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CHAPTER ONE |
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THE GARDENS OF CROESUS |
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The vast iron wheel of taste that had spun, for much of the eighteenth century, with suchspeed and precision that it seemed scarcely to move, began to slow down toward the century's end. As it began to swing on its axis like the wheel of a gyroscope, it began to throw out small showers of tiny sparks; a cluster of Picturesque gardens, a sudden brilliant flower garden, an 'American' garden, a few rose arbours or a heart-shape bed filled with a mixture of simple annuals. As the swings became wider and wilder in the 1830's, the showers of sparks became more and more showy, and more and more unpredictable. There were sudden bursts of Italianate, or French, or Chinese, or Egyptian gardens, or vast and brilliant parterres filled with exotic plants from the swamps of South America, or immense rockeries supposed to model the Alps, with glaciers of crushed marble and spar, populated with real alpine plants and model chamois goats in tin. There were sudden showers of back-to-nature gardens, of gardens filled only for a season with palms and Indian lilies, or of gardens so refined and chilly and Classical that they were inhabited only by painted iron casts of Roman antiques. As the glare from the slowing wheel's streams of sparks increased, it was possible to see more than the gardens of the rich and the stylish: there were gardens everywhere, in dark industrial cities where artisans cherished the latest variety of rose or auricula, in front of cramped terraced houses, in parks and pleasure grounds and tea gardens, even plots of gaudy bedding plants amongst fresh grey tombstones. Gardens invaded windowsills, drawing-rooms, dirty closes and courtyards of ancient cities, or spawned ideas of ideal 'garden cities' with which to replace them. Gardens became places for the rich to be even more extravagant,places to be given to the turbulent masses to placate them, or places to store the incredible flood of plants that poured into Britain from all over the world. Some gardens became places of the grossest vulgarity; others, fewer, became places of great beauty. It seemed, throughout much of Victorian Britain that everyone gardened, from great aristocrats and magnates, vying with each other to produce ever vaster conservatories, terraces, and parterres, all planted with ever rarer flowers and shrubs, to obscure spinsters, dying curates, artisans, labourers, tradesmen. More surprisingly, almost everyone seems to have written about gardening. The dying curates wrote brave best-sellers completed by an anonymous 'fair hand', the spinsters (from the marvellous muscular Miss Hope of Edinburgh to the egregious 'Rosa' of the 'Cottage Gardeners' pages), charted the changing role of women from delicate flower to muddy planter and designer; artisans and labourers joined florists' societies and sent letters and papers to the increasing numbers of gardening magazines. Garden books poured from the presses; books for gardening children, for bored housewives, for new-minted members of the middle class in crisp 'third rate' houses in Fulham or Manchester or Goole,books by plant collectors, travellers, gardeners to the peerage (so many of these seemed to either write or edit that they must scarcely have had time to manage their employers' no doubt very weedy gardens). Reverends wrote comfortable garden books in the Home Counties, and Ministers wrote them in the dampest and remotest parts of Scotland. Landowners' younger brothers wrote penny pamphlets for the destitute cottagers of their brother's estates, half-mad men wrote impossible books for the impossible urban poor. Though most of this book is about the more modest classes of garden and gardener, and almost everybody with but the tiniest scrap of ground had at least a few flower beds and a rockery scattered with seashells and broken porcelain, the very rich naturally produced the grandest and often most extraordinary examples of each garden element. To get a flavour of the period, it is simplest to look at the great prodigies of Victorian gardening first. Of these vast gardens, like Chatsworth, Trentham, Wimbledon, Cragside, Drummond Castle and Castle Kennedy, there are an enormous number of examples. It sometimes seems as if every great house spent much of the age surrounded by mud and scaffolding. In some of them, the grandee owners invoked memories of their families, or at least their house's past grandeurs, either by supposedly copying rediscovered designs for the garden in question, or re-creating gardens based on their own, or their gardener's reading of early English garden books. Others, and especially the new magnates of America, who had provided themselves with new houses in Gothic or French style, chose to see themselves as Renaissance or seventeenth century princelings, and adopted only moderately Victorianised schemes culled from European sources. Numbers of magnates, whether owning old or new money, chose the fashionable style of the early-Victorian period, which they called, without an enormous amount of justification, 'Italianate', and surrounded their mansions with immense terraces, astonishing fountains, box-edged parterres, statuary, orange trees, and gravel walks that stretched to the horizon. Greedy magnates wanted, and got, everything. Some gardens had Alpine rockeries, Elizabethan knot gardens, models of the Great Wall of China, miniature Scottish glens, two acre conservatories, American gardens, grottoes and Swiss cottages all in such abundance that any visitor who visited each in turn must have been quite bewildered. The sheer scale of some of them was quite remarkable; one of the most astonishing of these was probably Trentham Hall; this was an early seventeenth century site, renowned for its dullness, owned by the Marquis of Stafford. Work on a vast new scheme began as part of the development of the house undertaken by Sir Charles Barry from 1833. This was prodigious. There were proposals for an immense stone and glass conservatory that was to equal the house in size, and to form an entire wing. The gardens, whose initial plans were also by Barry, began to take shape almost as soon as the house was begun. An account from a few decades after their partial completion describes the terraces created from almost flat ground thus: 'the first level is about two hundred feet square, and is divided from the second by a stone balustrade. In the centre is a circular plot with a fountain and pond. A flight of circular steps leads to the second level, an oblong enclosure seven hundred feet long by five hundred feet in breadth, divided by a broad gravel path, bordered with with trees in tubs, and on each side are ponds. At the far end, overlooking the lake, is a handsome stone terrace four hundred and sixty feet long, with a statue of Perseus, and a circular stone landing'. The site had been considered very inauspicious for such magnificence; John Claudius Loudon, author of several influential garden works, and himself an important arbiter of taste, thought that 'We could not help doubting whether even Mr Barry could make anything of this great dull flat place, with its immense mansion, as tame and spiritless as the ground on which it stands; we have seen the plan, however, for the additions and alterations. Let no man henceforth ever despair of a dead flat' No rich one at any rate; the plans he'd seen were very spectacular indeed, and included an island garden in the lake, modelled on Isola Bella. Much of the practical work was at first left to the gardener, a Mr Fleming, who had already worked for the Duke of Sutherland at Dunrobin. Though the Italian garden was begun the year before Fleming was appointed, he soon took both practical and design matters in hand. It was he who altered the course of the River