England's Magnificent Gardens by Roderick Floud

Author:Roderick Floud [Floud, Roderick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

To people today, used to a system in which men and women are prepared for the world of work by vocational training in college or at university, one of the most extraordinary aspects of the world of gardening is that the working gardeners of the past were not trained in that way—at least not until a few attended horticultural colleges at the end of the nineteenth century. Yet they achieved an extremely high level of skill in a wide range of activities, from botany to landscaping, water engineering to the management of a large workforce. Men who had left school at the age of fourteen with no formal qualifications, just able to read, write, and do simple mathematics, learned how to identify thousands of plants—using both their common and Latin names—and how to nurture them. They were expected to be able to undertake basic surveying in order to lay out lakes and ponds, to become carpenters and glaziers to maintain the greenhouses, and to display their artistic talents to satisfy the exacting standards of Victorian flower arranging.

Many did much more. The biographies of head gardeners mention time and again how their subjects became nationally renowned for their skill with particular species of plants, be it orchids, ferns, or geraniums. They showed off their skills at horticultural and flower shows around the country, or at the pinnacle of the system in the annual competitions of the Royal Horticultural Society, even if it was their employers who took the credit for the prizes that they won. Working gardeners had to take solace in the esteem of their peers or, sometimes, to delight in naming a new plant variety or even having one named after them. Meanwhile, head gardeners had to satisfy the exacting demands of their master and mistress, or their cook, for a steady supply of fruit, flowers, and vegetables and for manicured lawns and coppiced trees fit to be shown off to critical visitors. To do this, they had to oversee the daily tasks of perhaps a hundred men and boys and manage a large budget, negotiating with nurseries and other suppliers—of manure, plant pots, or gardening tools. Some, such as Joseph Paxton, designed and built greenhouses as well as bought and grew new imports in a way that rivalled the great botanical gardens.

Even if all this was paralleled, in other professions such as engineering, shipbuilding, or architecture, by men who had been trained in a similar way by apprenticeship and emulation, it was still a tremendous achievement, replicated as it was in thousands of great and small estates across the country and from generation to generation. Equally skilled men—and later some women—worked in nurseries, in botanical gardens, and in public parks. Others scoured the world, risking their lives while developing a high level of botanical knowledge, to feed the insatiable appetite of English gardeners for new species and varieties.

What shines through the biographies and autobiographies of English working gardeners is their enthusiasm, their love for their work. Gardening

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