as a supportive partnership, a Victorian marriage almost, in which both parties benefit from the unique characteristics and skills of the other. Yet, as in the work of Arnim and Maryon, the art of gardening is returned to women's sphere, for writers like Jekyll worked hard to wrest garden design away from architects and traditional hired gardeners, giving themselves a central role in the development of contemporary garden aesthetics.
Women gardeners were keen to present themselves from the outset as a positive and constructive influence on the field of professional gardening, and to that end they avoided the thoughtless criticisms of hired gardeners made by Arnim and Maryon. Authors such as Jeykll and Frances Wolseley (who founded a school dedicated to the training of women gardeners at Glynde in Sussex) combined criticisms of nurseryman anxious for quick sales, and of gardeners wedded to unambitious designs, with statements of respect for the gardener's travails and admiration for his achievements.Footnote 36 Thus Jekyll in Wood and Garden (1899), her first book-length text, admits that “most people who have fair-sized gardens have to do with the middle class of gardener, the man of narrow mental training,” but she also stresses that there are other types of gardeners available, men “of a widely-different nature, whose minds are both supple and elastic and intelligently receptive, who are eager to learn and to try what has not yet come within the range of their experience” (273, 275).Footnote 37 These men, the ones with elastic minds and plenty of intelligence, were finding the influx of women into the profession inspirational, she suggests (a touch disingenuously, perhaps). Other writers engaged more self-consciously with male gardeners’ potential anxieties about their own futures and positions: Frances Wolseley redressed an old argument about women's special aptitude for gardening as part of a claim that women intended to support and aid their male counterparts, rather than displace them:
[women] do not wish to supplant able, clever men head-gardeners, nor even to compete with them. They do desire, however, to assist as far as their strength allows, by lending intelligence, good taste, refinement, towards securing better cultivation of our great country. What they lack in physical strength they endeavour to compensate by other equally important, yet softer, womanly qualities. (xiv)
Wolseley is stepping carefully here: women are bringing certain distinctive qualities (like “taste, refinement, and intelligence”) to the table, but they recognize their physical limitations, and thus the responsibilities they cannot take on. The relationship between the two apes a Victorian marriage, with men bringing the brawn and the training, women the taste and manners, to the union. Accepting that a woman gardener cannot “go it alone,” she abrogates to women the right to work on garden arrangement and design. This suggestion on one level reduces or limits the scope of women's gardening practice, yet it does make intriguing inroads into the effort to legitimize women's professional gardening by associating the activity with traditional feminine skills and accomplishments. The art of gardening is effectively feminized, transformed into a contemporary version of a longstanding responsibility; professional gardening is conceived as a version of the traditional domestic role of home- and nation-beautifier. Edith Chamberlain, a writer of several gardening how-to texts and an advocate of women's entrance into professional gardening, makes the relationship between traditional domestic and modern professional roles particularly clear when she argues that the woman gardener is unusually well-placed to improve the look of “our great country” (as Wolseley put it): Chamberlain described in Town and Home Gardening (1893) how one particular woman gardener was successfully introducing greater plant and colour variety into the well-to-do if florally clichéd London suburb of Hampstead.Footnote 38
Women's claim to a place at the forefront of the aesthetics of Victorian gardening was made most cogently by Gertrude Jekyll herself. Jekyll, it should be said, was an enormously energetic garden labourer, as well as the author of dozens of books, a skilled photographer, proprietor of a nursery, and designer of many of the greatest gardens in England and abroad.Footnote 39 Yet her major contribution to gardening is surely found in her distinctive gardening credo, articulated first in “The Idea of a Garden” (1896):
[the best gardening] teaches us to form and respect large quiet spaces of lawn, unbroken by flower beds or any encumbrance; it teaches the simple grouping of noble types of hardy vegetation, whether their beauty be that of flower or foliage or general aspect. It insists on the importance of putting the right thing in the right place, a matter which involves both technical knowledge and artistic ability; it teaches us restraint and proportion in the matter of numbers of quantity, to use enough and not too much of any one thing at a time; to group plants in sequences of good colouring and with due regard to their form and stature and season of blooming, or of autumnal beauty of foliage. It teaches us to study the best means of treatment of different sites; to see how to join house to garden and garden to woodland. (35)
