Babylonstoren: an historic garden in the making

Posted on 29/11/2022 by The Garden History Blog

Back in September I was in South Africa and taken to see Babylonstoren, an impressive  “new” garden about an hour north of Cape Town.

The 200-hectare estate lies at the foot of the  Simonsberg mountain range near Franschhoek in the heart of the Cape Winelands, and it has one of the grandest – and probably most productive  – kitchen gardens in the world.  Even though it was only the very beginning of spring there it was obviously somewhere you could spend days wandering and not feel satisfied that you’d seen enough.  As one other visitor put it  “clearly, no money has been spared on its creation and ongoing maintenance, but nothing is over-done, nothing feels pretentious, it all just feels exquisitely, tastefully ‘right’.”

Babylonstoren is garden history in the making. Read on to find out why…

Aerial view with the Simonsberg Mountains and the koppie [small conical hill] on the left

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Painting the Gardens of History with Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale

Posted on 19/11/2022 by The Garden History Blog

What’s in a name? Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale sounds like an escapee from a Victorian 3-volume bodice-ripper or maybe the wicked governess in a  1920s girls comic – well that’s what I thought when I first saw her name.  That will teach me to be prejudiced and  judge a book by its cover or somebody by their name.

In fact she was one of the most popular artists in Britain at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. She specialised in historical and legendary scenes often incorporating gardens into her work. Her work later fell from popular favour as tastes changed, and she was according to her obituary The Times  “the last survivor”  of the pre-Raphaelites. That may explain why after her death in 1945 her work largely  disappeared from sight.   That is, as I hope you’ll agree when you’ve read the post and seen some of her work, a great pity.

Queen Katherine – with Henry lurking in the background

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The Turf Maze

Posted on 12/11/2022 by The Garden History Blog

Way back in  April 2021  I wrote a piece about the  Elizabethan painting below, which as you can see from the detail, has a maze in the background.   It struck me as an unusual things to put into a portrait, although I soon discovered that it was almost certainly an allegory about finding the right path in life, rather than anything in the sitter’s own garden.

 

 

 

 

 

What I hadn’t fully realised then was that the idea of walking round a low-level maze  wasn’t actually that  strange  because  the English countryside was once dot­ted with earthwork labyrinths or turf-mazes of a similar kind, although not many survive today.

Nor did I realise quite how popular  mazes and labyrinths were, with many  intriguing  stories around them, although  usually with very little hard evidence to back them up.  Indeed there is an entire sub-culture debating their  origins and purposes, and as a result  the boundary between fact and fiction, or evidence and conjecture,  is “flexible” to put it mildly. There is sound academic research but also a lot  of “new age” fantasy where in the end you can almost believe what you want.  Today’s post is just going to wend its way  through the labyrinth looking at just a small part of this world: the turf maze.

Breamore mizmaze from Google maps

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Cutting Edge Technology

Posted on 05/11/2022 by The Garden History Blog

There can’t be many garden tools that have caused hundreds of people to demonstrate in the streets against their  introduction. But that’s precisely what happened in 1840 when a committee decided to test a new device against traditional methods and equipment.  The protests would be the other way round now if  gardeners were forced to give up what is probably the most popular and easy to use hand tool in the shed.

So what on earth am I talking about and if it’s so easy to use what caused the problem?

Apologies if you were hoping for a firework related post  but I did that last year with Here Be Dragons and Marvellous Contrivances so check them out!

Noah at work in his vineyard, c.1350 Continue reading →

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Gardening Advice from a Squint-Eyed Monk

Posted on 29/10/2022 by The Garden History Blog

I’ve written several posts on early gardening books, but today’s post goes back even further. It’s about the first gardening book in European history which dates from around 830-40AD.

It  was written by a Benedictine monk who spent most of life  on an island in the Bodensee [Lake Constance]  in south-west Germany. His name was Walafrid, although  he also called himself Strabo which means squint-eyed or cross-eyed. We know a surprising amount about him given the long time gap because he was quite a significant figure both theologically  and diplomatically. However most of his theological writing, has  been long forgotten and instead he’s remembered for another part of his life.  Yes you guessed correctly: Walafrid was a keen gardener.

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