A Green and Pleasant Land by Ursula Buchan

Author:Ursula Buchan [Ursula Buchan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-02-25T05:00:00+00:00

Wartime exigencies had caused at least one research station to abandon its ivory tower, and find that it didn’t miss it.

Young school leavers and female gardeners replaced those called up, and the Institution reduced the burden of garden work by substituting the growing of food crops for some of the experimental work. The geneticists worked instead on raising hybrid tomato and other seed that yielded well, as well as producing tomato and cucumber seed for Carter and Sons.

Of course, the John Innes Horticultural Institution was hardly immune from wartime measures, especially since Merton, on the south-western edge of London and home to the Lines Brothers factory, was an obvious target for German bombers. Lines Brothers had been a famous toy business, using the trademark Tri-ang, but had switched to munitions manufacture when the war started. Most of the scientists and gardeners who were able to stay at Merton inevitably became involved in air-raid precaution duties. Four shelters were built in the grounds, and those books in the library considered irreplaceable were sent to Lord Wandsworth School at Long Sutton in Hampshire, or to the RHS Gardens at Wisley.

That was just as well, for one bomb fell in the walled garden at Merton Park in May 1941 and, more seriously, there were a number of attacks by V-1 flying bombs – ‘doodlebugs’ – between 15 June and 27 August 1944, on which day twenty or so fell within a mile of the Manor House. The bomb that dropped on the afternoon of Sunday 20 August knocked down the garden wall, blew out the glass in the glasshouses and damaged the windows, roofs and ceilings of the main buildings. ‘The general scene was one of appalling devastation.’57 The entire Antirrhinum (snapdragon) crop, used for genetics research, was destroyed, and other crops grown for breeding work were also damaged. Only the books that were still in the library remained intact. So-called ‘cloudy glass’ was not available to reglaze the glasshouses until the following November.

In 1940, fear of potential bomb damage had led the Institution’s Director to urge the Board of Trustees to make plans for temporary evacuation, if there was an emergency, with the idea that this might become a permanent move in time. Waterperry House outside Oxford, at that time leased to the Waterperry School of Horticulture for Women, was the chosen option. In early 1941, the JIHI began negotiations to secure the lease, for it looked to be a very attractive proposition, not least because of the link with Oxford University. Miss Havergal and Miss Sanders, the two Principals of the gardening school, took fright, not surprisingly, since the JIHI’s Board of Trustees did not seem very alive to the difficult position into which they had been thrown, and the negotiations eventually foundered on the question of legal liabilities to the School of Horticulture.58 So the Institution stayed at Merton until after the war. In 1949, it moved to Bayfordbury in Hertfordshire, where Lawrence designed state-of-the-art glasshouses. Waterperry continued to be a school that trained women gardeners until 1971.

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