Category Archives: Cottage Garden

Hippolyte Bayard’s Garden

Self-portrait in the garden
Salted paper print, 1847
All photographs courtesy of the J Paul Getty Museum (unless otherwise stated)

This remarkable image of a man standing in his garden was produced by Hippolyte Bayard (1801 – 1887), an early pioneer of photography. His record of people and the built environment around Paris, where he lived, provides a vivid insight into the character of cultural life during this period.

Vernacular gardens are by their nature ephemeral places, so Bayard’s photographs from the 1840s showing his own garden, clearly a place he valued, and which features repeatedly in his work, is especially captivating for anyone interested in these spaces.

A strong sense of composition is evident in ‘Self-portrait in the garden’ (1847). The photographer leans on an enormous barrel, on top of which a tall ceramic vessel is placed, creating a connection between these two bulky objects, while a simple wooden ladder, balanced against the garden wall, adds more height and balance. If we look closely at the slightly irregular grid of the rustic trellis forming a background to the photograph, stems of a climbing plant are visible, trained along its structure. At ground level we see various terracotta pots, a watering can, as well as low-growing, evergreen plants – probably box – edging the borders. As well as plants, Bayard appears to have appreciated the objects and paraphernalia of gardening.

Bayard’s interest in the natural world is clear from his earliest photographic impressions made in the 1830s using salted paper prints and cyanotypes. He takes great care in the arrangement of plant specimens, feathers, fragments of cloth and lace. A long raceme of wisteria flowers looks elegant placed next to a leaf with a similar form, while in another image Bayard uses a range of different shapes – the spiky structure of a nigella flower contrasting with the softer outlines of sweet peas and nasturtiums.

Plant specimens
Salted paper print, about 1839 – 1841

Arrangement of flowers
Salted paper print, about 1839 – 1843

Arrangement of Specimens
Cyanotype, about 1842

Three feathers
Cyanotype, 1840 – 1841

Further photographs of Bayard’s garden appear to show the trellis later in the season, clothed with vine leaves. In ‘Chair and watering can in the garden’, the vine leaves, combined with tall hollyhocks in the flower border fill the frame with foliage, while the empty chair seems to invite the viewer to take a seat and enjoy the lush growth.

Chair and watering can in a garden
Salted paper print from a calotype negative, about 1843 – 1847

Self-portrait in a garden
Salted paper print, about 1845 – 1849

‘Garden Wall with tools’ (September 1844) suggests late summer warmth, with slanting shadows in the bright light, and an open shutter on the right, allowing sunlight into the house.

Garden Wall with tools
Salted paper print, September 1844

Leaves on a trellis
Salted paper print, about 1847

Still Life in Bayard’s Garden: Baskets, Watering Can and Planter Pots
1848

Potted Plant in a Garden
Salted paper print, 1849

The wooden gate in ‘Self-portrait in front of garden’ (1845), is another example of rustic woodwork, and features in several photographs of various visitors to Bayard’s garden.

Self-portrait in front of garden
Hand coloured salted paper print June 1845

Two Men and a Girl in a Garden
Albumenised salted paper print, about 1847

Group portrait in garden
Salted paper print, about 1847

Portrait of Georgina Benoist at gate
Salted paper print, about 1840 -1849

Bayard also produced still life studies of flower arrangements, often using dahlias. Originally from Mexico, dahlias began to be cultivated as garden plants in Europe in the 1820s. Dahlias were at the height of their popularity in the 1830s and 40s, when dozens of new double varieties were introduced by plant breeders, including a red flowered form which hadn’t been seen previously. These plants were highly collectible and still relatively expensive to buy, so represent a nod to Bayard’s engagement with gardening fashions. ‘Vase of flowers’ (about 1845 – 1846) shows dahlias in pride of place in his arrangement, with the light from a window creating a splash of brightness on a wall and the vase of flowers casting a beautiful shadow.

Vase of flowers
Salted paper print, about 1845 – 1846

Vase of flowers
Salted paper print, 1847

Flowers in a vase
Salted paper print, about 1845 – 1849

Hippolyte Bayard was employed as a civil servant in the 1830s and, according to the J Paul Getty Museum, ‘devoted much of his free time inventing processes that captured and fixed images from nature on paper using a basic camera, chemicals and light.’ However, Bayard’s achievements were overshadowed by the launch of the daguerreotype in 1839. With the backing of the French government, the daguerreotype became the first commercially successful photographic process.

