The History of Women & Gardening
From pioneers like Gertrude Jekyll and Beth Chatto to on-screen faces like Charlie Dimmock and Carol Klein, gardening women are hardly an unfamiliar sight. With their knees muddied, gloves donned, and sleeves rolled up, they get to work. They shear, prune, dig, design, and bring their gardens to bloom. But gardening women haven’t always received the recognition they’re due; they’ve had to fight for their place in history.
Good Housewives and Weeding Women
For centuries, a woman’s role was in the home, and this role would include general maintenance of the family’s garden. For the lower classes, this might mean growing medicinal herbs, or harvesting fruits and vegetables for use in the kitchen. For the upper classes, this often meant maintaining the “pleasure garden”: a floral garden intended for relaxation, leisure, and beauty - never labour. Outside of the home, women played little to no role at all, with parks, garden design, and landscaping being monopolised by men. This kind of work was deemed too skilled or too strenuous for women (sometimes even too uncouth!) and, up until the late 19th century, all professional gardeners were men.
Before the tides changed, only a small number of women found ‘unskilled’ work in gardens which weren’t their own. Early evidence is scarce, however, and the names of these working women appear as mere fragments in the archives, if not forgotten altogether. The main evidence comes in the form of references to “weeding women”: lower class women who were hired to weed the gardens of the well-to-do. For many years, your lot in life was to either stare longingly out of the window, daydreaming about garden design, or to do back-breaking weeding work that often paid you less than the garden boy. Thankfully, as the fight for women’s rights began to make real traction in the late 1800s, things began to change.
New Schooling and Claiming Space
Rising against the societal norms of the day, women began to push for involvement in more professional spaces, including public and private gardens. Change, however, was slow to come, and only really impacted those who could afford it. It wasn’t until 1878 that a woman, Fanny Wilkinson, was able to convince the Crystal Palace School of Landscape Gardening and Practical Horticulture to admit her - a school that up until then had been men-only. It was a great leap for women gardeners that saw Fanny go on to lay 75 gardens in London (though she was not paid for all of them). Towards the end of the century, opportunities began to grow, and the Swanley Horticultural College became the first to accept women as standard. Later, in January 1896, two of its female students were the first to be employed as gardeners at Kew.
But this period of history is littered with failures and successes alike, as people grappled with a changing society. Although the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh also employed their first two women gardeners in 1897, it came with a catch: they had to dress like and present as boys. So, although some people were willing to experiment with progression, they often did it on very particular terms… perhaps in an attempt to discourage too much dissent.
But try as some might to slow the progress of women gardeners, they persevered. In 1898, Countess Warwick founded Studley College, which was the first of around twenty women-only gardening colleges to open between 1898 and 1940. Along with these schools, key figures began to carve their way into the mainstream, most notably Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932). Working with architect Edwin Lutyens, Jekyll designed over 400 gardens across the United Kingdom and United States during her lifetime, as well as independently writing over a thousand articles on gardening, and publishing books on the topic. Her style is often described as “painterly”, influenced by brush strokes, and with an artist’s eye for colour. She remains a strong influence in gardening today.
A Gardening Legacy
Moving into the first half of the 20th Century, the position of women changed dramatically. With the nation’s men off to war, women were called to farms to help provide food as part of the Women’s Land Army initiative. Some 6,000 women were also called to the forests as part of the Timber Corps, in which they sourced and sawed wood for pit props and telegraph poles. Necessity brought women into the world of work, and though the end of the war returned thousands to unemployment, the taste for independence grew.
Building on the legacy of the women who came before them, women pushed into the world of work, and in turn into the world of professional gardening and design. New figures came onto the scene, such as the innovative Beth Chatto, who pioneered the “right place, right plant” approach. Chatto became known for her ecological approach to gardening, as well as for her flower clubs and her interest in unusual plants. Her “Unusual Plants” exhibition saw her winning 10 consecutive gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show, and towards the end of the 20th century, women were only receiving greater recognition and awards for their contributions to gardening. Arabella Lennox-Boyd received Best in Show at Chelsea in 1988, and was later followed by Sarah Eberle again in 2007. To this day, Eberle holds the record for the most accolades of any entrant to the Chelsea Flower Show, with 19 gold medals all together across every category. This trend of women winners is only set to continue, as this March, for the first time ever, more female gardeners were competing than men.
Though there is still a way to go when it comes to female representation in more laborious areas of gardening, such as landscaping and arboriculture, women are continuing to make history in the world of gardening, floristry, and design. Not just on grand, award-winning scales, but every time we make space for ourselves in the garden, whether that’s at work, home, or with the friendly folk at Bloom. We owe a big debt to those daydreaming women who came before us; it’s thanks to them that we now have the opportunity to gather and grow.
This blog post was kindly written for us by one of our volunteers - Emily Readman. Emily is a freelance writer and editor from Sheffield. Though her own “garden” is mainly made up of succulents, she’s a sucker for pale pink peonies. You can find her at proofofthepud.co.uk