The Garden History Blog

One of the highlights of my recent trip to southern India was  to  visit the botanic gardens  in a place known now as Udhagamandalam, (officially  at least) although I didn’t hear anyone anywhere call it that.  Instead they all talked about Ooty.

This is the  popular abbreviation for Ootacamund,  the “Queen of Hill Stations”, which sits  about 7,500 feet up  in the Nilgiri Hills. During the days of the British Raj   it was where Europeans could go to escape the intense summer heat on the plains below. And of course, as elsewhere throughout the empire, wherever the British went, they constructed gardens including the one that I had read about and was keen to see…

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I’ve just returned from a trip to southern India where one of the most amusing incidents was being taken to Banana Street, a narrow alleyway that led off the main fruit and vegetable market in  Madurai.

The 40 or so stalls that lined both sides of this little thoroughfare only sold bananas and the guide said very proudly, there were 16 varieties on sale all grown locally.

I love bananas but I’d have been hard-pressed too distinguish more than 3 or 4 different sorts on display and  none of them were that much like the ones we in Britain see on our supermarket or greengrocers shelves.

So of course I had to find out more about bananas and their history if not in our gardens then at least in our conservatories and supermarket shelves…

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Seaweed design for fabric by William Kilburn, c1788-1792 V&A

All that talk of seaweed and photography by Anna Atkins in last week’s post reminded me that, like fern collecting, seaweed collecting was a very big thing in the mid-19thc and taken up by many middle class women as an acceptable hobby –  even Queen Victoria indulged.

Who do you think wrote this little ditty?

A landscape composed from seaweed by Eliza Jordson 1848 Brooklyn Museum Libraries

Call us not weeds, we are flowers of the sea,
For lovely and bright and gay-tinted are we.
And quite independent of sunshine or showers.
Then call us not weeds, we are ocean’s gay flowers.
We are nursed not like plants of a summer parterre
Where gales are but sighs of an evening air ;
Our exquisite, fragile, and delicate forms
Are nursed by the ocean, and rocked by the storms

Read on to find out…

and I suspect that if  you’re a lover of great English literature you will be surprised

Design for printed dress material, Thomas Vaughan & Sons, London, 1820s.

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From ‘Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions’ by Anna Atkins, 1843 © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence

Today’s post is about another woman you’ve almost certainly never heard of but definitely should have done. She was a botanist and  almost certainly  the world’s first female photographer, yet she didn’t use a camera to make her images because they’d hardly been invented.  Instead she found another way to produce hundreds of strikingly beautiful blue-and-white silhouettes of plants and seaweeds which she  used to create the first-ever “photographically” illustrated book in 1843.

Not long after her death in 1871, her work, signed A.A, was thought to be by an Anonymous Author, whereas in fact it stood  for  Anna Atkins.

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Choosing a successful wedding present can often be difficult but in 1816 the British government made a pretty good guess.  Princess Charlotte, George IV’s only child and the heir to the throne was to be married to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, an impoverished  minor German princeling she had met and chosen for herself over her father’s preferred candidate. According to Charlotte, Leopold  expressed a wish for “a large place and a house in the country where he can farm, shoot and  hunt etc a day’s journey from town.” 

That large place proved to be  Claremont. [see last week’s post],the estate created by the Duke of Newcastle, the long-serving 18thc Prime Minister, which had been described as “the noblest of any in Europe”. It was on the market and  Charlotte was delighted when she heard that “Ministers will certainly buy it for us”.  It cost £56,000 with a further £6,000 for the contents, and the couple moved into “the most fit royal residence that can be found anywhere,” in August 1816.

detail of Caleb Stanley’s “Claremont House: the south front” c.1843 Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2024

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