Bayard’s response to his disappointment at having been overlooked in favour of Daguerre’s rival process was to produce an extraordinary photograph – ‘Self-portrait as a drowned man (1840). The text written on the back of the image reads:

‘The corpse of the gentleman you see here . . . is that of Monsieur Bayard, inventor of the process that you have just seen. . . . As far as I know this ingenious and indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with perfecting his discovery. . . . The Government, who gave much to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life! . . . He has been at the morgue for several days, and no-one has recognized or claimed him. Ladies and gentlemen, you’d better pass along for fear of offending your sense of smell, for as you can observe, the face and hands of the gentleman are beginning to decay.’

Bayard’s creation of this photographic alter ego, expressing both his personal pain and his unfair treatment by the French government, is full of satirical complexity. Today the image seems extraordinarily modern, bringing to mind the work of artists like Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many others, who have used photographic self-portraits in their work.

The powerful message of Bayard’s self-portrait seems to have prompted the French Academy of Sciences to recognise and acquire details of his photographic process and Bayard used the money to purchase better equipment to progress his experimentation. His involvement with photography continued – as well as being a founder member of the Société française de photographie he was also commissioned to record historical sites in France for the Historic Monuments Commission.

Self-portrait as a drowned man 1840
(Wikimedia Commons)

In the studio of Bayard
Salted paper print from a paper negative, about 1845

Links to Bayard’s work at the J Paul Getty Museum below:

July at Perch Hill

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Last week I ventured out of London with some gardening friends for an open day at Perch Hill, the home of Sarah Raven’s garden company. Established in 1999, the company began by supplying flower and vegetable seeds, each variety having first been tested for quality in Sarah Raven’s own garden, and providing courses about growing cut flowers and food crops.

Soon bulbs were added to the seed list, and by the early 2000s the twice yearly catalogues were like a breath of fresh country air, with their modern design, beautiful colour photography (by Johnathan Buckley,) and aspirational lifestyle. As well as the original seeds and bulbs, today the company offers a vast range of bedding plants, perennials, climbers and roses – all carefully curated and chosen for their vibrant colours and long life in the vase.

Here’s a reminder of how the catalogues used to look:

Entering the famous cutting garden from an adjacent field acting as a car park for the day, we passed through a gap in a hawthorn hedge into a blaze of colour. Here, a profusion of cosmos, tagetes, gaillardia, eryngium, and gladiolus in vibrant reds, oranges and purples are being trialled (alongside countless other flowers from the catalogue), while next to the hedge surrounding the garden, blue and purple phlox seemed to glow in the semi-shade.

Wandering at leisure around the garden, as well as planting ideas there are plenty of design tips to take away, many of which could be scaled down in a smaller space. The conical outline of the oast house roof is repeated in the neighbouring Oast garden with several enormous wigwam structures, some supporting clematis ‘Julia Correvon’ with its rich, wine coloured flowers – a reminder how important verticals are in the garden. These structures supply height all year round without casting much shade, as the canopy of a tree or large shrub would.

Elsewhere in the garden some simple ironwork structures left free of any climbing plants provide effective focal points in the densely planted cottage garden style borders.

Next to the house, a small tree, simple brick paving, a collection of good sized planted pots and a wooden chair make for an inviting place to sit, which could be translated into a much smaller space very effectively.

A perfect drying day ..

Perch Hill is close to some well-known gardens and some of the planting seems to reflect this – the English cottage garden style recalls Sissinghurst, while plants like this extraordinary sanguisorba (see below) echo the exuberant perennial planting at Great Dixter. I like the way these places seem to be engaged in an exchange of ideas – a planting conversation.

When we visited, these dahlias were just starting to come into flower. This beautiful rustic wooden fence has weathered to a lovely silvery grey colour.

Roses are a relatively new introduction to the Sarah Raven catalogue, and a welcome one, as it’s always interesting to note which varieties she selects. Despite an invasion by the local deer, there were still some flowers to see in the rose trial garden. One of the orange roses (see below) shows an unusual hint of brown, and in the current catalogue some of the roses share these sepia tones. I imagine these roses would associate well with other contrasting colours, perhaps linking bright pinks and reds.

