Chapter Eight

 THE GARDENERS

If the Victorian period saw an astonishing increase in the numbers of people for whom gardening became a preoccupation, or even just a mild hobby, it also saw an equally astonishing change amongst the ranks of people who serviced gardens, from the grand and almost middle-class head gardener to the half starved wretches, often elderly and female, who travelled from garden to garden, hand picking the caterpillars from the cabbages.

For the best of them, life was terribly hard, and even for the ones who prospered, the trap of illness and desperate penury was easily sprung. For all the gaudy brilliance of the new parterres, for all the extravagant conservatories filled with rare orchids and the latest camellias, for all the new parks and allotments, and for all the charity, private as well as public, the gardens of both great and small were rooted in the dark soil of poverty and exploitation.

In 1851, amidst all the excitement of the Great Exhibition, Prince Albert was awarded a gold medal by the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrial Poor. Though only 'Class VII', it was for designs that he'd done for blocks of flats that were to be let out to artisans in the larger cities. Each block was trimmed in a rather anaemic Tudorbethan way, and comprised flats that were to be rented out at four shillings a week. This represented a return to the landlord of a few percent (each flat cost four hundred and fifty pounds to build). The lucky tenants had a lobby, a living room of ten feet by fifteen, scullery, meat safe, flushing loo, and astonishingly both for the times and the cost, three bedrooms.

Many such flats were soon built in all the major industrial cities, and wherever these model dwellings rose, fever, the bane of poor or rich who lived without running water, disappeared as if by magic. However, such flats must have seemed impossible dreams for a vast percentage of the urban poor, and certainly for the thousands of half-starved jobbing gardeners who tidied the gardens of the fast expanding ranks of the urban middle class. Such unskilled men were badly paid, even by the standards of the times, and the pay was constantly at the mercy of the agricultural depressions that swept over the land throughout the century. During those periods, destitute agricultural workers flocked to the cities in search of work, and, half-starving yet often as skilled, they undercut the meagre wages of itinerant gardeners.

Even a jobbing gardener with all his time filled found it difficult to earn much more then ten or twelve shillings a day, and his weeding-woman helpers got, for much of the century, only eight to ten pence a day. Skilled and trained gardeners fortunate to find themselves permanent places in a household, however small, were slightly better placed. They were at least provided with a roof over their heads, though not all such were equally desirable. They also had an annual salary, clearly defined duties and a rather lowly place in the 'service' hierarchy. A manual written for servants in the 1820's described a situation that held for much of the rest of the century. It set out for the the head gardener various rules along the lines of: "1. Complete every part of an operation as you proceed. 2. Finish off one job before beginning another. 3. In leaving off working at any job, leave the work and the tools in an orderly manner. 4. In leaving off work for the day, make a temporary finish, and carry the tools to the tool house'... and so on. Rule No 9 was 'let no crop of fruit, or herbaceous vegetables, go to waste on the spot' important, for such things might have reminded the employers of how much was wasted in any garden. The manual provides a list of items that an uncertain gardener needed to impress his employers, and provides a picture of what most gardeners would have looked like;"The gardener usually wears a blue woollen apron, which, when he is pruning, he ties up before him, and then serves to hold his nails, shreds, scissors, hammer and pruning knife. He should also be provided with a light measuring rod, flat and narrow, painted and divided on one side into feet and half feet, and on the other into yards and half-yards..." To help in the negotiations which all employees had to undergo, they suggested that his salary should be from fifty to one hundred pounds a year, though with a cottage and generally with vegetables and fuel. If the family was wealthy enough to need several garden staff, then the gardener was in charge of one or more under-gardeners. Such men were to do the 'digging, trenching, weeding, dunging, gravelling, hoeing, manuring, mowing etc.' and they were commonly engaged as weekly servants earning sixteen shillings to a guinea a week, with only vegetables coming for free. In more generous households, some also had a cottage and fuel.

The difference between being paid by the year and receiving a weekly wage was an important distinction; yearly servants had four months notice on either side, and thus at least a little stability in their lives. Weekly paid servants could be dismissed instantly. However, being paid by the year had its disadvantages, at least early in the century. However badly their masters maltreated them, servants needed the permission of a Justice of the Peace before they could quit their posts. However, if women servants were hired pregnant and the pregnancy was unknown, their employer needed a Justice of the Peace's permission before they could be dismissed. If they were employed, and the employer knew the woman was pregnant, the servant was paid up to the birth, but only a month beyond. Even in other areas, employers had remarkable degrees of control; for instance, servants could be forced to church. Gardeners who were caught selling their masters' produce, or pawning his belongings, were fined two pounds in addition to the goods' value, and could be further jailed or whipped in public. Amongst the rest of the servants, most had far better conditions of employment than the gardeners, though well trained examples of the latter were highly knowledgeable. Even head gardeners were paid, in 1841, for all their skills, only about a tenth of the cook's salary, and half that of the footman. It gave rise to considerable discontent, and gardeners, as a class, were notoriously politicised. One such wrote to the Gardener's Chronicle that 'even breaking stones on the highways pays better'.

