A History of Gardening in 50 Objects

George Drower

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780750991308
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750991889
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Biological Sciences

The earliest record of an enclosed space around a homestead come from 10, 000 BC and since then gardens of varying types and ambition have been popular throughout the ages. Whether ornamental patches surrounding wild cottages, container gardens blooming over unforgiving concrete or those turned over for growing produce, gardens exist in all shapes and sizes, in all manner of styles. Today we benefit from centuries of development, be it in the cultivation of desirable blossom or larger fruits, in the technology to keep weeds and lawn at bay or even in the visionaries who tore up rulebooks and cultivated pure creativity in their green spaces. George Drower takes fifty objects that have helped create the gardening scene we know today and explores the history outside spaces in a truly unique fashion. With stunning botanical and archive images, this lavish volume is essential for garden lovers.

SEVERAL OF THESE TOOLS for creating and maintaining gardens were ingenious adaptations of devices intended for other purposes, and some were innovated by persons with remarkably distinguished origins. Secateurs were invented by the Marquis de Moleville, a French aristocrat in search of safer means of pruning vines than existing knifes and billhooks. Having intended them to be used by vineyard workers, when they went into production in 1818, de Moleville was surprised the new cutters were being adapted for use by gardeners who found them ideal for pruning hybrid roses.

The original wheelbarrow was devised in AD 231 by Chuko Liang, the prime minister of a Chinese kingdom, for the purpose of transporting military supplies over hilly terrain. The design having gone on to reach western Europe via the Byzantine Empire, the barrow was altered for use on medieval building sites, from where it evolved into being an indispensable tool for jobbing gardeners.

Ordered by the Earl of Harrington to rearrange the grounds at Elvaston Castle, in 1831 William Barron developed a more versatile tree-moving contraption than had been used by landscapers such as ‘Capability’ Brown and Andre Le Nôtre. Barron’s machine established how the appearance of gardens could reliably be changed instantly.

By adapting paper-making machinery George Acland was able to mass-produce sturdy green jute twine for supply to gardeners, who hitherto had needed to secure plants with hazel strips or raffia.

Better known for being modified into a weapon of war, the Swedish-invented flame-gun was an enjoyably haphazard means of putting down weeds, during an era prior to acceptance that gardens would be best kept organic.

1 CHUKO LIANG’S WHEELBARROW

THE SIMPLEST AND OLDEST of tools are invariably the most useful, and none more so than the wheelbarrow. Its inventor was Chuko Liang (AD 181–234), sometimes known as Zhuge Liang, who was prime minister of Shu and the author of several classical Chinese works on warfare and political strategy. One of the warring ‘Three Kingdoms’ formed during the fall of the Han Empire, Shu was a vast state located in western China. A great and ingenious general, the technically minded Chuko Liang grappled with the logistical problem of how to supply his armies in muddy soil conditions and hilly terrain, especially when there was a severe labour shortage. With some assistance from Li Zhuan, a naturalist and engineer with whom he had been improving the crossbow, Chuko Liang had the first wheelbarrows constructed. (It has been suggested that relief carvings on the Wu Liang tomb-shrines near Shandong, dated to AD 147, show a vehicle which could be a wheelbarrow, but the carvings are faded and the interpretation insecure.)

The newfangled prototype that trundled out of a workshop in AD 231 to shift army stores at a place called Jiangzhou was indeed a remarkable contraption. The wheel, which was very large in proportion to the barrow, was placed in the centre of the part on which the load was laid, so that all the weight bore upon the axle. The barrowman supported no part of the weight, but served merely to move the barrow forward, and keep it in equilibrium. The wheel was cased up in a frame made of laths, and covered over with a plank four or five inches wide. On each side of the barrow was a projection, on which the goods were balanced – rather like the pillions of a pack-horse. The wheel was at least a metre in diameter, with spokes which were slight and numerous. Its rim, which at first glance appeared to be unsuitably slender, was deliberately narrow: in the rainy season it would cut through boggy ground in which broader-rimmed wheels would stick fast. From this basic design Chuko Liang soon devised two simpler variants: the ‘Wooden Ox’, so-called because its shafts projected in front and it was pulled; and then the ‘Gliding Horse’ wheelbarrow, which was pushed.

Chuko Liang’s invention apparently reached western Europe via the Byzantine Empire where it was encountered by westerners during the Second Crusade. They took the idea back home and modified their existing handcarts to ride on one wheel only. The earliest known western depiction of a wheelbarrow appears in a stained-glass window at Chartres Cathedral, dated AD 1220. Initially barrows were much used for travelling long distances, such as moving goods across Alpine passes. However, later they were normally confined to short-haul work. Unlike the see-saw Chinese models, the medieval European types had the wheel placed well forward and were low-slung. Although more stable they had smaller cargo capacity.

