We’re all familiar with the idea of the Grand Tour, where young elite men were sent to finish their education touring the great classical and Renaissance sites of Italy. This had been going on since the mid-17thc but the Napoleonic Wars bought most European travel to a halt. Suddenly many people turned to a home tour and began to discover their way round Britain instead.
And now it wasn’t just rich young men who went touring. So did quite a few women, including Anne Rushout, a wealthy aristocrat and amateur artist, whose life I looked at a few months ago. She sketched her way through north Wales as well as keeping an account on her journal. It wasn’t her first trip to the principality, nor was she a rare example of a female tourist.
detail of Ann’s painting of a trip down the Wye in 1802
“There are a number of ways of laying out a garden. The best is by taking on a gardener.” So opens a delightful book on gardens by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. Published in Prague in 1929 with illustrations by his brother Josef, it was first translated into English in 1931.
Normally gardening books from that era are, let’s be honest, worthy but dull, good for a bit of period feel, quaint photos or funny adverts but otherwise not much use and cratinly not widely read any more. The Gardener’s Year is different. It is both timely and timeless and worth reading every word, and smiling at every drawing.
I’ve written about many weird and wonderful inventions on here but I think this apparently madcap contraption might take some beating! It all started when I stumbled across an unusual engraving in the Wellcome Collection. There was no background information, no context, and very little referencing other than the date of publication, 1755.
The Garden History Blog 
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