Trent (it flowed into one end of the lake) both as part of a massive drainage system he determined to have for the rather boggy site, but also because it rather muddied what had to be clear water. He also had to enriched the very poor soil of entire area; it took several years of work even to get the kitchen garden going satisfactorily. It comprised about five acres, though this in itself was not unusual for an exceptionally grand household of the day. However, it was an extraordinaryily grand five acres. As one contemporary writer remarked "Although in every sense of the word a Kitchen-garden, it may nevertheless be traversed by ladies in any weather, so perfectly hard and impervious are the walks". Over each of these walks was either a pear tunnel (ladies were not supposed to get the slightest tan from the sun), or trellis to support Mr Fleming's trained peaches, nectarines, and apricots. There were vast parterres on the terraces filled with geraniums and pansies, and the conservatory, in its final state as designed by Fleming (no doubt in an attempt to out-do another famous gardener) was held up by no less than forty cast iron columns. Sash window of the structure were counterbalanced by large hanging baskets of plants, though it's not clear if the windows closed once these began to dry out. There was such an enormous acreage of gravelled walks in the garden that it taxed even the resources of the colossal Trentham staff to keep it all clean and weed free. Undaunted, the head-gardener developed a unique piece of machinery to do just this. He put it on show at the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, and it began to save his employer at least part of the hundred pounds a year (that was two men, full time) that it took just to keep moss from the paths. The new machine was a boiler on wheels, and looked remarkably like one of the equally new railway engines. However, the boiler contained water, with two pounds of of salt to every gallon, and the gravel was watered with the boiling mixture”. Fleming was clearly aiming for some sort of Paxtonian fame. Unlike Paxton, though, he was an extremely orthodox gardener, and had bursts of eccentricity rather then inspiration. He preferred the use of glazed pots to porous ones, saying that they didn't get waterlogged. He preferred zinc ones even more, so it's surprising that all his plants didn't at once collapse from zinc poisoning. In the kitchen garden, fruit was still being fixed to the wall by nails (albeit rust proofed) and bast fibre, long after most progressive gardeners were using horizontal wires. His odd gardening must have cost his employer rather more than the weeding engine saved. If you've enjoyed the read so far, and would like to support the site, please click through to some of the advertisers. Many thanks! In an entirely different, and rather earlier style, was the astonishing flower garden at Wimbledon House. This was another ancient and notable garden site, having been owned by Charles I, then General Lambert. Inventories over the centuries list astonishing rarities, some of the tougher of which where discovered, gone wild, when Victorian collectors searched the locality. Whatever beauties it once may have shown, by the early nineteenth century it occupied a rather ambiguous position; it was on such a scale that few commentators felt themselves in a position to make any but the most oblique criticism. The house, described with some understatement as 'first rate', was set in an undulating park, with lakes and groves of trees. All this was reasonably standard. What was extraordinary was the astonishing flower garden, the ground totally covered with oval, round and moon shaped„ beds, stuffed tight with plants. A contemporary described it thus:"But the grand feature of the place, in a gardening point of view, is the flower-garden, which occupies upwards of three acres, and contains above two hundred flowerbeds. These beds are of different shapes and sizes, and they are scattered over the surface with very little regard to regularity or symmetry; the object being, apparently, to get as many beds as possible into the given space, allowing a small strip of grass between them. In point of general design, therefore, this flower-garden has little to recommend it; but, from the great number of beds, and almost endless variety of the kinds and colours of the flowers they contain, it presents a dazzling surface, of the most brilliant colours, mingled together in confusion". Two hundred flower beds up to about fifteen feet in diameter might contain approximately sixty thousand plants, all, in this case annuals or not winter hardy, and often replanted twice or even three times a year. This was a fairly modest requirement. For sheer scale, some of the Scottish estate gardens, where land was rather cheaper than in the south of Britain, won the palm. When Queen Victoria visited that country in 1841, and journeyed to Drummond Castle, passing through villages decorated with the new red or yellow dahlias, her arrival was witnessed by a local journalist, James Buist of Perth. Lord Willoughby d'Eresby, Drummond's owner, had adorned the main entrance not with dahlias,but simply with heather. Beyond that, Gaelic speaking tenants, carefully selected for their looks, were lined up along the immense drive. The journalist, captivated, wrote that "The policy [a Scottish word for pleasure grounds] extends to two miles every way. . . On the North there is a beautiful artificial lake, with the foliage depending to the water's edge, and rendered animated and gaudy by the troops of swans. . . On the south side, and immediately fronting the principal face of the Castle, lie the matchless flower gardens of Drummond, which, though situated in the north, are as well known by repute to every florist, and every man of cultivated taste in London, as the lion of Northumberland at Charing Cross. . . We have no meaner authority than the Duchess of Sutherland for saying that these gardens are unequalled in Europe. . . They have been called Dutch; but the fact is, that the old common garden of Drummond has been transformed by Lord Willoughby into the floral gem which it now is." He went on, with an entirely Victorian lack of embarrassment at using flattery "It reminds the writer of the hanging gardens of Babylon", and he proceeded to describe Drummond terrace by terrace. On the lowest level there was, and still is, if now rather debased, the "nearly level expanse of the Drummond gardens, laid out in every conceivable form of beauty, containing every floral treasure known in our clime, interspersed with beautiful pieces of statuary, and the walks shorn by the scythe, and levelled by the roller, till they have contained the BEAU IDEAL of a velvet sward. . . " However, if Drummond or Taymouth had scale to help them, one English garden had, above any other, wealth to ensure its fame, and a gardener of genius to ensure its beauty: Chatsworth. This was, and still just remains, stupendous. Its gardener, whom we shall meet often in these pages, was Joseph Paxton. Here, in a garden already containing magnificent seventeenth century features, he created for the Duke of Devonshire, an astonishing new paradise of immense rocky waterfalls, shaded gorges, nearly two acres of conservatory constructed on entirely new principles, formal canals with astonishing fountains, and parterres in the newest taste. Although the conservatory's builder, poor Mr Mankey, despite desperate advertising throughout the 1840's, eventually went bankrupt, the conservatories he built saw the first flowers of the astonishing waterlily Victoria regia. This most extraordinary of all Victorian flowers was discovered on the Amazon, on January 1st. 1837 by Sir Robert Schomburgk. Seeds first germinated at Kew in 1847, but the plant first flowered at Chatsworth the following year. However, the Chatsworth glasshouses saw the first flowering of innumerable