Jekyll's ideal garden design is (as many critics and scholars have noted) a harmonious synthesis of what both formalists and wild garden advocates admired: it combines the peace of the seventeenth-century landscape garden with the hardy plants of the cottage garden; it uses hothouses and greenhouses sparingly, structuring the garden around seasonal growth patterns. The passage quoted above appears as part of an intervention into the formal/wild garden debate: “The Idea of a Garden” summarizes the positions taken by the major participants, outlining the strengths and weaknesses of both and championing ultimately the latter (Jekyll here and elsewhere applauds Robinson's success in saving the herbaceous border from the meretricious bedding system, and disdains the idea that architects should take responsibility for garden design, as some formalists suggested). Yet it may also, in the light of the texts discussed in this essay, be seen as outlining a preference for an expressly feminine Victorian aesthetic – or, to put it another way, for a series of aesthetic preferences and ideals that had long characterized women's writing about the garden. Jekyll's admiration for native plants, grown and nursed according to their seasons, reminds us of the mother-gardener concept; and, like the very earliest Victorian garden writers, Jekyll sees moral qualities in colouring and in different types of vegetation. There is a place for moral ordering if not for row-like ordering in her garden scheme, for “the right thing in the right place.” Her insistence on the unity of house and garden, while a general theme of contemporary architectural and horticultural discourse, hints at a Ruskinian ideal of garden as domestic extension.
Moreover, in Jekyll's scheme, the garden begins to take over many of the duties conventionally ascribed to women. Private and quiet, beautiful but restrained, separate from the bustle of modern life, the garden purifies those who come into contact with it. As she remarks in Wood and Garden, a beautiful garden “gives the delightful feeling of repose, and refreshment, and purest enjoyment of beauty,” causing the owner “to lift up the heart in a spirit of praise and thankfulness” (2). “I venture to repeat that I hold the firm belief that the purpose of a garden is to give happiness and repose of mind,” she adds in Wall and Water Gardens (1901; 141). The conception of the garden as a private, sanctifying space is not, of course, new or unusual, and it might have escaped critical comment were it not for the fact that, in the context of the tradition of gardening writing examined here, it constitutes a shift in perspective. For we have seen that, by contrast, early authors celebrated the garden as a public space, a scene of technology and modern advance, an opportunity for women to enter into political life and commerce. This is not to say that the early writers never celebrated the garden's peace and spirituality, or that later writers never championed technology and public debate, but that the balance of the texts shifts; references to the possibilities of technological advance surface in later writing only to be submerged beneath discussions of the transformative qualities of the garden, the moral improvement it allows, and the peculiar pleasures of being cocooned from modernity. Such discussions take on particular meaning in literature written by women who were, like Jekyll, professionals themselves, who interacted with men in business and managed their own economic affairs. I suggest, therefore, that Jekyll's insistence on the garden's positive, morally uplifting effects is a product of a desire to shift the responsibility for improving society's morals away from her as a woman, liberating her (and her peers) to occupy the garden as professionals.
Conclusion: Queens of the Garden, Queens of the Air
The meaning of “queenship” was renegotiated throughout Victoria's reign. Victoria herself – both in private life and in popular cultural representations – oscillated between victorious, all-powerful Empress and self-abnegating, subservient wife, between aristocratic monarch and homely middle-class mother. Ruskin's vision of queenship in “Of Queens’ Gardens” is, appropriate to its time, similarly complex, insisting on women's complete self-renunciation while conferring considerable economic and political influence on the gender. As Weltman argues, Ruskin's lecture turns housewives into “rhetorically empowered queens. . . [stretching] the boundaries of domestic ideology and. . . [exploring] newly defined possibilities for women within Victorian culture” (Weltman 105).Footnote 40 But Ruskin's vision is ultimately a mythic portrait: his queen is a “queen of the air,” a “Pole-star” by which women should steer.Footnote 41 Gardening advice texts, by contrast, are earth-bound in every sense of the phrase; the woman gardener of these texts is no mythological queen, but rather an active labourer, an aesthetically-informed designer, even (towards the end of the century) a professional business partner. Reconceiving women's relationship to the garden – and thereby to society itself – across the course of Victoria's reign, the texts examined here do not just imagine feminine power, they actively hand power over to three generations of reading and gardening women.
