A Natural History of English Gardening

As we pass the half-way point in his Nightshelf series, Stephen Town starts to reflect on how he might spend his time after retirement.

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Laird, M., A Natural History of English Gardening, 1650 - 1800, in the University library at LA 2 LAI.

Garden pests come in all shapes
and sizes. Image reproduced from
our Special Collections

The most common assumption about retirement, and one strongly held by my wife, is that I will have more time for gardening when I retire. In truth, I may actually spend more time reading about gardening, and this book would be a good place to start. It is not exactly easy nightshelf material, as it is a large and sumptuously illustrated title, produced by Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; coincidentally this is where our former History of Art colleague Mark Hallett is now Director of Studies.

This is, however, no coffee table book. Although, anyone interested might gain great pleasure just by looking at the illustrations. It is, as the Guardian reviewer suggested, a work of both scholarship and beauty. Mark Laird is a knowledgeable scholar and an accomplished writer, and he and the book have associations with our University, York and Yorkshire which are documented carefully in his acknowledgments.

Photo: Stephen Town. Redressing the balance between
nature and geometry in my own springtime garden.

The title was consciously chosen as a ‘natural history’ to reflect the multidisciplinary breadth of the subject of gardens, and is particularly interesting on the subject of weather in the period documented, which all we gardeners know can ‘subvert the best-laid schemes’. This book brings together successfully all those disparate elements which influenced the art, science and practice of gardening in the eighteenth century, in a set of chapter essays which could each be read alone. The book seeks to redress a perceived bias arising from Walpole in the perceptions of modern English garden taste for ‘nature’ and against geometry and formalism, as I also try to do in my own garden. The book also recovers the significant contributions of both women and amateurs to the development of gardens in this period.

Gardening is, in the end, a joy, and this book fully reflects that.


Further reading:

Books from the Garden History Society Special Collection can be found in King's Manor Library and the University's Special Collections located in the Borthwick Institute for Archives.

What the Brownies taught me about the First World War

Armed only with a Brownie Guide Annual and a radio, Joanne Casey has discovered some unexpected facts about the First World War.

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This year, the Brownie Guides in the UK celebrate their 100th birthday. My 8 year old is a keen Brownie, with a uniform covered in badges that didn't exist back in my brown bobble-hatted days; Circus Performer, World Issues, Environment, and Disability Awareness. So, at Christmas, I bought her the 2014 Brownie Annual - the centenary special.

Prominently featured is a timeline showing how the Brownie movement has developed and highlighting its involvement in community activities. One little fact captured my attention; during the First World War, Brownies helped to collect eggs to improve the diets of soldiers hospitalised in France.

Image used under the terms & conditions
of the IWM Non Commercial Licence
© IWM (Art.IWM PST 10836)

Let that sink in for a moment.

Eggs.

Soldiers.

France.

How on earth did that work?

Very efficiently, apparently. Egg collection points - over 2000 of them - were set up nationwide. A poster campaign promoted the collection, and eggs were collected from anyone from a householder with one laying hen to large farms - the aim was to collect around 200,000 eggs each week. The eggs were packed into sawdust filled boxes for transportation - any that were broken during the initial process were diverted for use in local hospitals. Other schemes encouraged the collection of fruit and vegetables for soldiers and sailors - much of this was done through collections at schools, with pupils encouraged to donate.

The BBC provide more information, and a film clip of one egg collection point on their World War One at Home pages.

It's worth noting that their older sisters in the Girl Guides had a role to play too, acting as messengers of confidential information for the Marconi Wireless Telegraph company, as the use of telegraph became increasingly important.

The Brownie Annual hasn't been my only source of new facts about the First World War. Listening to Radio 4 in the car, I was equally astonished to learn that soldiers based in the trenches gardened in them - growing both food to eat and flowers to remind them of home, and even holding vegetable shows - the Imperial War Museum has amongst its artefacts the medals awarded.

Medals awarded at the 1918 British Forces Vegetable Show in Le Havre
Held at the Imperial War Museum.
Image used under the terms of the IWM Non-Commercial Licence.

Again, this turned my perceptions on their head - I had no idea of the length of time that soldiers must have spent stationed in the trenches, and no real concept of what those trenches were like.

The drive to self-sufficiency was strong on the home front too - the moats of the Tower of London, currently filled with ceramic poppies marking each of the British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the war, were used at the time as a vegetable garden.

This clip from Gardener's Question Time explains more, and a project undertaken by The Garden Museum also examines this.

100 years on, none of the soldiers who fought in World War One survive - the last veteran who served in the trenches, Harry Patch, died in 2009, and the last surviving combat veteran, Claude Choules who served in the British Royal Navy and the Royal Australian Navy, died in 2011. For me, the small details of life on the home front and in the trenches allow us to recapture some of the humanity of the war, remembering the small scale alongside the very big picture.

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Earlier this year, we marked the centenary of World War 1 with an exhibition and blog post on conflict and remembrance, highlighting items held here in our Special Collections and Archives:

• The Pity of War: Conflict and Remembrance

Across our collections, we hold a wealth of physical and electronic resources about World War One, which you can explore through YorSearch.

Liberating balsam

During our recent Staff Development Festival, Hannah Smith joined the rest of her team in a bit of community work.

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10:00am Rowntree Park and the date was set for our Staff Festival team day! A chance to give back and support the endless task of keeping York parks green and tidy.

In all honesty, I’d never even heard of balsam until our day in the park but by the end of the day I was more than familiar with the tall stem and helmet shaped flower head of a plant which is currently invading the banks of our river.

It was a beautiful morning, the team rocked up, parked bikes and loaded all bags into David B’s Kia Venga (our very own Venga Bus for the day!)

We’d arranged to meet Jen from the City of York council who talked us through the jobs in hand for our morning's work and the various tools and safety related information. By 10:15am the team were out in the field stripping back, hammering, pulling, cutting and digging. By mid morning, thistles had been threshed, fruit trees pruned, wooden fencing repaired and lime tree trunks trimmed and tidied.

After a swift coffee break (coffee purchased from the fabulous Reading Cafe), we ploughed on and started with the obsessive  task of tackling the Balsam. Thankfully the Balsam was easily identifiable, the lanky stems extend right along the banks of the Ouse smothering all life beneath. The roots of the plant are so short making it easy to pull up and the most satisfying bit was popping the hollow stem, not dissimilar to the satisfaction achieved from playing with bubble wrap.

Having spent the morning convincing the general public we weren’t doing Community Service, the team had a picnic lunch before embarking on a walk to Bishopthorpe. After some light refreshments, the return walk brought us back round full circle to the Venga Bus.

By the end of the day, laughs had been had, hands were grubby, food had been shared and legs most definitely ached but it was absolutely worth it! A great day was had by all and one that tee’d up Friday’s events well!