new introductions, whether huge specimens of exotic orchids like the one eventually named Dendrobium paxtonii, or of plants like some of the Verbena species that went on to become popular bedding plants in the tiniest of gardens. Curiously, for all the magnificence and expense of the these colossal structures and the interest of the plants that they contained, glasshouses, at least in the early part of the Victorian period, were a masculine preserve, and for an odd reason. It was believed, as we shall see, throughout the period that perfume had an adverse effect on the health, particularly of ladies, but also of anyone of refined breeding. A writer, probably Paxton himself, suggested of orchid houses that "Not one in ten of the houses expressly devoted to their culture, can be entered by the most robust among the higher classes, much less by delicate persons or by ladies, without experiencing highly uncomfortable and overpowering sensations, and entailing unpleasant and even dangerous consequences. Everyone will acknowledge that this is a state of things which urgently demands some remedial measures, if such can be applied consistently with the safety and prosperity of the plants" Of course, Chatsworth, too, had its vast bedding schemes, and outdoors was entirely in keeping with the conservatory interiors. Early in the century, the bedding arrangements were designed by Paxton himself. He began to popularise his own geometrical plans by publishing rather watered down variants in the horticultural press so that even middle class readers could emulate at least part of the gardens of those socially far above them. While by mid-century there were hordes of nurserymen selling job lots of bedding plants for middle and lower class gardens (one London nurseryman sent out, each season, eighty thousand plants of any one variety of geranium, and most nurserymen stocked at least a hundred varieties - then were verbenas, calceolarias, fuchsias,and so on), grand gardens almost always used plants from their own glasshouses. Indeed, the new engineering possibilities of cast iron and cheaper glass (once the associated taxes were repealed) made the propagation and overwintering of all the new bedding plants, and so bedding itself, possible. It was estimated in the 1850's that even an ordinary middling landowners' garden, with a fairly simple design might need something approaching one hundred thousand bedding plants a year. For instance, at Thornham Hall in Suffolk, all the flower beds contained about two to three hundred plants each, and there were seventy five beds on average. They contained all the usual plants, though the gardeners also putout more interesting things like Felicia, Gaillardia, Cuphea, Lantana and Gazania. Throughout most of the 1850's there were also seventy five smaller beds, and each of those contained about twenty five to thirty plants, so the total for an average summer planting must have been a very modest sixteen thousand plants. If that isn't too surprising, it is important to remember not only that they were all planted in a very short space of time, often a week or so in early June (they lasted until the end of September, and were then rehoused under glass for the winter), but that there was often a spring and a winter bedding scheme as well. By 1871, the Thornham Hall bedding scheme included not only tender plants from South America, but on some of the new pansies. Though the gardener thought that they were all part of Viola cornuta, most were hybrids, either 'Sandbeck Gem' or 'Pride of Stafford'. The gardener planted four thousand of them in 1870, and planned for eight to ten thousand of them in 1871. Critics of violas claimed that they didn't flower much in bad seasons, though he maintained that they did if well fed. He mixed them with 'Mangles' pelargonium (still to be found, though the violas have vanished) or 'Beatons variegated Nosegay' (now lost). Though the colours must have clashed, ten thousand visitors admired the whole ensemble very much, and ladies especially were reported to have liked the pansies, calling them "beautiful and so sweetly innocent". Thornham Hall was modest indeed. The tremendous parterre at Castle Ashby was designed for the Marquess of Northampton by Joseph Newton of Oxford Terrace. It was planted up on what Newton hoped to establish as a new 'shading principle'. It isn't now clear how this was done, though presumably each section of the parterre was planted with various shades of one colour to get a sort of needlework effect. Each of the parterre's squares had sides of one hundred and ten feet, and was filled with curlicue box-work. Each square needed five thousand flowering plants each time twas planted. Newton was, understandably, a strong supporter of the parterre. Their design provided him with an income, and their possession flattered the ancient lineage of his patrons, for while some of them merely alluded to such things by their fake 'historicism', others actually copied, in flowers, the family coat of arms (some aristocratic gardeners still do this, though the sight of so many not too dissimilar municipal 'flower clocks' should have put them off). Of course, Victorian prodigiousness was not only shown by the quantities plants put in the ground, or in the cost of the conservatories built, but also in the pretentions of the work undertaken. One aspect of this was shown in the constant attempt by some gardeners to recreate or even out-do the gardens of the past. Naturally, in a garden like Chatsworth, owned by someone as enormously rich and enormously aristocratic as the Duke of Devonshire, no particular need was felt to recreate lost grandeur; the duke was perfectly content to create grandeur now. Other less grand persons had, though, a less simple attitude to the past, and felt that what of the past they had left reflected too poorly on their present status. Belton House, owned by Lord Brownlow, had once had a notable formal garden in the late seventeenth century; one quite grand enough to have been illustrated by Kypp and Knyff. In the eighteenth century, the park had been rather well landscaped, but in 1850, Lord Brownlow, following one aspect of the taste of his time, wanted once more a formal environment for his lovely house. As he knew what the gardens looked like in the seventeenth century, it seemed an easy matter to recreate them. He certainly claimed that he was making a replica of what had once been there. The results were rather surprising; and considerably less grand than the original. Photographs show a very Victorian looking scheme indeed. A few pieces from the original plan have indeed been used, but they ended up giving absolutely no idea of the original richness of effect, and the alternate obelisks and ball made of yew were set in the sort of carpet bedding that would have quite horrified seventeenth century owners. Elsewhere, entirely modern tea roses were mixed with also fairly modern herbaceous flowers, giving borders that look, at least to modern eyes, very much of the mid-nineteenth century. Rather similar recreations took place even at Hatfield, the seat of the ancient Cecil family. There, the immense parterres were based on designs taken from from seventeenth century books. The results were much more satisfactory. However, even there, the age's passion for piling embellishment upon embellishment took over in the designs for the balustrades. They look entirely Victorian. Worse, even though the beds were properly seventeenth century in shape, the plants in themwere clearly Victorian too, and the bedding infill was studded with a central standard rose, a yucca or cordyline. If you've enjoyed the read, and would like to support the site, please click through to some of the advertisers. Many thanks! The flower bed and the conservatory were not the only garden elements used as badges of wealth and extravagance. Whatever the style of the garden, and whether aristocratic