Gardening with Galligan: Gardening, then and now

Because women have been making news lately, and because there’s a terrific new book in the library called “The Illustrated Book of Women Gardeners,” I thought it might be fun to spend some time with it. And remind ourselves how much the lives of women have changed and how grateful we should be that they have.

Some of the women, of course, are quite well known, but others like the German Elizabeth von Arnim, for example, who was 31 in 1897, much less so. Frustrated at the requirement to hire gardeners rather than being allowed to dig the soil herself, she wrote, “I sometimes literally ache with envy as I watch the men going about their pleasant work in the sunshine turning up the luscious, damp earth, raking, weeding, watering, planting, cutting the grass, pruning the trees — not a thing that they do from the first uncovering of the roses in the spring to the November bonfires but fills my soul with longing to be up and doing too.”

Although she apparently couldn’t get her hands dirty, she could, actually, write. And she did. “Elizabeth and her German Garden” was published by Macmillan in 1898 and was an instant best seller.

She wasn’t, one must assume, the only woman to chafe against her quite arbitrary restrictions.

Since the gardens were part of her husband’s vast estate, and presumably, at least technically, she could have done anything, any day and any time that she wanted, she, like so many women (think the fight for suffrage, for example) had apparently internalized the restrictions that were actually external, and hence,  could have been challenged.

And then, of course, we have Gertrude Jekyll, so much better known and the third woman who sat down to write in the waning years of the 19th century. She published “Wood and Garden” in 1899 when she was 56 years old. She was a born teacher and was passionate about her subject — her vision of garden beauty. She saw the garden as a three-dimensional  painting that had to be viewed as “right” from all angles and in all lights.

“For planting ground is painting a landscape with living things and I hold that good gardening takes rank within the bounds of the fine arts, so I hold that to plant well needs an artist of no mean capacity,” she wrote.

When she decided that the vases of her day came in shapes that were far from satisfactory she designed her own and called them “Munstead glasses.” You can find them online; they still exist.

Their voices were silenced by the first World War which came earlier to the Continent than it did to America.

Then, by the mid-19th century there was a large readership of women who could not afford gardeners but who loved to garden and were more than eager for practical advice.

And the poor … the poor had always gardened, if only in a single window box, but as time went on and literacy became well established, they furnished yet one more readership for books about gardening.

Now, of course, all of the above trends have not only blossomed, they have almost literally cascaded into an ongoing, ever-present genre of gardening books, past and present. Today’s gardeners love to know what their forebears thought and what they were doing 100 or 200 years ago. Reading between the lines, one can chart the progression of women’s lives, their thoughts, their dreams and their opportunities.