The wage levels of late Georgian Britain remained constant for much of the nineteenth century. This was in spite of the fact that the purchasing power of the pound fell more or less constantly throughout the period, leaving them in progressively worse and worse circumstances. For instance, a thirty four year old bachelor gardener, trained in the kitchen garden, advertised for a job in 1860, and hoped for eighteen shilling a week. Another hoped for fourteen to sixteen shillings a week 'besides a House and garden, a pig kept during summer, dinner during harvest, and an allowance of 6d or 1/- when from home delivering produce'. Both men were probably disappointed of their hopes. Such rates were sometimes to be found in the north of the country, but were down to eleven shillings a week in the south where competition for work was more intense. Here, a household in Kensington advertised, in 1842, as follows: "Wanted as Servant in a Small Family at Kensington, a Young Man from the Country about 21; one that has not been in service will not be objected to. .. grounds half in garden, half in cattle etc. Wages 12/-pw" However, even in parts of the North, money wages were kept low, though allowances of food, especially 'porige', were much higher. In Scotland, things were far worse than in the worst parts of England, and it was not uncommon for there to be no money wages at all, but merely 'cottage and keep'.

Public employers were no better than private ones.In 1871, the Public Parks Committee of Manchester advertised for a head gardener for the popular Alexandra Park, offering a salary of eighty four pounds and four shillings a year, together with house, coals, gas and water. This was exactly the same salary given to the previous gardener, the 'late Mr Macmillan', whose widow and children proclaimed in exactly the same issue of the same paper that they were destitute, and appealed for help to keep them from the workhouse. Even with a husband fit and well, and earning around seventy pounds a year (an average sort of salary for a head gardener in some minor garden), a wife could only allow her family a cup of tea once a day. Domestic economists of the mid-century suggested, for instance, that, for families on this sort of income, all domestic items should be kept in very specific places 'so that they can be found without needing to light candles'. However low the salary or wages, the other important consideration was an inter-personal one, for some employing households were plainly lively places in which to work, whilst many others were equally plainly terrible. Many of the gardeners who took to the new media, and wrote of their early careers, had had delightful times, working for employers who were generous, who treated their servants almost as part of the family, and who helped selflessly with their staffs' education and development. Many less vocal gardeners were less lucky; and some who worked in penurious households must have sometimes suffered terribly. For them, we can only hope that their own private family life offered compensation.

In Scotland and parts of northern England, where the infamous 'bothy system' held sway, families in the lower ranks of service were actually split up, consigned to separate bothies. For the garden staff, these were sheds built on the outside of the north wall of the kitchen garden, and offered dark and often dank accommodation. The bothy system began to alarm the philanthropists of the mid-century, and many articles about bothy life began to appear in the press. In one article of the 1860's, a bothy was described as "a house set apart for the men to sit in and cook their victuals, with a sleeping apartment or apartments adjoining. In many cases the bothy is badly kept, and the sleeping apartment dirty and untidy, but there is no necessity for this and it is not inherent in the system... Where there is a bothy, the men get their food and keep by themselves; and when a woman arrived at the years of discretion is appointed to keep their bedroom in proper order, and the bothy clean, they are far from uncomfortable, and prefer it to going into the house for their food. As regards married men, the system is radically wrong..." Once the issue was raised in public, it caused an outcry. Worried apologists wrote to claim that "In a well-conducted bothy, the master allows a female to keep the place clean, light the fires, make the beds, and at the same time cleaning out the apartments, bake the bread... A common arrangement of some bothies is as follows: The male and female servants sit and eat, and pass their evenings in the places where the hands sleep, and the females' sleeping place is in some off-closet, entering from it or in a separate but adjacent apartment. Sometimes the sexes have separate apartments to dwell in, having different doors...” Not always, however, is there such accommodation: "..Some landlords supply no peat or candles... There is consequently no reading in our long winter evenings, and the darkness of the bothies encourages and facilitates deeds of darkness".

Some examples must have been quite exceptionally unpleasant, as the following: "A lad, and a big boy, and a single woman live in one room, which is badly furnished. There are two benches or forms, which supply the place of stools or chairs, but there is no table. The inmates make use of a chest lid as a substitute. There are two beds of coarse unplaned deals... All the sheets and blankets must be provided by the lads themselves, and all the bowls, plates and spoons. Their food consists of milk, when it can be got, and oatmeal. Beef, mutton, pork or fish or flesh of any kind they rarely taste. The bothy may not be cleaned out or whitewashed for years, and their bedding is washed but seldom... ' Surprisingly, in parts of the country, the bothy system survived well into the twentieth century.