or suburban,everyone had to have certain elements which have become identified almost as the Victorian garden; rockeries, rustic summer houses, arboretums, ferneries, rose gardens and the rest. Of these, the rockery gave rise to some of the most astonishing vulgarities of all. Books and articles in praise of rockeries also show up the quite extraordinary lengths to which Victorian self-deception could be taken. Of all the other garden elements, the rockery has had by far the longest life (it's still alas with us). Dealt with in more detail later, it's worth looking a just a few examples here. In the 1840's for instance, the rockery was commonly made out of almost any sort of junk, whether broken porcelain plates, broken bricks, flints, and tattered statuary. By 1853, the 'Book of the Garden' suggests that it should be made more tastefully of "stones, the fused masses of brick procured from brick kilns, or indeed, any coarse material most convenient to be got. These are built up in the most rugged and mis-shapen forms imaginable and afterward covered over with Roman cement, and formed into recesses, projections, and overhanging crags, according to the taste of the artist. Sufficient apertures are left for receiving soil, in which rock plants are planted. When the whole is perfectly dry and set, it is painted with oil paint to represent veined or stratified granite, or any other kind of natural rockwork that may be desired. Here is no unnatural mixture of shells, fossils, petrifications, architectural remains, and natural masses of stone huddled together, as if it were the omnium-gatherum of the vestiges of creation' Rockeries were soon so important a part of the gardens scene that there were, for a while, fleets of rockery designers. The best of these was a Mr Gray, who did the Colosseum grotto at Regents Park, many others in London, as well as rockeries at country houses like Clumber. While in the capital, most rockeries were, at mid-century, often just a pile of stones around the roots of a tree, or consisted of a pile of stone, broken bricks, glass debris or old tree roots, some were already extraordinarily grand There was tremendous interest in exotic examples of 'rockwork' for most of the nineteenth century. Many were unashamedly unnatural in appearance (deliberate artifice, as we shall see was a sought-for quality in the century's early years). However, one of the most natural-looking examples was at Redleaf near Tubridge Wells. This was made of real rocks, set together to look as if they were part of a natural outcrop (the sort that garden books still suggest). The most unnatural rockery was at the Duke of Marlborough's private garden at Blenheim. Though this was actually formed on a scar of natural rock, it had been hewn into zig-zag paths with numerous hand-cut niches on each side to receive plants. However, most of the niches were made of spar, a richly coloured, expensive and rather glittery natural rock. The final result was a rich and sparkling effect, which can have done little to make the plants it contained look at home. Hybrid in effect was the rockery at Syon Park, where a pile of only moderately large granite stones had been shipped from Scotland, and, assembled, compared by most London journalists "to the scenery of a Highland glen". Only Jane Loudon (whom we shall meet throughout this book), was brave enough to "confess there does not appear to me the slightest resemblance. In fact, the Syon rockwork is so overpowered by the magnificent conservatory in front... that it becomes quite a secondary object... It consists of masses of granite, intermixed with broken capitals planted with ornamental flowering plants, principally exotic. . . ". However, in her books she approved of some which must, in their hey-day, have appeared equally odd. She much admired "the most remarkable of all... that of Lady Broughton, at the Hoole, Cheshire, which, indeed, standsquite alone, the only one of its kind. The design for this rockwork was taken from a small model, representing the mountains of Savoy, with the valley of Chamouni... The plants are all strictly alpine - the only liberty taken being the mingling of the alpine plants of hot and cold countries, or rather of different elevations, together, and this is contrived very ingeniously, by placing fragments of dark stone to absorb the heat, round those that require most warmth, and fragments of white stone to reflect the heat, round those that require to be kept cool'. Attempts to reproduce natural mountain scenery in more or less miniature form remained a theme throughout the nineteenth century, and eventually gave rise to some splendid gardening rows. Another major badge of wealth, even for suburban gardens (it is important to remember that at least the early Victorian concept of 'suburban' included property now mostly used as golf clubs, nursing homes or borstals), was the arboretum or pinetum. "An arboretum, vaguely considered, is merely a collection of indigenous or exotic trees, disposed according to the taste of the proprietor... In modern arboretums, every genus or tribe of plants is grouped together, more or less densely in estates of considerable circuit, or in botanical or other public gardens. Such departments create a variation, and sometimes a pleasing one. They also furnish the beholder, at one gaze, with a knowledge of the hardy ligneous species of every genus, tribe or order of plants, and their position in the natural system of botany". All very laudable, and many surviving arboretums are today very beautiful. However, they were also wonderful places to show wealth (it takes a lot of space to collect trees, especially ones whose seed may have been collected by one's own collector in, say, North America), and status (the first specimen of such and such a species in the country, or one planted by a member of the royal family - a ploy which still continues). Even without a rockery or an arboretum, garden mania soon invaded the actual house itself, and in unlikely and new ways, partly made possible by new technolgy, partly by a wider spread of the new wealth. For middle class homes, nice hardy plants became, at least for a few month at a time, denizens of the drawing room. It is quite common to find pictures of "Yuccas, New Zealand Flax, Palms, India-rubber, and Ivy grouped around a Sofa Arbour in the Drawing-room". To do this properly, there was a thriving trade in curious metal frames, rather like garden arches on castors, to place over each over-stuffed Neo-Classical sofa. At the grandest social levels, things were correspondingly expensive. At one ball, given at Bridgewater House, St James, attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales, the public rooms were turned into a jungle, except for the incongruous crimson baize carpet and grey granite columns. On this occasion, new technology, money and gardening combined. A magazine correspondent wrote that "During the past season, Mr John Wills, one of our most extensive floral decorators, has used huge blocks of real ice tastefully arranged in the form of obelisks and rockeries. These, when illuminated from behind and wreathed in Ficus repens,Creeping Jenny, Ivy, Lygodium scandens or Virginia creeper, are very beautiful,and give a most delicious idea of coolness even during the hottest summer weather" Fun though all this must have been, then as as now, not all the taste shown by even the richest of patrons, was universally admired. We shall come acrosss some bizarre rockeries later, but the vogue for the 'rustic', which started in Regency times, went on to produce some equally odd structures. 