The Garden History Blog

Mrs Montague : The Bluestocking Gardener

Posted on 21/02/2015 by The Garden History Blog

Elizabeth Montagu
by Wilson Lowry, 1787
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Elizabeth Montagu is best known today as one of the leaders of the bluestockings and a great lady of letters – she was ‘brilliant in diamonds, solid in judgement, critical in talk’ but it’s much less well known that she was an enthusiastic builder and garden maker.

She was also a prolific correspondent and her letters are a major source of information about intellectual life, especially amongst women, in the second half of the 18thc.

So…read on to discover more about her views on leading gardens such as Stowe, about the creation of her famous “feather room” in London and her work with Capability Brown at Sandleford Priory…
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Capability Brown, Duchess of Portland, Nottingham, Stowe, Thoresby | Leave a comment

Romance in the garden…

Posted on 14/02/2015 by The Garden History Blog

http://publicwallpapers.org

My partner dropped a subtle hint suggesting I should do something for the blog to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Of course it might just have been a subtle hint that I should do something for him too but it set me thinking….

What on earth has St Valentine got to do with gardens? Well obviously there are the slushy sentiments of the Victorians… and the cold commercialism of today’s overpriced and imported red roses but is there anything more interesting? Read on to find out…. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Burne-Jones, Chaucer, Mediaeval, Roman de la Rose, Valentine, William Morris | Leave a comment

Percy – The Nation’s Head Gardener

Posted on 07/02/2015 by The Garden History Blog

Cover photo from Timothy O'SullivanPercy Thrower: A Biograpy

Cover photo from Timothy O’Sullivan Percy Thrower: A Biography

Percy Thrower was a household name during his long career in gardening programmes on radio and television. A natural broadcaster, with quiet enthusiasm and a very hands-on practical approach, he built a substantial following amongst adults and children alike.

Always cutting a fairly formal figure in jacket and tie, he was usually seen with a pipe in his hand, even when actually gardening. His biographer may have called him” a mild mannered sergeant-major”, but Peter Seabrook, one of his successors on Gardener’s World said “Percy was comfortable to watch on television… He was a lovely man and he smiled from the inside”. Alan Titchmarsh, another of his successors, says it was Percy who inspired him to take up gardening.

Read on to discover how he became so influential and why, as a result, he was nicknamed the Nation’s Head Gardener.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Alan Titchmarsh, Arthur Hellyer, Blue Peter, Gardeners World, Gardening Club, Head Gardener, Peter Seabrook, Shrewsbury, Temple Newsam | Leave a comment

Garden Menageries 3 … Osterley

Posted on 31/01/2015 by The Garden History Blog

A male gold pheasant from ‘Birds … from the Menagerie at Osterley Park’ (1794).
© The Trustees of the British Museum

Continuing with my occasional theme of menageries in the garden, todays’s post looks at Osterley Park in west London and also reveals how garden history interacts with wider current research. The East India Company at Home project has been trying to put the country house and estate into its global and imperial context and has made a special study of Osterley, in particular looking how its owners acquired and used exotic Asian commodities in the 18th and 19thc. This included birds for their garden menageries.

Osterley House
http://thegoldhawkproject.com

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Addison, aviary, Chinoiserie, East India Comapny, Francis Child, Horace Walpole, Joseph Banks, menagerie, National Trust, Robert Adam, Robert Child, Syon, Valentines, wallpaper | Leave a comment

Gazetteer of War Memorial Parks and Gardens

Posted on 24/01/2015 by The Garden History Blog

This is not one of my normal slightly irreverant posts but a more serious one to try and spread the word about Parks and Gardens UK’s publication on-line of the first Gazetteer of UK War Memorial Parks and Gardens. It’s amazing it hasn’t been done before, because it seems of such obvious ‘national’ interest, but it has been finally been put together, by volunteers, as part of the Gardening in Wartime project. This is a joint initiative between the Garden Museum and Parks & Gardens UK, which has focussed on the untold story of gardens and gardening during and after the First World War.

This first version of the Gazetteer has over 400 entries on it from across the United Kingdom. We hope it will inspire others at a local level to contribute information about their war memorial parks and gardens for inclusion. You can find the full gazeteer and related articles at:

http://www.parksandgardens.org/projects/gardening-in-wartime/839-gazetteer-of-war-memorial-parks-and-gardens

In today’s post I’m going to highlight a few of the lesser known memorial gardens and landscapes and hope that it will inspire you to take a look yourself…and maybe suggest others which haven’t been included.

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