The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Posted on 02/01/2021 by The Garden History Blog

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

History is always changing.  The kind of history I did at school, kings and queens, great battles and the stories of great men [and occasionally women] has given way to a much more broadly based picture of the past.  We now see things from more than one perspective and look at the stories of more than just a few rich and powerful people.  But some things don’t change. Our fascination with certain events, places and ideas is never-ending and, for example, I suspect most of us are  fascinated by great monuments and how and why they were built.

Who, for example, didn’t learn all about the Seven Wonders of the World at school?  Although it might be hard to  remember them all [answers at the bottom of the post!] I bet that there are at least a couple that everyone recalls because they were so fabulous and almost unbelievable. I’d guess we’d all think immediately of the Great Pyramid of Giza but I wouldn’t be surprised if not far behind came the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

But what do we actually know about them?

You’d think that being the Hanging Gardens of Babylon we’d at least  know where they were, but unfortunately we don’t – indeed we can’t even be sure  they actually existed at all.  So read on to find out if there’s any the evidence  or if the whole idea is just a romantic myth…

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2020 on the blog…and the Annual Quiz

Posted on 26/12/2020 by The Garden History Blog

The quirks of the calendar mean that this is the last blog of 2020 and  that the blog has now been running for 7 years.  Like all 7 year olds it’s still growing, and at a pretty staggering rate.  This year there have been about almost 100,000 hits, [as I’m about to publish at 8.46 this morning it’s 98,569, so maybe it will get there by midnight on New Year’s Eve] virtually double last year’s 55,000, with the average number recently being well over 300 a day. There have been about  56,000 visitors, over double last year’s 26,000.

Thanks to the statistics provided by WordPress I’m also able to tell you that this is the 362nd post which in total contain 788,059 words, with this year’s posts averaging about 2500 words each.

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 6th annual quiz based on this year’s posts.

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“Oh, a dainty plant is the ivy green…”

Posted on 19/12/2020 by The Garden History Blog

Mr H in festive mood [courtesy of my brother Nicholas]

Writing a post for Christmas is never easy… unless there is an obvious  monstrosity to write about as there was in 2017 [check it out if you have managed to blank it from your mind!]  It would be easier  if I chose to be trite and write about the same things as everybody else desperately trying to be seasonal. But I don’t like being banal so  nothing about Christmas trees, and as far as plants go I’ve already written about mistletoe, poinsettias, the Glastonbury Thorn, and   amaryllis.  I’ve also written about  James Shirley Hibberd, the great Victorian garden writer and populariser of suburban gardening who loved artificial flowers at Christmas. 

Then I remembered that Hibberd also published  a whole book about a well-known , although now rather less popular, Christmas stalwart, and since I’ve already got pictures of him dressed up in the spirit of the season , today’s  post  will, in his words, “present to public notice a few particulars of the history, habits, and uses of that well-known plant, the Ivy”.

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Flowers and a Duke open the gates…

Posted on 12/12/2020 by The Garden History Blog

Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, Marquis of Westminster (1825-1899) (later 1st Duke of Westminster. from Vanity Fair 1870

Over the past few months we’ve examined the story of the London square, and the last post revealed the beginning of both a slow decline in status and tentative attempts to open them to the public.   Today’s post is going to look at these  attempts and show how, gradually through the second half of the 19thc, the squares became part of the movement to increase the amount of publicly accessible  green space in the capital.

It was achieved by a mix of charitable institutions, religious and secular bodies petitioning the owners and trustees of private squares, especially those whose gardens were unkempt or under-utilised to allow limited access to them. But these reformers could not achieve their aims alone.   They had considerable help from a public-spirited  Duke who also happened to be the wealthiest man in Britain.

Once the momentum developed, legislation followed that  allowed  local authorities to acquire other important open spaces such as commons, burial grounds as well as squares for recreational use.

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A Tale of Two Cities

Posted on 05/12/2020 by The Garden History Blog

We saw last week that although new squares continued to be built in the middle of the 19thc the design was sometimes adapted and modified, and there was sometimes criticism of both the layout itself and increasingly of the planting.

Nevertheless most squares, as Todd Longstaffe-Gowan points out,  “somehow miraculously maintained a degree of social pre-eminence regardless of the vicissitudes of fashion.”  London squares were generally still seen as   prestigious places to live, “bestowing social rank, dignity and precedence upon their inhabitants.” That meant they continued to attract the aspirant classes [sometimes known as “gentility-mongers”] and more squares were built in the later years of the century.

Yet at the same time there were  huge and growing differences  between them and some had even ceased to be residential. The social commentator Henry Mayhew, as part of  his studies of poverty and crime, tried to categorise the city’s squares in 1862.  Some were “imposing”, others “stately and gorgeous” while another group were  “intensely quiet ..and as still and desolate as cloisters.”  But it’s clear that the whole concept of the square as a social construct was changing as he dismissed a large number of others as “pretentious parvenu-like suburban squares” and wrote off more as “obsolete or used up old squares.”    What was happening and why?

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