is a great literary virtue, and the gardener’s foibles in the face of indifferent nature are the stuff of comedy. We therefore have a category of humorists. Then there are writers for whom the garden provides metaphors for subjects beyond botany, horticulture, and landscape design. I think of them as philosophers.
We meet women who broke the barrier of the spade; spouses who cooperated or quarreled; nurserymen who blurred the boundary between disinterested advice and business promotion; foragers who tell of their adventures digging plants for their gardens in the wild; warriors who filled their pens with vitriol in order to acidly disagree with one another; rhapsodists who never met a flower they didn’t love tenderly; and travelers who write about the gardens of foreign lands. But, of course, teachers travel, travelers teach, philosophers can be humorous, humorists can philosophize, and so on. Therefore the reader should feel free to transpose these authors from one category to another as they see fit.
Transecting all our garden-writer categories are certain universal themes. Several of our authors tell us how their love of gardening sprang from a seed planted in childhood. The gardening mother or grandfather and the advantages of growing up surrounded by nature and horticulture were for them formative. These autobiographical fragments help round out our sense of their backgrounds, characters, and personalities, as well as their predilection for certain kinds of gardens.
Another theme that you will find sounded throughout is the importance of good soil. True gardeners always start in the most literal sense from the ground up. In their case “digging in the dirt” is much more than a metaphor. Soil is the fundamental medium of their art, and their close attention to its quality is a leitmotif that runs throughout our present survey. For them nothing is sweeter than the smell of freshly turned soil. More than any herbal fragrance, this is the most intoxicating garden aroma of all. Rightly, they give fundamental importance to knowing the degree to which their soil is composed of clay, sand, and silt and what its chemical composition is. To garden successfully, you, like they, must calculate your horticultural possibilities in terms of which plants will thrive in what kinds of soil. Read carefully what they have to say about soil when you are still a gardening neophyte; you will be grateful that they felt compelled to pass on this valuable information.
As a corollary requirement, competent gardeners need to understand the climate of the region in which they garden and have a keen grasp of those plants that will thrive and those that cannot be planted at all. Related to this is a knowledge of the seasonal nature of gardening and which plants can be expected to appear to best advantage at various stages of the growing season. For this reason, you will note that many of the books under discussion have chapters titled according to the months of the year.
The Garden of Eden may have been the only garden not to have had aphids, scale insects, moth larvae, mealybugs, spider mites, cabbage worms, and a host of other unwelcome guests—including the slug, a slimy, shell-less mollusk. This nocturnal predator can ravage foliage and kill plants faster than they can grow. The slug is a universal scourge, the bane of gardeners everywhere, and a subject discussed with unqualified repugnance and unbridled ire by several authors we encounter in these pages.
Sensory delight, on the other hand, emerges as a happier recurring theme. There is a physicality to gardening, and we should take note of the tactile satisfaction dedicated gardeners find in good, friable soil running through their fingers; their joy in the pungent aroma of rich compost or decaying autumn leaves on a woodland path; the bliss they derive from the smell of various flowers in bloom; the aesthetic enjoyment they receive from tree form, plant texture, and flower structure, as well as the colors of bark, leaf, and blossom; the nostalgia they experience in remembering the taste of honeysuckle nectar when they were children.
Curiosity is a long suit among the garden writers we are considering. They are readers and researchers avid for botanical lore, horticultural history, and the etymology of plant names. They are steeped in the works of ancient and Elizabethan herbalists—Dioscorides, Pliny, Gerard—as well as Linnaeus and other pioneering botanists and plant hunters in the Age of Enlightenment. Because of the fact that self-taught amateur gardeners like to seek and share information and ideas and are quite naturally readers of one another, a large literary commonwealth of garden writers has developed during the past two and a half centuries. This is a situation that is hospitable to a personal and individualistic form of writing that presumes, as we shall soon see, a certain friendly intimacy between author and reader.
Women in the Garden
FOR MORE than a century presumptions regarding the gardener’s sexual identity have slowly undergone a sea change as perceptions about women gardeners have shifted from the commonly held belief of their being too delicate for dirt to the qualified notion of gardening as a suitable female occupation to their full admission as members of a now gender-irrelevant profession. Jumping the garden fence of Victorian values was a hurdle forward-thinking persons once had to encourage them to attempt. Later, a love of flowers and knowledge of plant form, color, and seasonal growth patterns opened the garden gate to a growing body of women who saw gardening as an art form. Gaining the same horticultural training and design skills as men, women at last were considered experts in the garden, putting them on an equal footing with their male peers. Throughout this long journey, ink from the pens of women garden writers never ceased to flow.
Jane Loudon
I would categorize Jane Loudon (1807–1858) as a pioneer on behalf of women gardeners as well as a botanical and horticultural educator of the first rank. Mrs. Loudon (she is thus referred to on the title pages of her books) was the wife of the Scottish botanist John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843), author of An Encyclopedia of Gardening; Comprising the Theory and Practice of Horticulture, Floriculture, Arboriculture, and Landscape-Gardening (1822). J. C. Loudon furthered the nineteenth-century marriage of industrial technology and horticulture with the invention of the hinged sash bar that made possible the construction of conservatories and glasshouses for the protection and propagation of the tender exotic plants pouring into England from the four corners of the world. He is best known as the originator of what is called the Gardenesque style, based on the arrangement of plants in a manner intended to display their characteristics as individual specimens.
A pioneer of science fiction like Mary Shelley, as Jane Webb (her maiden name), she anonymously published The Mummy! Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827). Because of her descriptions of the kind of futuristic technological inventions that fascinated him, Loudon discovered the author’s identity and arranged a meeting. After their marriage she served as her husband’s amanuensis for the production of the rest of his herculean literary output, including the magisterial Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (1838). Remarkably, she found time to become a botanical and horticultural writer herself. In Instructions in Gardening for Ladies (1840) and The Ladies’ Companion to the Flower Garden (1841), she gently nudged her purportedly delicate female contemporaries to take up the spade and trowel and to dig and plant as a source of healthy exercise and self-fulfillment. Since the ladies to whom her words are addressed were so unaccustomed to manual labor of this sort, she felt compelled to explain that “The first point to be attended to, in order to render the operation of digging less laborious, is to provide a suitable spade; that is, one which shall be as light as is consistent with strength, and which will penetrate the ground with the least possible trouble.” In that era of normative female attire, it was necessary as well to suggest the appropriate costume for a lady gardener: “a pair of clogs . . . to put over her shoes; or if she should dislike these, and prefer strong shoes, she should be provided with what gardeners call a tramp . . . . She should also have a pair of stiff thick leathern gloves, or gauntlets, to protect her hands. . . .”
“A