Of course, servants were employed in households where even the employers were scarcely more comfortable. It was possible for households with an income of one hundred and fifty pounds (only twenty five more than was paid to the head gardener at Alexandra Park) to employ one servant. Naturally, this was rarely a gardener, though only slightly more prosperous households commonly employed one full time. They probably managed this by using the commonly advertised arrangement whereby a gardener and his wife were employed if they had no children, with the wife to supervise the house. In the 1850's, if such a couple were given rooms in house, the man was paid one pound a week, his wife ten pounds a year. This arrangement naturally allowed their employers to keep constant watch on their employees lives, and this must often have been onerous. A writer in the 'Cottage Gardener' of 1849 suggested that "Honest, sensible servants will never object to be closely watched. They will place themselves in their mistresses' situation, and be satisfied that they would do exactly the same if their circumstances were reversed. Where servants dislike being strictly looked after, they are either disposed to do that which is evil, or they are ignorant and self-conceited, and fancy that their mistress suspects their honesty, when she is only guarding against thoughtless waste".

An employer like the writer must have made the servants' lives very difficult, for the article continues "With a good, superior servant in the house to overlook all things,a boy or a woman might be employed for a couple of hours in the morning to clean shoes, knives etc. and to perform the little morning offices required, which would be a far cheaper plan... In our intercourse with the poor we must not affect to find them faultless or destitute of evil tempers, unthankful hearts, gross deception often... We must not expect to find the smooth tongue governed by a smooth heart, or the kindness shown always understood and valued." However low the wages, and however dependant the servants' happiness was on the whims of the employer, even such bare comfort as could be expected was extremely precarious. Employers could die, lose their money, simply take a dislike to the servant concerned; gardeners themselves could fall ill, die, have too many grandchildren, or simply age (forty was considered 'old' for a gardener).

The threat of total destitution was present almost every hour of every day. Only the most prosperous and provident gardeners ever managed to save sufficient money to provide for themselves or their families if and when disaster struck. Often elderly gardeners found themselves destitute on retirement, and many had, as an article of the 1840's claims ". . but the honest gardener without other means or extraneous aid to money-making, must perforce leave his wife and family a burden to posterity, pensioners on the Benevolent Institution, or a legacy to the union. And yet surely the workman is worthy of his hire..." It was, for a few decades, not uncommon for the better known of head-gardeners or their dependants to publish heartbreaking appeals in the gardening press. An example from the same decade as the last quote runs 'We, the undersigned, appeal to the Benevolence of the Public, and particularly to Gardeners, on behalf of the widow of the late Robert Runciman, who is left with five children under ten years of age, wholly unprovided for. The late Robert Runciman was many years gardener at Coptfold Hall, Essex, which situation he was obliged to quit three years since in consequence of the gentleman leaving the place; he was not able afterwards able to obtain a situation in consequence of his numerous family, and he commenced Jobbing gardener, when he was unfortunately attacked with severe Rheumatism, which confined him for many months to his bedroom; and thus the little savings he had previously made became exhausted before his death. We know him to have be a steady, sober, and industrious man, and therefore confidently make this appeal on behalf of 'the widow and the fatherless' in the hope that it will meet with that attention which the circumstances of the case deserve'.

Mrs Runciman and her family do not appear in the literature again, though another example occupied the personal columns for rather longer. After the initial appeal came the following: "Henry Spare acknowledges with heartfelt gratitude the following CONTRIBUTIONS, but for which himself and family must have suffered the greatest distress and privation. He is also deeply impressed with the kindness of his late Noble employer towards his two eldest children, and he begs to add and return his special thanks to MR LOUDON for his gratuitous and prompt appeal on his behalf... " Rather cannily, he published a list of the contributions, though the cost of the public acknowledgment must itself have been high. Sums sent to him range from one shilling from 'Harvey, Camden Town' to £4.12. 6d. from 'Dakin and friends, Eastnor Castle'. A later issue of the Gardeners Chronicle contains yet another advertisement of 'PS Henry Spare will feel thankful to be informed of contributions omitted or delayed (if any) which shall be acknowledged in a future number - Isleworth Feb. 17th 1842'. Sure enough, next week, he had another nine contributions, to about three pounds or so. Perhaps he escaped the full rigours of Victorian poverty.

