Ask most people to describe the greatest days of British garden history and they’ll probably end up talking about the grand gardens of Edwardian England where lots of staff worked on maintaining huge flower borders, vast kitchen gardens and seemingly endless shrubberies. In other words the sort of garden that has been labelled the Golden Age of gardening in Britain. Is that a realistic view? By the late C19th Britain had moved from being a rural to an urban nation. Cities expanded but nostalgia for the countryside was widespread, while new suburbs developed a culture of their own. Technology and mechanisation continued to change life, usually but not always for the better, but there were also constant calls to return to traditional methods, which were reflected in gardens. While nurseries filled our gardens with huge numbers of new plants from round the world, at the same time there was greater interest in wild flowers and natural planting. This affected garden styles and designs, and everything became possible - from imitation exotic Japanese gardens to reimagined Tudorbethan parterres and blowsy labour-intensive herbaceous borders. At the same time interest in horticulture spread right across the social scale as seed companies enabled anyone with a little space and a few spare pennies to take up gardening for themselves.

So while it’s true that in many ways this truly was a Golden Age it’s also true that it contained within it the seeds of its own destruction as we’ll see in our next series on gardening between the two world wars which starts in January.

This ticket is for this individual session and costs £5, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions via the links below, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 6 sessions at a cost of £30 via the link here.

Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.

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The C19th Garden part 4: The Talented Miss Jekyll (1843-1932)