Sometimes one stumbles across interesting people by pure chance. Today’s post is one such serendipitous discovery. I was looking for images for another post and found an interesting watercolour painting of a landscape by a woman I’d never heard of, but who seemed interesting enough to do a quick search to see if she’d done any other paintings of interest.
She had.
So let me introduce you to Anne Rushout of Northwick Park and Wanstead Grove.
I wrote a couple of weeks back about the origin of the cottage garden, and today I want to take the story forward and look at how by the middle of Queen Victoria’s reign rural cottages and their gardens had become both a cause for social reformers and at the same time a rich subject for artists. But while one group saw only the poverty, squalor and daily grind, the other managed to romanticise what they saw and create idealised chocolate box versions of reality.
Guess which side won in the public perception both then and, I suspect, even today?
Continue readingWe all know what a cottage garden looks like don’t we? We might even be able to describe its main features, although a short definitive account is quite elusive. So where does the phrase come from? When is it first used? I confess to being stumped when someone asked me recently. You’d think the answer was obvious but actually it isn’t.
I’m sure you knew there is a Cottage Garden Society – large and flourishing – so I thought they’d know if anyone does – but no. Their website doesn’t have a definition of what constitutes a cottage garden, although there’s a lot about what are nowadays known as cottage garden plants.
So it was off to Collins Dictionary which defines it as an informal style of garden which has beds planted with a great variety of traditional flowers. Michael Symes in his handy little Glossary of Garden History says it’s “a garden attached to a cottage where the planting is informal, apparently artless crowded with flowers, vegetables and fruit trees, with trailers climbers and creepers on the woodwork.” It’s the “apparently artless” which gives away the fact that nowadays a cottage garden is another form of horticultural artifice.
It remains an aspiration for many. “What everyone wanted, from the Lady of the Manor to the humblest suburbanite, was a romantic cottage garden, a private bucolic retreat that would provide an escape from modern world.” (Penelope Hobhouse/ Ambra Edwards in The Story of Gardening). But was it always so? I suspect that most people wouldn’t aspire to it if they knew what it used to mean…
A Cottage Garden by Helen Allingham – but where does this style originate?
The Walled garden from Google Maps
Another lockdown escape last week took me to Audley End, near Saffron Walden in Essex. Although the mansion itself is still closed because of Covid restrictions the extensive grounds which were completely redesigned by Capability Brown in the mid 18thc, were open. So too was the walled kitchen garden restored by English Heritage about 20 years ago. This includes two large greenhouse ranges: a vinery dating originally from the 1820s , and a rebuilt Orchard House dating from the early 1850s.
When Anna Pavord, the garden writer visited about ten years ago she wrote that “Nothing makes me feel happier than walking into a kitchen garden, especially a walled one. The real world disappears. Here instead is an ordered, productive microcosm. No climbing garden plant is more beautiful to me than a well- trained espalier pear; no herbaceous border sings more harmoniously than an old-fashioned vegetable border, snug inside its box hedges.”
Even on a chilly April afternoon all that’s still true at Audley End today. 
Wednesday was escape day in north London – the first visit to a garden for many long months. Thank goodness it was sunny, although I think even if it had been pouring with rain the planned escape would still have happened. And to celebrate we went to the Gibberd Garden on the outskirts of Harlow. The town might not be the first place that springs to mind for a glorious day out but then maybe you haven’t been to the Gibberd Garden.
The garden was created mainly by Sir Frederick Gibberd the architect and the master planner of Harlow New Town between 1957 and 1984. It’s idiosyncratic to put it mildly but is considered such a significant contribution to garden design that it’s one of just a handful of post war gardens on Historic England’s Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest .
The Garden History Blog 
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