If you look closely at the next photograph, you’ll see two women in straw hats examining the flowers – it was that kind of place, that kind of day.

Thanks to Louise O’Reilly for organising this enjoyable outing.

There are more open days on 5th and 6th August – Sarah Raven website here

Gertrude Jekyll’s Cottage Gardens

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Cottage porch from Old West Surrey (1904) by Gertrude Jekyll (University of California Libraries)

Gertrude Jekyll’s Old West Surrey Some Notes and Memories (1904) represents something of a departure from her vast output of books and articles about plants and garden design. This study of the locality around her home at Munstead Wood reveals an enthusiasm for all aspects of vernacular architecture and the rural way of life in this part of southern England, which was rapidly disappearing at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Illustrated with dozens of Jekyll’s photographs, details of farm buildings and cottages, trades, furniture, tools and everyday household articles are documented – and, of course, the people she encountered on her travels. Jekyll dedicates a whole chapter of her book to the cottage garden, praising both the skill of the cottage gardener, and the dedication needed to maintain the displays of flowers over the season.

This style of gardening, with roses framing the front door and a profusion of flowers in the borders, was a favourite of Jekyll’s and examples of cottage gardens regularly appear in her other published works. These gardens are still deservedly popular, despite associations of sentimentality and nostalgia, perhaps because this unpretentious style of planting complements smaller houses so well. Any meanness in the scale of the building is softened and the cottage front garden, in particular, lifts the spirits of passers-by as well as providing pleasure for the owners themselves.

Here follow Jekyll’s photographs of cottage gardens from Old West Surrey together with some of her observations about them. Her detailed knowledge of plants makes this a useful resource for anyone wishing to re-create a cottage garden from this period. Links to the text below:

‘The most usual form of the cottage flower-garden is a strip on each side of the path leading from the road to the cottage door. But if the space is a small one, it is often all given to flowers. Sometimes, indeed, the smaller the space the more is crammed into it. One tiny garden I used to watch with much pleasure, had nearly the whole space between road and cottage filled with a rough staging. It was a good example of how much could be done with little means but much loving labour. There was a tiny green-house, of which the end shows to the left of the picture, that housed the tender plants in winter, but it could not have held anything like the quantity of plants that appeared on the staging throughout the summer. There were hydrangeas, fuschias, show and zonal geraniums, lilies and begonias, for the main show; a pot or two of the graceful francoa, and half-hardy annuals cleverly grown in pots; a clematis smothered in bloom, over the door, and, for the protection of all, a framework, to which a light shelter could be fixed in case of very bad weather.

It must have given pleasure to thousands of passers-by; to say nothing of the pride and delight that it must have been to its owner.’

‘There is scarcely a cottage without some plants in the window; indeed the windows are often so much filled up with them that the light is too much obscured. The wise cottagers place them outside in the summer, to make fresh growth and to gain strength. These window plants are the objects of much care, and often make fine specimens.’

‘The deep-rooting Everlasting Pea (Winterbean is its local name) is a fine old cottage plant, and Nasturtiums ramble far and wide. Nowhere else does one see such Wallflowers, Sweet-Williams, and Canterbury Bells, as in these carefully-tended little plots.’

‘Here and there is a clipped yew over a cottage entrance; but this kind of work is not so frequent as in other parts of the country.’

‘China Asters are great favourites – ‘Chaney Oysters’ the old people used to call them – and Dahlias, especially the tight, formal show kinds are much prized and grandly grown.

Sweet smelling bushes and herbs, such as rosemary, lavender, southernwood, mint, sage and balm, or at least some of them were to be found in the older cottagers’ garden plots.’

From Wood and Garden, first published in 1899.

Quintessential cottage garden from Wood and Garden first published 1899.

Derek Jarman’s Garden

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Front cover – Derek Jarman’s Garden with photographs by Howard Sooley (Thames & Hudson (1995)

Earlier this month, as a mark of appreciation for the artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942 – 1994) who died twenty five years ago, BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week featured readings from his journal Modern Nature, published in 1991.

These daily excerpts read by Rupert Everett reminded me what a good diarist Jarman was, recording his daily life with candour, unafraid to reveal his strong opinions and moments of bad temper as well as happier events and encounters. He also understands the power of a few details to sketch a place or person, and fix an image in the mind. By means of this intimate narrative the reader is included in his life, which probably accounts for the great affection still felt for Jarman today.

