The Garden History Blog

© The Tabley House Collection Trust

There can’t be many great landscape gardeners who, as a young man,  fought against Napoleon in the Peninsular War or against the Americans in the War of 1812. Yet one who did both went on to become a well-known artist and then  one of the leading garden designers of the 19thc,  with over 250 sites including some of the most important  in the country under his belt by the time he died in 1881.

He was William Andrews Nesfield usually mainly remembered for his complicated colourful geometric parterres but who was  actually a far more nuanced and sophisticated designer than he is often given credit for.

Mamhead Park by Nesfield , from the Nesfield Archive in Australia scanned from Country Life 8th April 1993

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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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