Winter Gardens

Posted on 04/01/2025 by The Garden History Blog

Winter lights at Anglesey Abbey, photo by Peter Hobson

I’ve been struck recently by how many gardens are holding winter light shows. They used to be quite rare events but nowadays everyone seems to be getting in on the act. They showcase gardens and plants in a very different way but, of course, equally are a good money-making venture. They are surprisingly popular and usually sell out quickly.

Similar motivations are probably behind the rise in the number of sites which are developing winter gardens to attract more visitors in the more inhospitable months of the year. It made me wonder when this interest in gardens specifically designed for winter interest started so I decided to investigate…

The new Winter Garden at Wakehurst photo from the Kew/Wakehurst website

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Anglesey Abbey, Blooms, Bressingham, Cambridge Botanic Garden, Dunham Massey, Gertrude Jekyll, graham stuart thomas, Harold Hillier, Kingston Lacy, Marks Hall, Mottisfont, National Trust, Osterley, Polesden Lacey, Rosemoor, Royal Horticultural Society, Stanley Whitehead, Vicary Gibbs, Vita Sackville-West, William Robinson, william shenstone, winter garden | Leave a comment

A New Year and a New Title

Posted on 01/01/2025 by The Garden History Blog

Happy New Year!

…and to start it off I want to give you two bits of important news about the blog and its future.

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2024 on the blog…and the annual quiz

Posted on 28/12/2024 by The Garden History Blog

The blog is about to celebrate its 11th birthday!

The first post was on New Years Eve 2013 and the numbers reading have continued to grow apace with over 236,000 views by 143,000 visitors over the course of the year, just slightly up on last year’s already record 224,000, the 100,000 for 2020 and less than 7,000 for the whole of 2014! All adding up to a grand total of over 1.08 million views from 625,000 visitors

As always, thank you for your loyal support and the nice comments. Please keep telling your friends about the blog and get them to join the mailing list. Just go to the very bottom of any post, enter an email address and each new post will appear, as if by magic, early on Saturday morning in time for breakfast. And now for the quiz….

Not Mr and Mrs Nesfield celebrating to acquisition of their archives by the Garden Museum but, believe it or not, an advert for the Anthracite Bedding Manufacturing Co., 1910. Image: Library of Congress.

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How to avoid Christmas Trees …

Posted on 21/12/2024 by The Garden History Blog

As usual I’ve been wracking my brains for the last few weeks trying to think of something original and garden-related to say about Christmas.

Over the last ten years I’ve tackled all sorts of things Christmasy from Hellebores to Brussels Sprouts and Amaryllis to Ivy. I’ve even looked at artificial Christmas flowers whilst studiously avoiding the obvious things such as Christmas trees . Sadly I thought this year I might have to give in, and for want of anything better finally give in and look at firs, spruces and pines but in starting my research I discovered another seasonal subject which allows me to avoid them for at least another year!

So if you don’t know much about Moodjar or Pōhutukawa then read on…

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Dr Syntax and the Search for the Picturesque

Posted on 14/12/2024 by The Garden History Blog

detail of Dr. Syntax drawing the waterfall at Ambleside, Thomas Rowlandson, 1812 V&A

I wrote a few months ago about William Gilpin who was in the words of the Monthly Review in April 1799, “the venerable founder and master of the picturesque school.” The problem was that while his travel writings and books about aesthetic theories helped define “picturesque beauty” there’s little doubt that he was more than a bit pompous and self-opinionated, and so very easy to satirise.

There was no better deflater of the self-important than the cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson. He apparently told a group of friends that he had decided on a tour of his own to the West Country and he felt “in a humour to sketch a series, where the object may be made ridiculous without much thinking.” Gilpin was an easy target and by 1809 Rowlandson had invented the character of Dr Syntax.

Like Gilpin, Syntax is a clergyman, artist and schoolmaster who travelled to out-of-the way places, drawing and describing them for publication. The result was humour that parodied Gilpin not cruelly but comically, in ways that can still make us laugh today.