The Garden History Blog

Aspidistra
Samuel John Peploe (1871–1935)
Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums

Everyone’s maiden aunt and granny had one, and Gracie Fields sang of having the biggest one in the world. A dreary, dark green, flowerless clump in a pot in a corner of the parlour. Often forgotten about for weeks on end they tolerated heat, drought, coal and gas fire fumes and could hover apparently on the verge of expiry for years on end, before responding gratefully to a  splash of water or a quick dusting. It’s not surprising they were known as the cast-iron plant.

Famous as a joke plant aspidistras were, according to the OED “often regarded as a symbol of dull middle-class respectability” – thanks largely one suspects to George Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. BUT how and why did they become so popular and where on earth have they all gone?

After all you’d think a cast-iron plant would be just the sort of thing that would appeal to time-poor and knowledge-lacking modern generation. Yet it’s cacti and succulents that are all the rage not the Aspidistra?   What has the poor plant done wrong to be so ignored? Continue reading →

Wax impression of John Evelyn’s seal,    National Portrait Gallery

John Evelyn is, like his friend Samuel Pepys, best known for his diary,  detailing life in the second half of the 17thc. He was a landed gentleman, government official and a high Anglican of uncompromising piety but also a man beset by curiosity.

As a result he investigated and wrote about a huge range of subjects, but particularly gardening. He not only translated and commented on several  major French texts  on gardening but also wrote several key ones of his own.  

Method for propagating plants by layering into a pot full of earth

Evelyn saw horticulture as the form of knowledge and expression that by its very nature could include all other arts and sciences, and developed  a pious understanding of the workings of Nature, so revealing God’s infinite wisdom. Indeed so convinced of this was he that he spent much of his life from the 1650s onwards working on a book intended to cover every aspect of the subject that he could. He’d already written about 1000 pages when he died in 1706.

Instructions for grafting rare fruit trees

Now in the British Library and catalogued as Add MS  78432 it’s better known as Elysium Britannicum or The Royal Gardens.  It remained virtually unknown until 2001 when it was finally transcribed and published.  Continue reading →