'Rustic work' made use of odds and ends collected from the forest to make seats, tables, plant baskets, pergolas, even whole summer houses or hermits huts. All these were supposed to look enchantingly natural, and probably did make a refreshing if uncomfortable change to the over-upholstered and densely furnished main rooms of the house. However, the Victorian urge to decorate took even these toys over, and numbers of 'craft' techniques became devoted to their beautification. Rustic sofas became so covered in twigs, roots and cones that they began to look like pieces of woody coral. By the 1850's, arbours, moss houses and covered seats were similarly elaborated (again, they're dealt with in more detail later). Thousands of such things still exist, now usually lop-sided and half rotten. Some are very pretty indeed, but all are just a tiny fraction of the enormous quantities that once graced almost every garden. The vogue was so strong that 'rustic' seats, vases, bird baths, sundials were soon appearing, made in all sorts of entirely non-rustic materials like cast iron, terracottaand concrete. Most seem to have been designed for urban consumers whose contact with the coutryside and therefore the sources of material for constructions was slight: few of them are in the least attractive. If the rich were inexorably drawn to the excess that their wealth allowed, it was impossible for thosevwithin, if even partly, their orbit not to emulate them. Some of the middle class gardens became places to visit in their own right, and made their owners well-known in the gardening world. The most extraordinary of these even had a waiting room built onto the street wall to accomodate those who arrived on open days too early to be allowed in. Biddluph Grange had such a garden, and was the subject of a series of articles in the 'Gardeners Chronicle' of 1862. It was clearly quite extraordinary. Parts of the scheme remain today much as they were, though enough has vanished to remove the remarkable density of garden 'features' crammed into a rather small area. Biddulph Grange had: a lean-to greenhouse for tender rhododendrons and camellias, as well as glasshousesfor all the fruit crops that could be cultivated in them, terraces, private gardens (the general public were not allowed access to these), a couple of parterre gardens, one for coloured sand (an idea taken from some seventeenth century gardens, and which caught a number of Victorian imaginations), one devoted to all the new verbenas being bred by the nurserymen, a large patch of hardy rhododendrons surrounding a pond with an islet set in its middle, narrow winding walks and tunnels,endless rockwork, part of which was an imitation of the Great Wall of China, planted about with bamboos and some of the newly imported hostas, a pinetum (an arboretum devoted to pine species, with its conifers planted, for some reason, on irregular banks), a bowling green, a quoit ground, a raised terraced crescent, again possibly modelled on seventeenth century features, and planted with strips of rhododendrons (as is the grandest of the surviving and full-scale seventeenth century examples at Castle Kennedy), and an Italian parterre built around four very un-Italian araucarias (the Chilean monkey puzzle tree). However, after all that, what impressed one journalist most of all was that "after leaving the Wellingtonia avenue, which is stopped by a very large and handsome vase, this walk ascends a hill so abruptly, through a mass of oldplantation, that being covered with the yellow sandstone of the district, and terminated by a rocky knoll, through which there is a winding, invisible tunnel, the walk presents the appearance of a large obelisk, backed by a dark hill, and had a most curious and startling effect". Even more lay in wait. The writer went on: "Between figs. 4 and 6 is an ornamental cherry orchard, the trees being planted on little mounds, surrounded and supported by closely clipped Cotoneaster, and turned into a pretty pendant bell shape, the intermediate spaces being grass. . . [then]. . . we enter the Egyptian court, shut in by yew hedges and decorated by stone sphinxes... a yew pyramid over the tunnel to the east, which last is entered through a fine Egyptian doorway [this still exists and is indeed very handsome]. This tunnel leads to a somewhat darkened apartment, with cavern views etc. , and there are some adjoining rooms adapted for rural fetes. The whole opens, but through a porch in the style of an old Cheshire black and white timbered cottage, towards the Pinetum... ' Yet it still wasn't finished: 'By another route from the terrace to the west of the Egyptian Court, a singular and most characteristic Chinese scene is approached, through an admirable root garden... A Chinese temple and terrace occur... some ruins and part of a supposed Chinese wall... [with] elevated rockwork... Moutan paeonies" The Chinese garden was full of idols, joss houses, and the so-called great Wall, really an rather elongated rockery, complete with towers, temples, winding paths, winding ponds, and even a couple of dragon-shaped beds filled with red gravel. The whole area was planted with hostas, skimmias, bamboos, ferns, japanese maples, aucubas, Lilium giganteum, but also various American plants and purple beeches. Every part of the garden was kept to a meticulous standard, perhaps financed by the five shilling entrance fee. It must have been rather like an American theme park, and was open free on the first Monday of each summer month, though any other day cost five shillings . It was, of course, closed on Sunday. While Biddulph was the result of the gardening mania of a county family, the same sort of passion for excess took place in the suburbs of almost every major city. Slightly earlier than Biddulph, the best known of the London prodigy gardens was that of a Mrs Lawrence, her husband a surgeon, who transformed twenty eight acres near Drayton Green in the late 1820's and 30's. The house, called the Lawrentian villa, had a garden that was "unquestionably the most remarkable of its size in the neighbourhood of London, on acount of the great variety and beauty which have been created in it, under the supervision of Mrs Lawrence, FHS, the lady of the celebrated surgeon of that name" The space contained four separate decorative gardens, a small farm, and a rather compressed sort of parkland. Loudon thought that "the secret of producing this variety consists in introducing numerous small groups of trees and shrubs, sometimes combined with flowers or climbers etc, other times with rockwork, and with statues, fountains, basketwork and so on" Mrs Lawrence was fortunate to have six gardeners... with one or two women for collecting insects and dead leaves, and during winter, three. It is only further necessary to add, that all the different scenes in these gardens, all the beds of flowers, pieces of rockwork, etc, as well as the greenhouses, and hot-houses, were designed by Mrs Lawrence herself, and executed under her direction" She plainly liked the picturesque style, for Loudon's woodcuts show dense and intertwined planting, often with details like a rustic arch framing a vase with a view of the paddock behind. However, she also had a long Italian walks dotted with statuary, urns, and an awful fountain, a so-called French parterre with rather little French about it, a pond in a wirework basket swathed with roses and with tented Turkish pavilion beyond, and even a rockwork arch with fountain at either side, and surmounted by a kneeling Cupid. If you've enjoyed the read, and would like to support the site, please click through to some of the advertisers. Many thanks! A later edition of the Suburban Gardener (edited by Loudon's wife, Jane) went on; "this villa may be considered as a model of its particular kind... Everyone cannot have so many fountains or form rockwork of spars, fossil organic remains, and other geological specimens brought from distant parts of the country, but everyone may sink in the ground a few small wooden cisterns lined with lead, and supply them with water by hand, as it evaporates in the summer season. Some of these may serve as brilliant spots to attract the eye, and others as habitats for aquatic plants. The margins of