Heavens above! There’s a nun in the garden

Posted on 11/03/2023 by The Garden History Blog

I’m sure lots of you are as familiar with this painting  by Charles Collins as I am. It’s one of those well known, if slightly unusual, pictures  that you wonder why anyone painted it.  What I hadn’t realised until I was researching a recent post on Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale and  saw her painting of St Clare  in  a convent garden that I began to realise there were in fact  several other paintings by Victorian artists on a similar theme.

 

Time perhaps to put two and two together and see if there was a reason why nuns, and particularly nuns in gardens, were  such an attractive subject for painters of the period.  So I’ve just spent an interesting day flicking through the websites of art galleries and the pages of academic journals trying to find out.

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Paul Sandby and his “Real Views from Nature”

Posted on 04/03/2023 by The Garden History Blog

Every so often an artist comes along who manages to change the way people think about or record the world, and in the process help launch a new kind of art. It happened in the mid-18thc in Britain when a school of landscape painting emerged, unlike anything which had preceded it .  The man largely responsible was Paul Sandby.

He’s not exactly a household name but as the New York Times said about an exhibition of his work in 2010 “he comes out as the unlikely founding father of a dazzling school of European art.” 

It was Thomas Gainsborough himself no slouch at landscape painting who told a potential client  in 1764 that if he wanted “real Views from Nature in this Country”,  he should turn to Sandby, who was “the only Man of Genius … who has employ’d his pencil that way”

Sandby’s  images contributed to the emerging appreciation of British landscape, the development of domestic tourism and the way that landscapes and even gardens were appreciated and portrayed both then and today.

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More Turf Mazes

Posted on 25/02/2023 by The Garden History Blog

At the end of last year I wrote about the earliest turf mazes in Britain  but I ran out of space to do justice to the subject, so here’s your chance to find out about the largest turf maze in the world, and discover several others including the smallest one in Europe.

The interest in all kinds of mazes, including those cut into turf, carried on well past the mediaeval period, and indeed, during the 16th and 17th centuries, as exemplified in the portrait of Lord Edward Russell [which I’ve written about earlier] they assume a symbolic importance far removed from the physical reality.

 

 

However, increasing urbanisation and the loss of rural roots,  seems to have put paid to most maze creation after that  until the late 19th and early 20thc. More recently interest has grown considerably  with many more being designed and planted in the last 50 years or so.  Although most new ones are hedge mazes there are some interesting new ones in turf  too.

 

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Walter MacFarlane and the Cast-Iron Park

Posted on 18/02/2023 by The Garden History Blog

In the Victorian era cast iron became ubiquitous in our parks, our streets and our architecture more generally. It was impossible to avoid and made up a large part of park and street furniture,  from  bandstands to drinking fountains, railings to lamp-posts and sewer ventilation to public toilets,  and everything in between, and not just in Britain but around the world.

You might be surprised, however, to discover that many of the  leading design and manufacturing companies for cast iron goods were based in Scotland, largely  because there were good sources of both coal and iron ore.  The largest of them was Walter MacFarlane and Son.

Established in 1850  in Glasgow, then the British Empire’s second city,  MacFarlane’s led the way in not only  design and manufacturing quality but aesthetics as well.  Walter himself was a consummate salesman and made his  fortune “by the beauty of his designs and the excellence of the workmanship, coupled with admirable organization.”

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Garden Rubbish

Posted on 11/02/2023 by The Garden History Blog

Many of you will remember I’m sure the best-selling comic history book 1066 And All That by Sellar and Yeatman, published first in 1930 but reprinted almost endlessly ever since. What you might not know is that they followed it up with several others, including,  in 1936,  a guide to  gardening.

They did so because  they said their earlier success” amply qualified them to compile the History of British Agriculture (post-Saxon) which they left out of that book. They cover the whole subject of Gardening (including Golf, but omitting chestnuts), Country Life and Scouting.  …  Everyone who loves (or hates) a garden will wallow in the rich loam of their wisdom.”

As you can probably tell even from that brief extract from the intro Garden Rubbish and other Country Bumps is very much a piece of its time. Its  humour is often  dated and laboured but parts of it can still raise a smile and as a recent critic noted  when it “hits its stride, it nails the British infatuation with competitive gardening with great gusto.

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