The first English books on gardening…

Posted on 03/01/2015 by The Garden History Blog
Thomas Hill, aged 28 from his treatise on bees which was added to The proffitable arte of gardening, 1568

Thomas Hill, aged 28 from his treatise on bees which was added to The proffitable arte of gardening, 1577

Happy New Year – after the frivolity of the festive season it’s time to get back to some serious stuff – but don’t  panic the gardening vicars will return to lighten the tone again next week!

The English pride themselves on being  a nation of gardeners. We have great gardens, great gardeners and great writers and great books about gardening. But when did that all start? The answer to some of those questions is difficult to pin down exactly but in the case of gardening books we can fix the date fairly precisely to 1558 the year that Queen Mary died and Elizabeth I came to the throne.  Read on to discover more about England’s first gardening writer and his books…

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Birthday Quiz Time….

Posted on 27/12/2014 by The Garden History Blog
Birthday cake for a gardener http://www.cakecentral.com

Birthday cake for a gardener
http://www.cakecentral.com

Happy birthday dear blog!

Its hard to believe but its virtually a year ago that I sat down and wracked my brains for something to say for the first post on the blog… now I have about 20 ideas underway  at any one time and could probably post almost every day if I had the time to type them up and anyone had time to read them. Don’t worry tho – roughly once a week is quite enough for me too!

The blog got off to a pretty slow start – 2 viewers the first day – probably just me logging in on two different machines BUT now its built up to well over 100 separate viewers for each post, around 1,000 views in total every month and over the course of the year, from a very slow start we’ve have had  nearly 7,000 views in total.

So thank you for reading & please carry on doing so….and if you belong to a garden related group then why not pass on the word via newsletters or announcements & encourage your friends to sign up too.

Anyway, by way of light relief I thought I’d offer a quiz this week to see how much of what I write has sunk in!  I’ve tried not to make it too hard so good luck!   All the answers can be found in earlier posts… but if you get stuck the answers are at the end.  Continue reading →

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A touch of festive red…

Posted on 20/12/2014 by The Garden History Blog

1774596-poinsettia-w-co-fIt’s that time of year again when the whole world seems to go red.    Love them or loathe them poinsettias dominate the Christmas flower market, and because of that they are are  the  most economically important potted plant world-wide.  Incidentally although less than 1 person in 5 buys one in Britain,  in Germany the figure is almost 1  in 2.: a frightening thought if you’re not that fond of them!

The scarlet monstrosity [maybe you can see where I stand on the like/loathe spectrum]  comes from Mexico and its surrounds, and is a member of the vast euphorbia family. It has the  scientific name euphorbia pulcherrima, (‘very pretty/beautiful) given in 1833.  So why is it always called Poinsettia and what’s it got to do with Christmas? Read on and find out more than you could ever possibly have wanted to know about them….

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Dyffryn

Posted on 13/12/2014 by The Garden History Blog

I’m always a bit suspicious when people use superlatives to describe something. It’s never usually quite as good as they make out. So initially that was my reaction when I started to hear/read about Dyffryn Gardens, near Cardiff.   Just shows how wrong one can be… because Dyffryn isn’t just  “one of the grandest and most important Edwardian gardens in Wales” and Grade 1 listed, it’s also one of the most surprising and enjoyable gardens I’ve visited in a very long time.  After a massive restoration project largely funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund it’s now also  the centre of a National Trust restoration project unlike most they have undertaken.

RCAHMW colour slide oblique aerial photograph of Dyffryn House, Toby Driver, 2000

RCAHMW colour slide oblique aerial photograph of Dyffryn House, Toby Driver, 2000

I visited with Liz Whittle, former inspector of Historic Parks and Gardens for CADW and I am very grateful to her for allowing me to use her notes as the basis for this blog.

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Do behold the King in his glory…King Sequoia!

Posted on 06/12/2014 by The Garden History Blog
"Wellingtonia Gigantea," c. 1855. Lithograph, Bancroft Library

“Wellingtonia Gigantea,” c. 1855.
Lithograph, Bancroft Library

In 1849 a young Cornishman William Lobb arrived  in San Francisco. Not to take part in the famous Gold Rush but to hunt for green gold for his employer, the enterprising Exeter nurseryman, James Veitch.

gold-rush-view_of_san_francisco

San Francisco from Telegraph Hill, 1850 lithograph by Currier & McMurtrie. In public domain

What Lobb bought back created a wave of excitement and  made Veitch a fortune. It also had a great impact on the landscape of many great British parks and gardens, and, with luck,  will continue to do so for a very long time.  Lobb returned with seeds of  the biggest tree in the world: the Wellingtonia, or as it should now more properly be called,  Sequoiadendron giganteum.

 

 

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