basins of this sort can be effectually disguised with rockwork" She then describes some of the new additions, such as rockwork fountains supporting weird figures, more paths, more flower baskets, one backed by a pair of simpering nymphs arising out of a picturesque planting. However, her tastes were sharper than those her husband had allowed himself. "We are aware" she wrote, "that there are many persons, of a simple and severe taste, who will think that the Lawrencian Villa is too highly ornamented with statues and sculptures; but allowance must be made for individual taste, for devotion to the subject, and for the limited extent of the place. Were Mrs Lawrence in possession of a villa of one hundred acres, there can be no doubt that she would display on her lawn a taste as appropriate to a residence of that extent, as the taste she has displayed at Drayton Green" Mrs Lawrence may not have noticed the barbs, but she did get a larger garden. But whatever opulent gardens had in the way of fleets of gardeners, of parterres the size of football pitches, or rockeries like scaled-down Mont Blancs with glaciers of crushed marble, the richness of the garden culture (if it can be so called) is also expressed by the diversity of people who care about gardens and gardening, and by the diversity of the things they do. Victorian Britain and, later in the century, America, seems to teem with energetic gardeners. This energy was fuelled not only by an explosion of business ventures, from publishers of garden part-works to manufacturers of gadgets like the essential 'Flor-umbra' (a flexible umberella to shade standard roses from the sun) or of patent earwig catchers but also of extraordinary gardeners like Mr. Thomson, of Clovenfords near Galashiels, in the Scottish borders, who when he retired, built himself at that village a vast glassed-over vineyard, and produced many tons of ripe grapes for the London market. There was an explosion of gardening at all social levels. This is best shown by the sudden burst of excitement about gardening societies. These ranged from ones devoted to special plants, like the 'Ipswich Cucumber Society' that had its first show in 1842, the Pelargonium Society set up on June the 14th of the same year, or the Pansy Society, based in Falkirk, that had its first show in 1844, to more generalised societies like the 'York Grand Floricultural and Horticultrual Society' at whose great exhibition of 1842, was offered a First Prize of one hundred pounds for the best stand of twenty four dahlia blooms (that was about the salary for a head-gardener for an entire year), and, of course, the London Horticultural Society, who shows were and remain, under a different title, famous. Whilst most of the horticultural societies were set up for town-based enthusiasts, 'cottage garden societies' sprang up to encourage rural gardeners. Some societies were set up by the local gentry to teach the local workers how to use their small gardens to improve their living condition; others sprang from humbler origins and less worthy motives. By 1860, there were such societies scattered liberally over the countryside, and often carefully kept separate from the local horticultural group, especially during the show season. At most local shows, fancy fruit and flowers from the gardens of the gentry usually won (still often the case, except perhaps for dahlias and chrysanthemums). At cottagers shows, the rural middle class were sometimes allowed to enter, as at a show in Wales in 1861, when "a few plants and fruits for decoration we resent by the neighbouring gentry, but in no case was a farthing of the funds applied to any but its legitimate use, for though farmers and village tradesmen were invited to compete, it was perfectly understood that if any prize was awarded to their productions, the value reverted to the funds of the Society. Prizes were given for collections and also for each kind of vegetable and fruit; for window plants in collections of three, and single specimens of cut flowers. One contemporary wrote 'Some of the collections of cut flowers were very beautiful, and I recollect a bouquet of these (in an old china vase) composed of Ferns, Foxgloves, Grasses, Orchids, honeysuckles, eglantine etc. managed so artfully and elegantly that the Queen herself would have been proud of it.' Yet other examples were the charmingly named 'Bletchingley and Nutfield Cottage Garden Society'; this consisted of just two parishes covering about nine thousand acres. The whole area was agricultural, an contained about two hundred and fifty cottages with gardens, all inhabited by agricultural workers, some mechanics and gardeners.The membership was divided into classes so that the latter didn't always win. All the cottagers' gardens were inspected by the judges (no doubt the local gentry), and there were four winners per class; each was awarded a grand five shilling prize. Entries included potatoes, cabbages, carrots, peas, onions, parsnips, turnips, rhubarb, red and white beans, blackcurrants, goosberries and raspberries (in all about thirty crops). In Lincolnshire, the Sleaford Cottage Garden Society had yet another set of rules: the winner on two consecutive years was debarred from further entry (something that many modern flower shows should still consider), but got a ten shilling prize if his or her garden was still up to scratch. Entry classes for that society included the amusing 'Basket of fruit, vegetables and flowers, arrangement to matter' The reporter inclined to the view that the society had actually improved local cottage gardens. However, perhaps the main energies of the whole society-forming movement was directed to the florists societies. There had, of course, been 'florists flowers', that is, groups of flowers like hyacinths, tulips and anemones, that had attracted passionate admirers since the seventeenth century. In Victorian Britain, the number of newly imported flower species was so vast, that all sorts of new things had caught the florists' eyes. Suitable groups of plants needed, above all, to be easily crossed, with plenty of resultant variations. It didn't matter too much about the plant's actual scale, or even the ease with which they were grown. Mid-Victorian grandees took up rhododendrons, camellias and orchids as their florists group; poorer folk took up violas and pansies, calceolarias, dahlias and chrysanthemums, or kept going on with their pinks, picotees, sweet williams and auriculas. While the old florists flowers were continually said to be going out of fashion, they were never entirely eclipsed, and some of the old societies devoted to their culture still exist. However, the superstructure of nurserymen/breeders built upon them did decay, though as many of the nurseries that closed down were often on the outskirts of major cities, and the owners of the land no doubt retired to reasonable prosperity. New nurseries, devoted to new flowers sprang up to replace them, like Mr.Chater's specialising in hollyhocks,or others growing new gladioluses, geraniums, pentstemons, paeonies and so on. All this pressure for new varieties (partly economic, for second-season varieties were worth almost nothing), caused an extraordinarily fast development of new types of flower. John Claudius Loudon wrote in the late 1830's that "Floriculture is, at present, unquestionably the most flourishing department of gardening; and nothing in this way can be more remarkable than the immense number of roses, dahlias, and hearts-eases raised and sold by commercial growers in Britain, France and Germany. Even the Chinese chrysanthemum has been subject to British improvement, and a number of new and beautiful varieties have lately been raised from seeds saved at Oxford, and other places in England, and in Guernsey. The establishment of flower shows by the London Horticultural Society, at their garden, has been the means of producing some splendid specimens of what may