One of his many enthusiasms was for plants and his final book, Derek Jarman’s Garden (1995) discusses the making of an extraordinary garden in Dungeness, on the Kent coast. This vast area of shingle, with its burning sun and biting gales is an unlikely spot for a garden as you are likely to find, but over time and by using a mixture of native plants and other species that could tolerate the conditions, he succeeded in creating a place of rare beauty.

Jarman’s companion Keith Collins recalls that his garden acquired a new meaning after Jarman was diagnosed with HIV. At first the struggle of the plants against the elements mirrored his battle with illness, and eventually it become a memorial for him. Collins notes, ‘the flowers blossomed while Derek faded.’

This book was a collaboration with photographer Howard Sooley who documented the garden in various stages of its development and contributed to it both through his plant knowledge and his ability to drive – transporting Jarman (a non-driver) from London to Dungeness on Fridays and taking him to some of the area’s plant nurseries. His photographs capture perfectly the character of this stark but beautiful landscape.

Jarman talks about the ancient Persian word ‘paradise’ describing ‘a green place’, and this idea of the ‘paradise garden’ is echoed in the semi-formal design at the front of Prospect Cottage where circular and rectangular beds are created. Edged with large flint stones, these are planted with santolina, valerian and crambe, a sort of kale which grows naturally in Dungeness. He describes the layout of the back garden as ‘random’ with plants interspersed with driftwood and rusted metal sculptures, all assembled from objects found on the nearby shoreline.

Jarman prefers gardens to be ‘shaggy’. He doesn’t like the style of National Trust gardens where ‘not one plant seems to touch its neighbour’. He says, ‘If a garden isn’t shaggy, forget it.’ Christopher Lloyd’s garden at Great Dixter is an example of the relaxed style of planting he favours.

Jarman is also a great advocate of allowing nature into the garden, saying:

‘You see it is rather a wild garden; I really recommend this – out with those lawns and in with the stinging nettles and kerbside flowers: bluebells, pinks, purple orchids, drifts of buttercups – subtlety to the eye. .. I would like anyone who reads my book to try this wildness in a corner. It will bring you much happiness.’

Jarman had a great talent for inspiring people and this book, which never minimises the difficulties of growing plants in such an inhospitable landscape, shows us it is possible to create a garden anywhere, no matter how difficult the circumstances.

Prospect Cottage, Dungeness May 2007 (Wikimedia Commons)

Back cover – Derek Jarman’s Garden with photographs by Howard Sooley (Thames & Hudson (1995)

In this photograph the driftwood and metal sculptures in Jarman’s garden seem to be having a conversation with the overhead cables and pylons of the power station in the distance.

With his sharp eye for beautiful things, Jarman acquired a bench similar to the one on which Mrs Andrews sits from a neighbour, after she died. An antique dealer told him it was a rarity – ‘It’s eighteenth century, built for a lady with a pannier.’ Jarman says, ‘You can see my bench in Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews.’ Derek Jarman’s Garden 1995.

Mr and Mrs Andrews by Thomas Gainsborough circa 1750 (The National Gallery)

Mr and Mrs Andrews by Thomas Gainsborough circa 1750 (The National Gallery) – detail

William Wordsworth’s Cottage Gardens

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Cottages in the Vale of Lorton engraving by Rev Joseph Wilkinson from Select Views in Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire (1810)

Clustered like stars some few, but single most,
And lurking dimly in their shy retreats,
Or glancing on each other cheerful looks,
Like separated stars with clouds between.

These lines from A description of the scenery of the lakes in the north of England, published in 1822, show William Wordsworth’s affection for the traditional lakeland cottage. By comparing cottages to stars in the night sky he suggests both their beauty, and the harmonious pattern formed by their interlinking networks in the landscape of the Lake District.

Wordsworth’s text was commissioned by the Rev Joseph Wilkinson, an amateur artist with a love for the Lakes, and it first appeared anonymously alongside Wilkinson’s engravings as Select Views in Cumberland, Westmoreland and Lancashire (1810). Later editions of the text were updated by Wordsworth and published without Wilkinson’s illustrations.