There were, of course, various means of escape[ Alcohol offered one, and a favourite. Political agitation offered a second, more exciting though no more successful one. Emigration offered a third; dishonesty a fourth. And if not full dishonesty, at least some gardeners used oblique means of increasing a meagre income. Young gardeners and nurserymen felt the main impact of this. Many under-gardeners found it impossible to get posts without offering the head-gardeners to whom they applied for work, a premium. This was sometimes eighteen shillings or twenty shillings a month, almost half of the under-gardener's wages. Head-gardeners were also in a position to blackmail nurseries and seed firms. One nurseryman wrote '. . . it is simply that the gardener has the nurseryman completely in his power. Should a gentleman visit a nursery he has not hitherto patronised, and selects plants to be sent to his gardener, if that functionary finds that there is no chance of his gaining any pecuniary benefit by the transaction, it lays in his power to very soon sicken the squire of that game; if large trees have been bought he will not properly secure or mulch them; choice plants he will 'shove' in a position or soil admirably adapted to 'cook their goose'; if seeds, he will in some way destroy their vitality... Finally, the employer gets discouraged, and confining his patronage to the gardener's favourite tradesmen, the object is obtained.' Even if the gardeners were not quite so malevolent (or simply desperately poor), some brassy gardeners asked the nurseryman for a commission of three pence in the pound, or at the very least, a Christmas box. No wonder so many nurserymen tried to sell 'Plants for the Million', where they did not have to deal with a head gardener.

Alcohol too played, at least in the media, a vastly important role in the lives of the gardening classes throughout much of the nineteenth century. Blasts against the beer-shops, and their effects on the rural or gardening male, began to appear in the 1830's. A writer using the nom-de-plume of 'Falcon' wrote 'It is deplorable to witness the utter want of principle which induces a man to sacrifice the comfort of his wife and children, and his own respectability, to gratify his brutal appetite for intoxicating liquors', and so on. Of course, beer and cider played a major role in the rural economy, and agricultural workers often had rations of both as part of their payment, indeed 'such articles are necessary for carrying on the operations of agriculture, for which purpose they are still considered essential by many of those who are engaged in farming...' The same was equally true of gardeners and gardening. With the increasingly religious attitudes beginning to grip the middle classes, it soon became necessary for every gardener advertising for work to claim that he was teetotal. James Carter and Co, seedsmen, ran an agency for gardeners, and claimed that all the men on their books were suitably 'dry'. However, the gardening press was crammed with beer advertisements -a creative one placed in many of them by Allsopp's brewery in the 1850's featured a letter from the famous chemist Baron Leibig, who had supposedly found that many other makes of beer were flavoured, not with hops or wormwood, but with strychnine. Perhaps it was this that affected the appearance of any man who entered the awful portals of the pub.

Such sins were thought to be instantly visible -"It is astonishing to observe the differences in the LOOK between the sober man and the drinker'. This was from the 'Cottage Gardener' of 1851. The writer was 'Rosa', whom we have already met. She went on: 'There is always a cheerful, clean, open air look about the former, and a leary, sodden, ashamed face in the latter character. Vice always marks the man, however he may try to conceal it, and it marks his family too; for it is IMPOSSIBLE for his wife and children to look well clothed and happy when he drinks half his wages, and comes home cross, and violent, if not in a state of positive intoxication" For those who were more fastidious or better off, or for their wives, alcohol came in many respectable disguises, whether in medicines,or more imaginatively, as perfumes like one in an advertisement that read 'Travellers and Visitors to the Sea-Coast would do well to provide themselves with a bottle of ROWLAND'S AQUA D'ORO. This fragrant and spirituous perfume refreshes and invigorates the system during the heat of summer... In all cases of excitement, lassitude, or over-exertion, it will prove of great advantage taken as a beverage, diluted with water...' The same firm marketed also the famous macassar oil that saved so many gardeners from unbecoming baldness. Some of the magazines aimed at gardeners rather than garden owners preached, in tones ranging from the headmasterly to the morally precious, against the evils of beer. 'Rosa', of course, adopted an enthusiastically superior voice, and wrote, in 1850, "No space NEED be lost, and every spot of ground that is turned to account adds tote beauty and the profit of the little homestead. How many beer-houses would be closed, how many empty seats in churches would be filled, how many suffering village shopkeepers would thrive... A parish would be indeed one blooming garden" Indeed.

She found almost every social activity gave rise to temptation, even the ringing of the church's bells at New Year; "I wish their hearts and voices were mixed with the joyful peal. I wish, too, that my cottage readers would take a friendly warning at this special time, and strive to separate the work of ringing from that of drinking, for they are apt to travel hand-in-hand, and that which is intended as a mark of joy and gratitude, becomes a means of intemperance and sin. This should not be. Even our harmless amusements and useful employments may thus bring down a curse, and not a blessing, on our heads". She saw alcohol everywhere and especially in the garden where "Neatness and attendance bespeak activity, diligence, and care; neglect and untidiness tell of the BEER-HOUSE." Alcohol became a matter for public self-confession, and the cheaper magazines often ran 'true confessions' of reformed drunkards. One we've already met. Not surprisingly, with a body of men who had at least some education, but were kept in a lowly position in society, discontent was rife. Both they, and the employing classes who felt the foundations of their lives shaking, wrote to the garden press. John Claudius Loudon, once an under-gardener himself, and now ever a liberal, wrote of the unemployed and discontented "But when he is told that he is not wanted - that the thing he possesses, his bodily strength, is useless... what CAN he do but sink in misery, abandon himself to despair... How can we wonder, then, at his lending a ready ear to what designing demagogues may say - for what is the fabric of society to him?"

