Are there Fairies at the Bottom of Your Garden?

Posted on 08/01/2022 by The Garden History Blog

Chritsmas Issue of Strand Magazine, December 1920

I thought we should start off the year with something to make us smile and I recalled a line from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy : “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

Where did that notion of fairies at the bottom of the garden come from? I suppose I’d always imagined that to be an idea based on mediaeval folk tales, or at the very least something that derived from Shakespeares Midsummer Nights Dream. But far from it. Although the idea of garden fairies might go back a long way I think the phrase “There are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden” really only dates from 1917… a year which has other fairy and garden significance too as well as having strong connections to Sherlock Holmes.

Intrigued? Read on to find out more

Still from a YouTube version of There are Fairies at the Bottom of our Garden

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged arthur conan doyle, children, Fairies, photography | 2 Comments

2021 on the blog…and the Annual Quiz

Posted on 01/01/2022 by The Garden History Blog

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Welcome to the 9th year of the blog. The numbers reading it have continued to grow apace with about 129,000 hits over the course of the year, an almost 30% rise on last year’s already record number. The average daily viewing have been about 350 over the whole year and during the height of the pandemic even passed 400. There were even 530 views on Christmas Day itself. There have been about 75,000 visitors, up from 56,000 in 2020 and almost 3 times the number for 2019.

Thanks to the statistics provided by WordPress I’m also able to tell you that this is the 414th post which in total contain 927,657 words, and this year I’ve been a bit more verbose than usual with posts averaging about 2660 words.

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 and enter an email address and each new post will appear, as if by magic, early on Saturday morning in good time for breakfast.

And now read on to test your memory with the annual quiz based on this year’s posts.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Happy Christmas!

Posted on 25/12/2021 by The Garden History Blog

This is the first time in the 8 years I’ve been writing the blog that Christmas has fallen on a Saturday, but I didn’t want to break my unbroken record of posting every week!

So I thought I’d just say…

A very Happy Christmas to you all… and if you really do want something garden history related to fill the odd moment between crackers, carols and carousing then read on …. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Mr. Saul of Lancaster

Posted on 18/12/2021 by The Garden History Blog

Mr Saul’s potato planting machine in use, 1843

One of things that I’ve always found fascinating about the history of gardens is the inventiveness of gardeners, and I don’t think there’s a period in horticultural history quite as inventive as the early 19thc. That doesn’t mean that their inventions always work, or even if they did that they stood the test of time.

Sometimes these horticultural innovators are well known but mostly, like Robert Gauen who I’ve written about before they’re not. Sometimes they’re well recorded but mostly they’re not and even when they are there’s usually a bit of serendipity involved in their survival.

Mr Saul’s box for transporting pot plants

That’s the case with today’s subject. I discovered him when I was researching a post about the transplantation of trees because he’d invented a new variation of the machinery involved. In the process I discovered that he’d invented a whole range of other garden-related contraptions and gadgets. So if you’re still looking for Christmas presents for your gardening friends see if you can find something devised by Mr Saul of Lancaster.

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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged flower shows, John Claudius Loudon, technology, transplantation, Victorian | Leave a comment

Reimagining Kirby

Posted on 11/12/2021 by The Garden History Blog

Visitors to Kirby in 1912.

Gardens are ephemeral creations and surely impossible to recreate once they’ve gone. That hasn’t stopped a lot of people trying. This is a trend that’s first noticeable in the early 19thc when it tended to be a romanticised view of past gardens that were installed. But the first real evidence-based attempt happened at Kirby, the great Elizabethan mansion in Northants, when in the 1930s archaeological techniques were used to discover and then try to recreate the early 17thc garden.

That wouldn’t have been necessary of course if Kirby hadn’t fallen first into decline and then ruin, so let’s begin the story of how Kirby has been re-imagined with and why it had to be done in the first place!