As well as a guide book for visitors, it discusses how the landscape should be managed sensitively so that natural and man made features co-exist without discord. In a plea which anticipates the creation of national parks and the National Trust, Wordsworth advocates the preservation of the Lake District as ‘a sort of national property, in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy’.

Wordsworth’s cottages are described in detail, from the local stone used in their construction, the whitewashed exteriors, and their gardens. Cottages are generally passed down from father to son, and he notices that additions to the buildings made by each new generation give the cottages an organic, plant-like quality:

‘these humble dwellings remind the contemplative spectator of a production of nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to have grown than to have been erected:- to have risen, by an instinct of their own out of the native rock – so little is there in them of formality, such is their wildness and beauty!’

Rough stone walls and roof slates provide shelter for plants such as lichens, mosses, ferns and flowers so that buildings appear clothed in ‘vegetable garb’. Doubtless, the wet climate also contributed to the abundance of plant life. The typical cottage garden described by Wordsworth matches the modesty of the cottage buildings and suggests an attractive (if idealised) way of life in complete harmony with nature:

‘.. the little garden with its shed for bee-hives, its small beds of pot-herbs, and its borders and patches of flowers for Sunday posies, with sometimes a choice few too much prized to be plucked; an orchard of proportioned size, a cheese press, often supported by some tree near the door; a cluster of embowering sycamores for summer shade; with a tall Scotch fir, through which the winds sing when other trees are leafless; the little rill or household spout murmuring in all seasons:- combine these incidents and images together, and you have the representative idea of a mountain-cottage in this country so beautifully formed in itself, and so richly adorned by the hand of nature.’

The section dedicated to ‘Planting’ indicates how significant Wordsworth considers plant choices to be (as well as the style of buildings) in preserving the character of the Lake District. He is especially concerned with the appearance of larch plantations which, he argues, jar with the landscape, and do not even produce good timber.

On a smaller scale, he is critical of gardens that use too many exotic species:

‘what shall we say to whole acres of artificial shrubbery and exotic trees among rocks and dashing torrents, with their own wild wood in sight – where we have the whole contents of the nurseryman’s catalogue jumbled together – colour at war with colour, and form with form – among the most peaceful subjects of Nature’s kingdom every where discord, distraction and bewilderment!’

His suggestion for planting a domestic garden in this context confines exotic plants to an area very close to the house and blends cultivated shrubs with native species to blur the line between the garden and the landscape beyond:

‘a transition should be contrived, without abruptness, from these foreigners to the rest of the shrubs, which ought to be of the kinds scattered by Nature through the woods – holly, broom, wild-rose, elder, dogberry, white and black thorn &c. either these only, or such as are carefully selected in consequence of their uniting in form,’

This radical approach, it could be suggested, precedes that of William Robinson, who published The Wild Garden sixty years later in 1870 and is usually credited with pioneering naturalistic planting schemes in English gardens.

While Wordsworth examines cottage dwellings and local farming activities very closely, he says little about specific cottage inhabitants. Cottage dwellers are portrayed, along with their buildings and sheep on the hillsides, as part of the landscape rather than individuals with ambitions and desires of their own.

Many of Wilkinson’s engravings (which Wordsworth is said to have disliked) do show people, although the figures don’t integrate particularly well into the mountainous landscapes. Wilkinson’s cottages (and gardens) are more successful, however, showing some of the character Wordsworth admired, and recording a way of life that was already disappearing with the advances of the industrial revolution.

View in the Vale of Newlands

Cottage in the vale of Newlands, between Keswick and Buttermere

Scale, or Skell-gill Farm House, above Portinscale

Cottages at Braithwaite

Cottages at Braithwaite

Cottages in Appelthwaite, looking from Skiddaw

Cottage near Rydal

Vale of the Lune, Lonsdale, looking towards Ingleborough Hill & Hornby Castle.

The Enchanted Garden

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The Enchanted Garden, currently showing at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, London explores our enduring fascination with gardens. Devised in collaboration with the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, this exhibition features around twenty mostly British artists working from 1850 to 1950, examining their individual responses to the garden, and documenting the influence of the Arts & Crafts movement and the Bloomsbury Group on the stylistic development of the English garden.