"It is employment that must be found, if we mean to sleep securely in our beds... Give them something of their own that is worth keeping, and they are not the men to risk losing it..." However, solidarity was not especially strong amongst the gardening classes, or perhaps too many of them had been caught up in the self-righteous conservatism of the lower middle class. One quisling gardener wrote to an editor that "the sort of agitation attempted in the printed correspondence upon the subject [of gardeners' wages] I think ill-advised indeed, for I feel assured that the attempts of a few malcontents to represent the whole body of under-gardeners as a body of discontented growling paupers, meets the disapprobation of every spirited practitioner in the profession." The fear that otherwise sober gardeners might become raging alcoholics was even used as excuse to keep them continuously busy. In 1841, one exhausted gardener wrote to the 'Gardeners Chronicle' to plead for 'liberty days' when they could visit other gardens to learn more about their craft, or to read books. The writers claimed, falsely, that drinking habits were changing fast, and so the time thus freed would not be abused. For those impoverished gardeners who were not attracted to the multitude of raucous and convivial beer-shops, the lure of foreign lands proved strong, or the lure of new sorts of employment. While one editor of 1849 was "sorry to hear that MR FORSYTH, the talented gardener lately employed by the E. of Shrewsbury, has left his situation, and is now a guard on the North Staffordshire Railway.'It is truly a pity', adds our informant, 'that such abilities should be idle'".

William Ball, the owner of a market garden, and a gardener's agent, advertised a situation in India. He was deluged with replies, and had to insert an advertisement apologising for his inability to reply individually to each applicant, as well as another one for a foreman at his own business (he was offering an excellent salary too; one hundred pounds a year, and with an annual increment of ten pounds). It was his foreman who had gone to India

Opportunities existed all over the globe. In the 1840's, estate owners in the West Indies were looking for experienced gardeners to tend the new crops of nutmegs, and cloves. An estate near Marseilles frequently advertised for English bachelors to take up two-year contracts at twenty fours shillings and four pence a week (it advertised itself as employing many other Englishmen). Australia and New Zealand were opening up.

In 1852, "A Few Friends of the Family of Mr James Corton, once Gardener at Syon House, and now wholly destitute, having formed a small purse, in order that he may emigrate with his family to Australia, solicit some further aid, in order to enable them to compete their arrangements". The New Zealand Society offered allotments near Canterbury in many garden magazines, and clever marketing often ensured that the offers were on the same page as various Life Assurance adverts, and even of the appropriate though odd 'Laurie's Patent Floatable Mattresses' to reassure anyone nervous of the high seas!

Even apparently successful gardeners emigrated. Mr Tweedie left for Buenos Aires when he was fifty, but thereafter played a quite pivotal role in the development of nineteenth century gardening. Travel to distant lands was cheap. It cost, in the 1850's, only three pounds to get from London to Quebec, though the migrants had to provide their own food. Conditions on the boats were terrible, at least until the public outcry of the 1860's; after a journey to Canada of between six to eleven weeks the ships could be smelt on land long before they docked.

The gardener emigrants naturally wanted to take some garden plants with them, especially as many of them hoped to set up as nurserymen. Garden magazines published many queries from intending migrants about the best ways of transporting seeds and plants to the Colonies. The techniques for doing both of these things had improved dramatically since the beginning of the century, though the fact that seeds would still germinate after packing in nothing more substantial that dry paper envelopes still caused great surprise. One editor insisted, in 1850, that "sending seeds abroad in bottles, or sealed Indian or Chinese jars is now totally obsolete..." But how did the gardeners and garden staff, the ones who remained behind and were determined to avoid any temptation, live from day to day?