be called botanical floriculture' Only a decade later, some sophisticated gardeners were beginning to find it all too much, and one agonised writer proclaimed in 1842: "I really liked heartsease till the florists called them pansies - a pretty name though, and Shakespearean too, - and put a thousand and one varieties in their catalogues, advertising flowers "as big as a penny piece"; and what in the name of moderation, is one to do with "four thousand new seedling, shrubby calceolarias, all named varieties", beautiful as they undoubtedly are?.... Woe unto the flower that becomes the fashion! It is as sure to be spoilt as the belle of the season. How well I remember the coming out, the first introduction, of that brilliant little creature, the scarlet verbena! It was engaged a hundred deep the moment it appeared; the gardening world was utterly infatuated, and fifteen florists, balked in their possession of it, hanged themselves in their own potting houses" Rules for how a perfect flower should look were of tremendous importance to the florists and to the nurserymen. Varieties that won at the shows sold at great premiums, and various attempts were made at standardising the sorts of thing that won throughout the country. Naturally, what was the 'perfect' flower aroused considerable debate, even acrimony. Various writers claimed to have put forward the 'correctest' set of rules, none more vociferous than William Glenny. This gentleman, who advertised himself as an ' improver of estates,sale and purchase of property,advisory work on fruit flowers and vegetables, as well as design of grounds, planting, construction of conservatories etc', wrote, in 1847 'Gardening for the Million'. A snappy title like this covered all sorts of topics, including the statement that florists flowers take up too much time, and working men should grow only useful plants! This didn't discourage him from going on to proclaim " THE STANDARDS OF PERFECTION FOR THE PROPERTIES OF FLOWERS AND PLANTS ORIGINATED AND DEFINED BY GEORGE GLENNY FHS." "I believe that there are many old florists, who would give their ears had the idea of publishing certain rules for judging flowers by a perfect model, instead of by comparison with general favourites crossed their mind instead of mine; they would make great sacrifices to be the author of 'The Properties of flowers and Plants. ' He does, amongst the fogs of delusion, admit that Maddock and Loudon have already published some ideas. However, he says of most of these, that they contradict themselves; this in the light of his next few pages, is quite surprising. "However, it is not to be disputed, that Maddock's was much before the cultivators of his day in defining the 'criterion' of a flower, as I have been before other people of my day. Nobody can question the fact, that I struck out into a new path; the only point they have to settle is whether I am in the right or the wrong road." "Let me ask some who feel inclined to detract from my merit, if there be any, of originating any standards, where they will find the criterion's the Geranium? the Pansy? Rose? Fuchsia? Chrysanthemum? Verbena? Cineraria? Rhododendron? Azalea? and half a score others, which none had ventured to mention? And why was I to be the subject to constant injustice and robbery by persons who ought to be the last to take so mean an advantage?" "Mr Wood of Nottingham, Mr Slater, of Manchester, and some others, gave the properties of certain flowers, which had previously been mentioned by Maddocks, Loudon, and others, as if they were fair game. It was unkind, however, and unhandsome, not to give the authority on THE POINTS WHICH I ORIGINATED." When examined, the standards of which he was so proud, seem to have been more or less the same in every flower - perfect circularity, and either perfectly flat, or only half-globular. This applied to tulips (concave), as well as to dahlias and chrysanthemums (convex). All sorts of flower had to have smooth edged petals, and some of his systematisations seem deliberately outrageous. How can anyone have grown a hollyhock thus: "there is no fixed height for the plants; but the flowers should begin one foot from the ground, and open all at once". His botanical perceptions were equally bizarre, and often just plain wrong. Of hollyhocks again "The centre, which is composed of florets, should form half a ball, and the more it covers the principal or guard petals the better". Hollyhocks flowers are not composed of florets. However silly a lot of the book was, it sold and sold, reaching its seventeenth edition in as few years. In spite of the consequent millions of confused gardeners, whole new sorts of florisitic endeavour arose, some directly prefiguring the flower arrangers of today, and flowers and their arrangement soon became an important preoccupation of nineteenth century hosts and hostesses. At least in London, it gave rise to both competitoons in the new 'art' form, as well as to quantities of professional table and room decorators. By the 1870's, London had popular shows for the competitive exhibition of 'Dinner table arrangements'. Elaborate rules were given for the size of table; they had to have settings for between twelve to twenty guests (nothing smaller or larger was possible!). Competition exhibitors had to provide their own cutlery, dishes, and glasses. Tables had to be three feet and ten inches high, so that the inspectors were at same height as if they were sitting. No lamps or candles were allowed. While Victorian domestic life developed, as we shall see, a whole series of crafts developed around the garden, and designed to fill the hours of idle ladies, there was a vast and rapidly increasing urban working class. These people, often garden-less, and often recruited from the countryside where they once had gardens of their own, or at least with some degree of tenure, also needed to be catered for. If these city dwellers were not totally desitute, then some of the great new dark cities began to provide green places for them to go. For private use, the growth of the allotment movement was of immense importance, both in London and the provinces. However, for those who felt disinclined (or much too tired), to garden for themselves, then they could visit the 'tea garden', or, as the century progressed, some of the new urban 'parks'. The 'tea garden' was an ancient institution, some of them dating from Elizabethan times, and many still offering an Elizabethan diet of cakes and ale. However, many of them also offered a more exciting fare, and had done so throughout the eighteenth century. Many allowed patrons, even the poorest, a whole variety of carnal pleasures, and even some dangers, for wherever purses and jewels (however simple), could be taken, and modesty be surrendered, thieves and thugs gathered. Some of the sites of these tea gardens have marvellous histories. There was, for instance, the notorious Highbury Barn, a vast and ancient barn, on a site once owned by Priors of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem. A place of resort by the eighteenth century, it had by the centuries' end, charming gardens, bowling greens, with courts for all manner of ball games. As its owners became prosperous, more land and buildings were added, until the main barn became a sort of conference centre for clubs and societies, as well as for chance visitors. By 1800, it could accommodate up to eight hundred diners, and had kitchen facilities large enough to cope with seventy geese in front of the fire. By 1841, it was even larger, and when the the Licensed Victuallers held a dinner, more than three thousand people attended. Vauxhall gardens, a place of resort for Londoners for several centuries, advertised, apart from the attractive gardens, that 'various objects of attraction, the principal of which is the representation of the late fire at Hamburg, painted by Mr Marshall. The scale upon which it is painted may be