William Morris’s study for Trellis (1862), his first wallpaper design, shows detail of a wooden garden trellis supporting perching birds and climbing roses. Morris took inspiration from both the natural world and the history of design, and his Trellis pattern brings both these themes together. It also connects today’s domestic gardens with those from the past, as versions of this ordinary structure have been in use supporting climbing plants and dividing space in gardens since medieval times. It is somehow typical of Morris that he has included in his design the tiny nails that hold the trellis structure together.

The cottage garden remains one of the nation’s favourite garden styles and Ralph Hedley’s Roses for the Invalid (1894) is a nostalgic tribute. A young woman and a girl collect pink roses from the garden, adding them to a basket of flowers and strawberries for a sick relative or neighbour in an idealised picture of the poor, but decent and deserving cottage gardener.

The vegetable garden in Stanley Spencer’s Gardening (1945) features two naively painted figures harvesting leeks. The texture of the man’s tweed jacket and corduroy trousers and the detail of the girl’s print dress evoke nostalgia for the Dig for Victory effort of World War Two. The pair work with heads bowed, so deeply absorbed in their task that instead of their faces we see only the crowns of their straw hats.

The theme of the garden as a magical place is explored, where strangeness and beauty occasionally have darker undertones. In Mark Lancelot Symon’s Jorinda and Jorindal (about 1930) a brother and sister have ventured out of the safety of the garden into woods, where they’ve encountered a witch. The children are shown frozen to the spot underneath a flowering hawthorn, a plant once associated with witchcraft, in which Jorinda appears entangled. The intense sunlight flooding every corner of this Pre-Raphaelite inspired painting is in seeming opposition to the dark fate that has befallen the children.

By way of contrast, Monet’s Waterlilies, Setting Sun (on loan from the National Gallery) depicts the garden in late evening. But here the encroaching darkness has no menace, but is filled with stillness and tranquillity.

The gardens belonging to William Morris at Kelmscott Manor, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell at Charleston in East Sussex and Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House, also in Sussex, still provide inspiration for gardeners today. In Grant’s The Doorway the profusion of the summer garden is glimpsed through the open door, in contrast to the cool interior of the house. May Morris’s View of Kelmscott Manor from the Old Barn also uses a doorway to frame the garden, the bleached whiteness of her painting communicating the heat of high summer, almost in the manner of an over exposed photograph.

This may be a small exhibition, but the choice of work and ideas explored are so considered, it stays with you for longer than many larger shows. The Enchanted Garden is at the William Morris Gallery until 27th January 2019 Admission free (closed on Mondays).

Ralph Hedley Roses for the Invalid 1894 Oil on canvas ©Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums

Edmund Blair Leighton September 1915 Oil on panel ©Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums

William Edward Stott The Widow’s Acre c. 1900 Oil on canvas ©Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums

Claude Monet Waterlilies, Setting Sun c. 1907 Oil on canvas ©The National Gallery, London. Bequeathed by Simon Sainsbury, 2006

Lucien Pissarro The Fairy 1894 Oil on canvas ©The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford Presented by the Pissarro family, 1951

Lucien Pissarro My Studio Garden Oil on canvas 1938 ©The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford Presented by the Pissarro Family, 1951

May Morris View of Kelmscott Manor from the Old Barn c. 1880s Watercolour ©William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest

The Enchanted Garden William Morris Gallery

A Cottage and Garden

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from An Account of a Cottage and Garden in Tadcaster. Sir Thomas Bernard, 1797 (Wikimedia Commons)

Picturesque cottages might be so disposed around a park, as to ornament and enliven the scenery with much more effect, than those misplaced gothic castles, and those pigmy models of Grecian temples, that perverted taste is so busy with: but it is the unfortunate principle of ornamental buildings in England that they should be uninhabited and uninhabitable.

This impassioned call for landowners to reject the fashion for ornamental garden structures and build cottages on their estates instead, to address a rural housing shortage caused by inclosure, comes from the social reformer Sir Thomas Bernard’s fascinating text An Account of a Cottage and Garden in Tadcaster (1797). It was published for the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, a charity which Bernard helped to found.

The picturesque cottage garden is a powerful motif in English garden history. The cottage garden represents a modest beauty, simplicity, a place of domestic production, supplying fruit, flowers and vegetables to the owners; perhaps some eggs, or honey. It is unpretentious, a sanctuary, in harmony with nature and its surroundings; it possesses an essential integrity born out of hard work and self-reliance. All these qualities are attractive, of course, and the cottage garden style is one many aspire to re-create today.