Under-gardeners, weeding women, watering boys and the rest mostly lived in considerable discomfort. On the whole, they have left little record of how they managed, and it is only possible to view their lives from the other side of the social gulf. Even so, the picture of their poverty, even though there were considerable attempts to turn it into the sentimental fantasy of 'cottage life', was not pleasant. In the 1840s, when the one of the frequent agricultural depressions was filling up the poor-houses all over the country, endless schemes were discussed for creating useful work for the unemployed, especially for farm and garden labourers. Writers to all the magazines try to suggest things that the unemployed could usefully do. Some parishes tried distributing labourers to the local rate-payers, with highly rated people getting several. The scheme was intended to act as a sort of tax, for the rich then had to provide work, and therefore wages to the poor; in fact, this system merely undercut those labourers and gardeners still with regular work, however dreadful their wages already were. The middle classes developed guilty consciences. In a series of articles called cosily OUR VILLAGE, Rosa stated that "Much is doing, in many ways, for the poor, but their health and comfort would be greatly increased if their dwellings were improved where it can be effected. I think much would be altered in this, as in every other case, if men would regard everything they possess as a talent committed to them by God. Men would not dare 'grind the faces of the poor', nor to neglect even their common daily comforts" Even if that were not possible, at least the ladies of the village could help out, for "A large jar of blackberry jam would be a very useful gift to a poor family, and a small quantity thinly spread on the children's bread would make it much more satisfying... In my neighbourhood the poor are so extremely poor, that it is impossible to think that they could make even blackberry jam for their childrens' food..." In a similar vein, another article proclaimed that "The rich are often little aware of the sufferings and privations of the poor, and how much relief they might afford by what in their abundance they think nothing of. A few baked apples, a jug of apple water, or a pot of apple-jam, are useful and grateful to those who are sick and possess NOTHING." She goes on to give various elementary recipes for basic jams and preserves. 'Apple water' turns out to be a thin tea made by pouring boiling water over sliced fruit, and slightly sweetening the result; it doesn't sound very appetising.

Inside hovel, bothy or tumbledown cottage, vermin and disease were common. For fleas, in 1842, "Wittering says the leaves of the common Alder (Alnus glutinosus) are sometimes strewed upon floors to destroy them, and that branches of the sweet gale (Myrica gale) will produce the same effect". Endless attempts were made to encourage the rural poor to make use of their gardens. As well as food, the garden could produce other useful crops; illness had only the herbs of the field and the garden as a cure. They were widely used by the very poor almost to the end of the century; meadow-rue (Thalictrum flavum) provided laxative leaves and roots, and was used in jaundice. Even the deadly Aconitum napellus, a nerve poison, was widely used in some areas, and Delphinium consolida, or larkspur, almost equally dangerous, was pounded into an ointment to remove vermin from the skin. Black hellebore (Helleborus niger) found a use in mania, melancholy, epilepsy (all three seem to have been very common, though the plant had to be used very carefully).

In the 1850's, a retired doctor started a series of articles for the poor, using the contents of his own garden as a starting point; of his garden he was probably rather proud, saying modestly that but a page would "describe its contents, and their application in disease and sickness, but yet it is abundantly useful to my neighbours. Nay, the village doctor himself sometimes borrows from my beds, and, though somewhat jealous of what he calls my unprofessional conduct, we are, upon the whole, mighty good friends; for to tell the truth, he somewhat leans upon me. It is wonderful how much may be produced from a small plot of ground well managed; but here I must premise that to cull simples and to prepare and administer their products with success, require both skill and experience. It is a task well suited to a physician like myself, who can afford to sit down under the tree of his old age, and devote himself to such a speciality.." However, even for the poor, herbal remedies were on the wane. In 1871, when Alexander Forsyth was working at the Manchester Infirmary, he had a look at the large herb markets of the city. He came to the conclusion that there were three levels of quacks: (i) those using undisclosed materia medica, and often especially obscurantist, who preyed on the rich or desperate; (ii) ones, perhaps the most authentic, using old herbals and consulting real doctors,and working largely for or on the middle class, and (iii) old crones and their believers, often working for little or no reward, and handing out folk remedies to the very poor. At Manchester,vast amounts of medicinal herbs were being sold, often with the sellers not knowing the Latin name, or even the demotic and probably ancient Lancashire ones. Plants were commonly sold by handful or armful - even when they were deadly poison. Worse, they were sold with very little instruction about dosage. The poor simply had to take their chance in this botanical roulette, for they couldn't afford to go to a qualified apothecary.

The head-gardener and his family could, though they seem to have been more inclined to try the proprietary medicines produced by the burgeoning enterprise of the commercial world. It is probable+7 that they were not much better served. Gardeners' magazines for the entire period are crammed with advertisements for all sorts of remedies for all sorts of dreadful ailments. Gardeners was assured of 'Freedom from Cough in Ten Minutes after use, is insured [sic] by Dr LOCOCK's PULMONIC WAFERS...' Or if the stresses of life began to tell, all they had to do was buy 'Norton's CAMOMILE PILLS for indigestion, bilious and liver complaints, headaches, heartburns, acidity etc...' Indigestion must have been a constant problem, for every publication was packed with remedies. Only a few survived throughout the century in the way that 'Milk of Magnesia' did. More serious ailments were still easily curable; like the "DEAFNESS and singing noises in the head cured in a few days, whatever the causes may be. For 7/6d from Dr Alfred Barker, 48 Liverpool St, Kings Cross". Gardeners who read the adverts carefully would discover that they could apply to the same address for "Miss Dean's CRINILENE", guaranteed to give them perfect hair. They needed Keatings cough lozenges for asthma and incipient consumption, as well as "Parr's Life Pills, Ozonised Cod Liver Oil (as used at the Consumption Hospital'", or even "Dr Robert's Celebrated Ointment, called the Poor Man's Friend", as well as his 'Pilulae Antiscrophulae' and "Smith's Tasteless Dandelion Antibilious Pills". Mr Smith hadn't read much in the way of modern medical books, for he still uses the herbal terms of the 17th century, and talks about 'humours' of the skin. Every gardeners' household must have bought the widely advertised and almost universally applicable "Holloways Ointment and Pills" which were supposed to cure everything from bad legs, to old wounds, sores and ulcers, bad breasts, glandular swellings, tumours, scurvy, and diseases of the skin. Not even the gardeners' children were safe from all this; they were fed on "Dr Locock's Powders for all Disorders of Children, including Chicken-pox, nettle rash, measles, scarlatina, sore eyes, wasting, rickets, etc etc." In case some mothers were worried about stories of opium and laudanum turning their offspring into drugged vegetables, some firms denied all such contents.

