The Gardens of the British Working Class by Margaret Willes

Author:Margaret Willes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300187847
Publisher: Yale University Press

Those who had had dealings with Glenny knew that avoidance of controversy was highly unlikely to be maintained. Only six weeks later, he declared: ‘We own that we only have one column of garden news where others have twelve, but nobody will deny that we give as much USEFUL information as any of them; nor about tom tits and snakes, and eels, which are not necessary in a garden; but we let no facts escape us. We write for 67,000 people, the majority of whom are buyers, not sellers of flowers.’22 This last dig is at the gardening press being used as a medium of publicity for nurserymen.

Despite his aggressive tone, Glenny provided good practical advice in simple language for the whole range of gardeners, from those with hotbeds, glasshouses and pine stoves to those with modest plots, for whom he provided a regular feature. Thus, ‘anyone with ten feet square of ground can make a garden’, with annuals such as ‘sweet peas, mignonettes, French marigolds, Virginia stocks, nasturtiums, dwarf larkspurs, candy tuft, convolvulus minor. Scarlet beans are recommended to climb up a fence or wall, and look gay all the summer.’23 Of course, given his background, he provided information about florists’ flowers and notices of the shows, but also about allotments and the cultivation of fruit and vegetables.

The main rival to Lloyd's Weekly was Reynold's News, launched in May 1850, appearing each Sunday at the price of 11/2d. The founder, George Reynolds, was a dedicated supporter of the Chartists, and aimed his paper firmly at the working class. One man recalled how his grandfather would club together with a group of eleven men to buy the paper, and he would then read it to them in his nailshop. By 1855, Reynold's Weekly, as it was now titled, started an occasional gardening column consisting of a couple of paragraphs which became a regular item by 1861. Ten years later, it had expanded again, into a weekly calendar, written by George Glenny's son, also called George, who ran a nursery at Paxton House in Fulham.

The year 1871 marked the arrival of an important new periodical, The Garden, edited by William Robinson. Robinson, born of humble Protestant parents in Ireland in 1838, had by the age of twenty-one become foreman in the gardens of the resplendently named Revd Sir Hunt Henry Johnson-Walsh, 3rd Baronet, of Ballykilcavan, Vicar of Stradbally. Following a mysterious quarrel during the severe winter of 1861, Robinson drew the fire from the entire glasshouse range, opened the windows and by the following morning arrived in Dublin. His career, however, did not collapse: within two years he was in charge of the herbaceous section of the Royal Botanic Society's gardens in London's Regent's Park, and by 1871 had become an influential author.

Samuel Reynolds Hole described how he sat ‘with my friend, William Robinson, under a tree in the Regent's Park, and suggested The Garden as a title for the newspaper which he proposed to publish, and which has been so

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