Dinosaurs and superphosphates…

Posted on 29/08/2015 by The Garden History Blog

This is third  and probably the last  [I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear!] post about the Victorians and their use of manure and fertilizer.

Even as guano took over from night soil as the ‘best’ fertilizer, and began to transform British agriculture and horticulture  in the mid-19thc [as was explained in two recent posts]  experiments began to find cheaper alternatives. These included making artificial versions of ‘guano’, although the name often stuck because it seemed  to have been a magical word in terms of sales.

It might be hard  to believe, but some of the alternatives were even more extraordinary than the idea of scraping dried bird droppings off remote islands and shipping them half way round the world, and the weirdest of all was completely home-grown. Read on to find out more…

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The Most Special Place in Wales…

Posted on 25/08/2015 by The Garden History Blog

Whats this?

A post from P&G?

But it’s not Saturday!

Well I confess I haven’t written it and  although I wouldn’t normally re-post something written on another blog, since I’ve written about Dyffryn Gardens quite recently  [post 13th Dec 2014] when I saw this from the National Trust’s wonderful Treasure Hunt blog I thought I would make an exception.

Great to see a garden win prizes and even better that it’s the wonderful garden at Dyffryn!   Congratulations to the whole team there on their success in being voted the most special place in Wales. Continue reading →

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Killerton

Posted on 22/08/2015 by The Garden History Blog
Killerton in 1818, engarving by D.Havell National Trust

Killerton in 1818, engraving by D.Havell
National Trust

Earlier this year I went on a nostalgia trip back to Exeter where I was at college. One of the places I wanted to see again was Killerton, the home of my tutor Sir Richard Acland.

Sir Richard Dyke Acland, 15th Bart, by Howard Coster, 1939, NPG

Sir Richard Dyke Acland, 15th Bart,
by Howard Coster, 1939, NPG

Apart from being an extraordinarily inspiring teacher Sir Richard was a gifted and principled, if sadly ultimately unsuccessful, politician, and the man who gave the National Trust its largest ever gift of land – the Holnicote and Killerton estates in Devon and Somerset – not to avoid death duties or maintenance bills but because he thought it was philosophically and morally the right thing to do.

Killerton, from our database, Copyright: John Clark

Killerton, from our database,
Copyright: John Clark

Killerton, as a house, is a quirky architectural patchwork but this has made it very ‘ liveable’. Its gardens and parkland are the combination of the work and vision of both the owners, generations of the Acland family who acquired the estate in the early 17thc, and the gardeners, generations of the Veitch family who were also nurserymen and plant hunters and who worked for the estate in the 18th & 19thc.

Read on to find out more about how these two exceptional gardening dynasties worked together to create Killerton’s renowned gardens…

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Northumberlandia

Posted on 15/08/2015 by The Garden History Blog

The facts and figures about Northumberlandia are endless.  It  is ‘a unique piece of public art’ … ‘set in a 46 acre  park with free public access and 4 miles of footpaths’ on and around the Lady of the North, ‘a stunning human landform sculpture’ of a reclining woman.  It took 7  years to plan and 2 more  to construct, involving over 10,000 man hours. The Lady is apparently  ‘the largest landscape replica of the human body ever seen in the world’…indeed the ‘largest ever piece of landform art’. Rising up to 112 ft (34m) above the surrounding land and  1,300ft (400m) long, she is made up of 1.5 million tonnes of rock, clay and soil.  The lakes on the site cover the same area as 10 Olympic-sized swimming pools.The Lady is expected to attract 200,000 visitors a year….etc etc etc.  As I said the facts and figures are endless.

There are two ways of finding out what Northumberlandia is really like. But unless you’re planning a trip to Northumberland to experience it first hand- and btw that is definitely worth it – you’re just left with just one option  – reading about it and looking at the huge range of photos and videos of it online…

so why not start doing that here?

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Aunt T & her Pot Pourri…

Posted on 08/08/2015 by The Garden History Blog
Mrs C.W.Earle [Maria Theresa Villiers] from Memoirs and Memories ???

Mrs C.W.Earle [Maria Theresa Villiers] from Memoirs and Memories

She may look a bit like Lady Bracknell or Charlie’s Aunt but she wasn’t really  like that in real life.  Maria Theresa  Villiers may have been born with a silver spoon in her mouth but she seems to have been happier settling for a silver plate version, and to her many friends and family she was just Aunt T.  Born into an aristocratic family she  turned down the chance to become a maid of honour to Queen Victoria and instead opted to become an artist.
Later, however, she settled into a superficially conventional life when she married Charles Earle, an Indian army officer turned business man and became a good ‘poor man’s’ wife looking after her family and gardening on “a small piece of flat ground surrounding an ordinary suburban house.”  A friend of William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll, at the age of 60, despite her husband’s opposition, she began to write  about her garden in what was to become probably the most popular series of gardening books of the Edwardian era.
Read on to discover more about her writing but also how she retained her radical streak  and became a supporter of the suffragettes, and a militant vegetarian.
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