The best paid gardeners and their wives could afford even some of the vanities of life. To encourage him to buy, adverts had thrilling testimonials, such as 'Sir, - I have much pleasure in informing you of the extraordinary effects of Rowland's MACASSAR OIL. For above nine years, I had not a particle of hair on my head, when I was casually recommended to give this celebrated Oil a trial... After five months perseverance, I can now boast of as good a head of hair as any man in this city --Prices from 3/0d to 21/0d a bottle'. House proud wives were induced to use the services of cut-price interior decorators, offering cheap Brussels carpets, and silk or damask hangings. The largest advert for all this didn't appear for very long, so perhaps few gardeners wives' could afford them. More useful was an advert of 1852. 'The Comfort of a Fixed WaterCloset for £1. Places in garden converted into a Comfortable Watercloset by the PATENT HERMETICALLY SEALED PAN, with its self-acting valve, entirely preventing the return of cold air or effluvia. ...'

In whatever comfort they did manage to get together, and in the time they had to spare, they read. Magazines, part-works, penny dreadfuls, almanacs, books of prophecies, even joke books that had been in print since the late seventeenth century, all were advertised on the pages of cheap garden journals. In the middle of 1852, for instance, "This day is published, price 3s 6d in cloth, the Second Edition of THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD, a Tradgedy adapted from the German of Ludwig Treck. By Jane Browning Smith..." But there were also complete editions of Shakespeare's works, edited by Bowdler, or, for the less cautious,the works of Byron and Scott. If none of that gave the reader sufficient insight into him or herself, then the advert "KNOW THYSELF - The secret art of discovering character from handwriting... 14 stamps to be sent with a specimen" offered no doubt much needed help. If the gardener was more interested in the vagaries of weather rather than self, to protect himself he could subscribe to 'The Farmers and Gardeners Hail-storm Insurance Company (Capital £200,000) One Duke, 4 Earls as Hon Directors'.

And after a life of church-going, domestic economy, and patent medicines, there might perhaps be a small pension from the savings so carefully secured, or from a kind employer. For some there was the comfort of a tiny pension from the 'Gardeners Benevolent Society'. This was founded in 1838, largely by members of the Horticultural Society of London. It grew rather slowly. By 1842, members of the Benevolent Institute met to discuss the current year's subscriptions of two hundred pounds. The new pensions paid out totalled £33. 8. 0d, and so two new pensioners could be added to the then pitiful list. However, already the funds were invested and doing well. By 1852, the Institute supported thirty five elderly gardeners or their widows, of whom the average age was seventy seven. The sum of their pensions amounted only to five hundred pounds a year, and to be eligible, they had to have been "either head gardeners, or their foremen, market gardeners, nurserymen, and seedsmen, for twenty years at least, subject to the following conditions:-..."

These conditions were of some complexity; for instance market gardeners must have had at least five acres for twenty years, and nurserymen and seedmen had to have been in business for same length of time. All had to be over sixty, unless incapacitated. Their widows couldn't apply if they later re-married non-gardeners. Naturally, preference in the pension lottery was given to subscribers of more than fifteen years' standing, though the pension was only sixteen pounds a year for males, and twelve pounds a year for females; it was paid quarterly and was also means tested. No-one was eligible if other income exceeded twenty pounds a year. The Institute's pension helpfully included a grant of four pounds as funeral costs.

Naturally, for Victorian Britain, the chances of getting a pension were higher if the original subscriptions had also been higher. The annual subscription of one guinea bought one vote, and the number of votes increased pro rata. Elections to pensions was by ballot. In the late 1850's, the pensions paid out annually amounted to over five hundred pounds, though the secretary's salary was sixty. In 1858, five pensioners died and one was struck off because it was discovered that she was getting parochial relief. Only one lived in Scotland, and one in Wales. There were a few in the North of England, but most of them lived in the Home Counties. In that year's list of subscribers to the funds, a D. Guthrie, 377 High Street, Edinburgh, was the only Scottish subscriber (he had a vested interest too, as he owned a magazine called 'The Scottish Garden'). Most subscribers were, naturally, gardeners, though some were business men and a few were wealthy aristocrats. However, the Institute was beginning to attract notables to its ranks, and funds to its coffers.