judged when it is known that the spire of St Nicholas is nearly one hundred and fifty feet tall, and may be seen from the different bridges'. Similar establishments, if less grand and less respectable, could be found in most parts of the teeming capital. One in north London had, by 1858, a vast dancing platform four thousand feet square, with orchestra, ironwork roof with gas lamps, and with yet more lamps on railings, and on pillars in the centre. Vast throngs assembled there on summer evenings. For dancers tired of the heat, or inflamed in other ways, there was a more secluded part of the garden, with an avenue flanked by female statues holding less brightly lit lamps. This led to less even darker parts of the five acres. There were, of course, other public entertainments to be had than just music to dance to. Leotard the gymnast performed daily all summer in 1862; Blondin in 1868, and the Siamese twins in 1869. However, that part of North London was becoming rapidly respectable, aided by the growth of the suburban railways, and the gardens' neighbours finally got its license revoked in 1870. It closed down soon after. At other gardens, some of the public shows were extraordinary. Chabert the fire-eater in 1826 "... after swallowing arsenic, oxalic acid, boiling oil and molten lead without, it is said, feeling any inconvenience... entered a large heated oven, supported by four pillars, and there cooked a leg of lamb and rump steak, which he proceeded to divide amongst the spectators... " Worse, at the disreputable Flora Gardens in Camberwell, shows like 'Lady Godiva' were staged (in 1854), with a torchlight procession to follow the naked lady. The almost equally riotous ' Montpelier Tea Garden' at Walworth staged an unpleasant cricket match between eleven one-legged pensioners (from Greenwich), and eleven one armed ones. Attendant gentry placed bets of up to one thousand guineas on the outcome. Many provincial towns had similar institutions (for instance, there was what must have been a very sedate tea garden at Enderby, near Leicester, which had a strawberry garden, a plant nursery and a wilderness with serpentine walks, all being advertised for sale in 1849). However, the various public disturbances of 1830 and 1848 began to frighten the more prosperous patrons away. So the tea garden, which had been important in forming the public taste in gardening (perhaps it was in one of those that Mrs Lawrence developed her passion for gimcrack and glitter), began to lose influence to the more sober pleasures of the park, or other sorts of urban garden. Though we shall look at the formations of these is more detail in a later chapter, it is worth noting here just how grand some of the public spaces designed for the urban masses could be, and the important role that they played in forming Victorian taste. As the tea gardens declined, London parks like that at Battersea became increasingly popular, and increasingly opulent. The capital accumulated new parks throughout the century, and most big cities, particularly the wealthy industrial ones, followed suit. The most stupendous of all was that around the Sydenham Crystal Palace. Though that building was designed by the century's greatest gardener, and although it contained innummerable plants, because it was set in Hyde Park, its immediate environs were left as parkland and so not gardened. The first Crystal Palace therefore played rather little part in the development of popular gardening taste. Once it was dismantled, re-designed and enlarged, then re-assembled at Sydenham by the Crystal Palace Company, the surrounding gardens became vastly important. Designed by Paxton himself, no expense was spared in their assembling of plants. In 1852, the fabulous collection of rare trees and shrubs owned by the once famous nursery of Loddiges was purchased and replanted in its entirety. It represented one of the most complete collections in the country. Paxton commissioned huge amounts of garden statuary, urns, fountains, seats, edgings, and balustrades. It was all stupendous. The new palace was larger than the original by fifty percent. There were sixteen and a half miles of iron column, and twenty five acres of glass. The whole building was treated as a gigantic conservatory, with, at the South end, vast plantings of rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias. There were huge clumps of rather incongruous aloes near the Pompeian court (South Africa mixed with Roman Italy), new and rare Norfolk Island Pines near the Birmingham Industrial Court. Some fashionable palms grew in gardens facing the Egyptian Court, and also "Two fine India-rubber plants - a plant that has lately acquired a considerable interest and value, on account of the variety and importance of the use to which its sap is applied" (gutta percha was soon to be found throughout the garden, as hose pipes, sheeting, boots, waterproofs and so on). Elsewhere, the building was filled with potted pomegranates, olives, oranges, Drimys winteri, date palms and the whole panoply of Victorian conservatory flora. Outdoors, there were sheets of the old yellow calceolaria bought in from every nursery in London and beyond, together with thousands upon thousands of other plants, all set out in the 'massing system' (we now call it 'bedding'). Bands of these plants were used to edge shrubberies of rhododendrons, camellias, azaleas, and roses. Where anything else at all was grown, it was kept trimmed or pegged down to equal the bedding plants in height; Salvia patens, newly fashionable, verbenas, penstemons, all were pegged whenever a shoot threatened to rise too high. Sixty six percent of the flower beds were circular in shape as "no other figure is so graceful" (Wimbledon and Hoole were still in fashion). Old tree stumps were hollowed out and used as rustic flower pots. Thousands of iron seats were provided. The Crystal Palace was hailed as truly the "people's own garden". So, in 1854, as war raged in the Crimea, the Queen opened the new building and "On the central platform there stood a royal family unequalled by any of its contemporaries whether regarded as an illustration of English domestic happiness, or as an example of a monarch wisely careful to provide the home improvements and pleasures of her subjects, whilst as discreetly directing their energies in the waging of one of the most world-wide wars that ever impended over Europe. That group told by its example, that however high the public duties, however difficult and weighty the cares with which our nature can be called upon to sustain, that there are sympathies within the home circle that sustain, and encourage and aid - upon which the heart, as well as the mind, can lean with a certainty of being strengthened... That group further gave evidence that those possessed of power, almost without limit, to command all that is rare and vivid of enjoyment, still felt that this enjoyment would be purchased too dear if it excluded the quieter pleasures of home; that the enjoyment would be scarcely worthy of the name if it could not be shared by all members of the circle... " It was a tremendous success commercially and socially. One writer of 1854 saw it in political terms, writing "that the more people have of new plants,and the more they delight in them, the happier and the better they will be; we let them in to Kew Gardens unwatched, and yet not a leaf is rifled;we build, or they build for themselves, Crystal Palaces, and we make for them parkland gardens, where they may walk unrestrained and roll upon the grass even, and bask in the sunshine, and revel in pure air. And what is the consequence of this? We must condense the reply into one sentence - We have had no Revolution" That was true, in a sense. However, there was at least a revolution in gardening... end If you've enjoyed the read so far, and would like to support the site, please click through to some of the advertisers. Many thanks! |