The first garden Bernard discusses belongs to Britton Abbot. At the age of 67 Abbot is still working as an agricultural labourer. The interview with Abbot takes place on a Saturday afternoon – his wife is sent to fetch him from a field where he is working a mile or so away. Abbot’s fortunes had nearly collapsed when his previous house and land were enclosed. He appealed to a local landowner, who gave him a strip of land upon which he was able to build his current house and establish the garden. Without this generous assistance, it is likely Abbot and his family would have faced ruin.

Abbot’s garden is about a quarter of an acre and has a hedge enclosing the garden. Cultivated by his wife and noted for its neatness, the garden contains, ‘fifteen apple-trees, one green gage, and three winesour plum-trees, two apricot-trees, several gooseberry and currant bushes, abundance of common vegetables, and three hives of bees’.

The produce the Abbots would expect to harvest annually from the garden amounts to, ‘about 40 bushels of potatoes, besides other vegetables; and his fruit, in a good year, is worth from £3 to £4 a year. His wife occasionally goes out to work; she also spins at home, and takes care of his house and garden’.

Bernard appeals to other landowners to give land to working people to be used in the same way:

The quarter of an acre that Britton Abbot inclosed was not worth a shilling a year. It now contains a good house and a garden, abounding in fruit, vegetables, and almost every thing that constitutes the wealth of the cottager. In such inclosures, the benefit to the country, and to the individuals of the parish, would far surpass any petty sacrifice of land to be required. FIVE UNSIGHTLY, UNPROFITABLE, ACRES OF WASTE GROUND WOULD AFFORD HABITATION AND COMFORT TO TWENTY SUCH FAMILIES AS BRITTON ABBOT’S.

The second case study, contained in an Account of the produce of a Cottager’s Garden in Shropshire (1806) features Richard Millward’s garden. Millward is a collier, and his wife Jane cultivates agricultural land, and a garden, which together amount to just over an acre.

The wife has managed the ground in a particular manner for thirteen years with potatoes and wheat, chiefly by her own labour; and in a way which has yielded good crops, and of late fully equal, or rather superior, to the produce of the neighbouring farms, and with little or no expense; but she has improved her mode of culture during the last six years.

Jane Millward has introduced the new cultivation method after becoming frustrated waiting for local farmers to have the time to plough the larger part of the garden for her. Now she and her husband do all the work themselves. In October, she sows wheat straight into the ground where potatoes have been, so the wheat over-winters in the ground. Then the ground which has grown wheat in the previous year is dug for planting potatoes the following spring. This excerpt gives an impression of the sheer hard work involved planting the potatoes:

The ground is dug for potatoes in the month of March and April, to the depth of about nine inches. This digging would cost sixpence per pole, if hired. After putting in the dung, the potatoes are planted in rows, about twelve or fourteen inches distant. The dung is carried out in a wheelbarrow and it takes a great many days to plant the whole, generally ten days. Her husband always assists in digging, after his hours of ordinary labour.

In the vegetable garden Jane plants peas, beans, cabbages and early potatoes for the family plus turnips which she boils for their pig. Both accounts give us an unusual amount of detail about the gardens and the way they were arranged and used.

Sir Thomas Bernard (1750 – 1818) spent much of his working life on social projects to improve conditions for the poor. He helped to establish the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor and was treasurer of the Foundling Hospital in London. He also established a school for the blind. He was an advocate of vaccination, rural allotments and was instrumental in obtaining consents for the building of the Regent’s Canal.

Below is a link to the 1806 version of Bernard’s text which is very short and well worth reading. Also some contemporary images of rural scenes and cottage gardens and a link to Margaret Willes’s The Gardens of the Working Classes – an extraordinary survey of gardens belonging to ordinary working people in the UK.

An Account of a Cottage and Garden in Tadcaster. Sir Thomas Bernard, 1797 (Wikimedia Commons)

Account of Britton Abbot’s cottage and garden : and of a cottager’s garden in Shropshire : to which is added Jonas Hobson’s advice to his children, and the contrast between a religious and sinful life. 1806 (Biodiversity Heritage Library)