In 1852 it held a sale of Guatemalan orchids to benefit the society, and in the same year had an anniversary dinner with Charles Dickens in the chair. Paxton, Knight, and Mecchi (who was rapidly building up a fortune from the sale of the new papier mache furniture and domestic knick nacks), were also present. Dickens, in his address, laid 'great stress upon that honourable characteristic of the charity [no less than that of judging the moral character of the applicants before offering them a pension], because the main principle of any such institution should be to help those who helped themselves (Cheers)'. A decade later, of the estimated ten thousand parishes in England alone, each of which must have had at least one head gardener, and probably more, there were still only two hundred and ninety four subscribers to the Gardeners Benevolent Society, and of those, sixty seven were in London. The main Fund (£5200 in 3% Consols), was still not enough to allow decent pensions to even most deserving applicants.

It must have seemed to many that being a gardener in trade, either as a nurseryman or as a seedsman, might be more rewarding. For some, it was, and nurseries that found success could quickly make substantial amounts of money. Then as now, the top end of the market was by far the most lucrative, though to tap it needed substantial supplies of capital. Many nurserymen were kept afloat by the richest of their clients, ones willing to pay for the newest and most fashionable of plants. Then as now, too, the majority of nurserymen were attracted to the vast and popular market, where competition was much keener, but the cost of entry much smaller. Endless nurseries were selling, by mid-century, cheap Chaters hollyhocks, dahlias, daisies, geraniums of all types, penstemons, tree carnations (and Malmaisons), calceolarias, or were advertising 'New cheap plants. Some, like Henry Walton, of Edge End, near Burnley, specialised in last season's geraniums, fuchsias, cinerarias and pansies, presumably buying job lots at auction and selling them on. Others, like John Hayes of Farnham,Surrey, sold 'CHEAP BEDDING PLANTS FOR THE MILLION' at between 1/- to 3/6d per dozen, with catalogues for a penny. Lancashire nurseries sold cheap carnations, pinks and picotees, with a free hamper for every twenty five pairs of show carnations (at four pounds), or show pinks (at four guineas). Seedsmen could buy a quite remarkably wide range of killed seed (baked until there was no possibility of germination), sold as '000' grade. This was for mixing with good seed of expensive varieties. It was easy to find land to rent or lease, or if capital was available, to buy. Many small nursery owners became rich when the land they used for growing crops became needed for urban development, and there are endless auctions of nursery stock throughout the period as businesses have been swallowed by new suburbs.

Not all auctions were due to urban expansion; many were, like the following, the result of financial misfortune: 'To be sold by Private Contract, by order of the assignees of James Bishopp, of Westburton, a Bankrupt, ONE THOUSAND SUCCESSION PINE PLANTS of all sizes, and One Thousand very fine Fruiting Pine Plants'. The plants referred to are pineapples, a popular fruit of the period, though they were being shipped direct from the tropics by the 1820's and it may have been becoming uneconomic to grow them in Britain, hence the bankruptcy.

Companies like Protheroe and Morris began to specialise in such things. That firm advertised at least half a dozen auctions a month near London alone, whether 'AUCTION of 20000 bedding plants' or 'Nursery equipment and 40000 well grown bedding plants' or even the notable collection of breeding material assembled by Mr. Hogg, whose carnations, picotees, pinks and auriculas were all being auctioned as his lease fallen in (Protheroe & Morris at Paddington Green, December 12th, 1842).

There were other and fashionable auction sales of plants and bulbs at 38 King St, Covent Garden. There, both imported plants like Ghent azaleas and French potted roses, fruit trees and camellias, as well as those from private growers went under the hammer. Poultry, pigeons and plants were sold on the first and third Thursday every month during the season October to May.

Some nurserymen, too, started trading in related garden products, from lawnmowers to decorations. One even published quite marvellous advertisements in full colour for 'canary guano' showing a vast flight of canaries around a sunset mountain, with the text "Perfectly clean, may be used by a lady". It's not clear exactly what it was.

So it seems that even going into business saved no more than a few gardeners from poverty, and for all the thousand of peaches, pineapples, bunches of camellias, pots of new and even Guatemalan orchids grown for their employers, for all the auctions and advertisements, for all the moral rectitude and abstinence, innumerable respectable lives, must, on ill health, or on the death of the husband, have ended in destitution, despair or the poor-house. Only a tiny fraction of this vast section of the populace made enough money to retire in comfort. A few may have done it by turning to trade; a few others became almost rich, with gardeners of their own, but they did that by becoming media 'stars'.

End