Much of the garden wheelbarrow’s evolution took place on medieval building sites. Although the wheelbarrow was six times more expensive to buy than a two-wheeled handcart, only one labourer was required to push it. Effectively it could pay for itself within a week. And because one operative could now shift the load of two, the wheelbarrow was an absolute must for jobbing gardeners. Numerous barrow shapes developed. Gardeners had a choice of wooden or wrought-iron wheelbarrows. Some had sides, others a framework for holding pots and yet others only a stopper-board in front. Then there was the ‘haulm barrow’ (haulm meaning discarded plant stems) for carrying litter, leaves and prunings. Many of these low-slung models had a light carrying capacity, such as a basket for grass-cuttings. Also devised was the ‘separating barrow’, the body of which was secured by bolts, enabling it to be lifted off so that the load could be taken into hothouses where a whole barrow could not go. Chuko Liang’s brilliant invention – in its European form – appeared to have reached its apotheosis in the eighteenth century when a tree-carrying barrow was created.

Yet on the other side of the world, in the Chinese coastal province of Shantung, a visiting Dutch diplomat beheld an amazing innovation: sail-assisted wheelbarrows! In 1794 an astonished van Braam Houckgeest watched junk-rigged barrows moving overland. Rapidly sketching some illustrations in his journal he noted: ‘Each of them had a sail, mounted on a small mast in a socket arranged at the forward end of the barrow. The slat sail, made of matting, or more often of cloth, is five or six feet high, and three or four feet broad, with stays, sheets, and halyards, just as on a Chinese boat. The sheets join the shafts of the wheelbarrow and can thus be manipulated by the barrowman in charge.’ Just how many such ‘sail-barrows’ were used in large gardens is unknown. Surely Chuko Liang could never have envisaged that his simple invention would become so technically advanced.

2 BERTRAND DE MOLEVILLE’S SECATEURS

THE MAN WHO INVENTED every gardener’s most useful gadget, the secateurs, seldom if ever receives a mention, but on those rare occasions when he does, his name is almost certainly given as M. Bertrand of Moleville. In fact his full name was Antoine-François Bertrand de Moleville, and the initial ‘M’ stands not for a first name or Monsieur, but for Marquis. Why the Marquis de Moleville should have sought to invent secateurs is really quite a mystery, but he certainly made the invention in exciting circumstances.

Although de Moleville was a fairly prominent politician, surprisingly little is known about his personal life. An ardent supporter of King Louis XVI, de Moleville was Governor, and effectively the military commander, of Brittany. His monarchist stance made him a much-loathed figure, as he discovered in 1788 when he ventured forth from the fortress at Rennes to announce an edict – and was pelted with stones by a furious mob, who even threw a noose around his neck. Fleeing France in fear of his life in 1789 he became an émigré in Britain. In London he busied himself writing to a senior statesman, the Duke of Portland, offering to inform him of the best places for British forces to attack the Brittany coast. He wrote a book, Private Memoirs Relative to the Last Year of Louis XVI (1793), in support of the late king, then another in 1803 vituperatively condemning the author Helen Maria Williams for daring to criticise that royal dictator.

At the end of the Napoleonic period it seems de Moleville returned to France and, despite his earlier treasonable readiness to facilitate a British invasion, for a while held a ministerial post in the French government. Out of office again, this time he occupied himself inventing the secateurs, although by what means he produced and developed his prototype remains unknown. However, there was certainly a need to create such a gadget. For centuries the standard tools for pruning and vine-dressing had been the knife and billhook, both dangerous to use, especially if dropped from a height. De Moleville’s new ‘secateurs’ – the French word for cutters – had two curved blades. The edge of each was bevelled in opposite directions, so that the flat blades worked smoothly across each other. The blades were fastened together by a rivet, around which they turned. When not in use they were held together by a strap at the ends of the handles; when open, the blades were forced apart and held in that position by a spring between the handles.

By 1815 de Moleville had completed the basic design work, creating the famous cutters which were introduced to the public three years later. Initially he seems to have expected them to be used primarily by vineyard workers, although in 1818 the annual directory Le Bon Jardinier referred to them as the latest invention which might replace the pruning knife, so the makers were evidently already targeting them at gardeners. The timing was perfect. Secateurs proved particularly useful for the new rose hybrids. These, unlike their shrubby predecessors, required careful pruning to ensure blooming in subsequent years. William Robinson noted in his Gleanings from French Gardens: ‘A secateur is seen in the hands of every French fruit-grower, and by its means he cuts as clean as the best knife-man with the best knife ever whetted. They cut stakes with them also as fast as one could count them.’ Nevertheless in those early years the secateurs were not universally popular. They had many detractors, especially in Britain where for a long time gardeners regarded them as merely a woman’s accoutrement. (Indeed gardening magazines advertised them as such.) Soon there were various types of secateurs, with differing forms of blades, springs and handles. The most popular were the Lecointe, with a coiled spring; the Vauthier, with a notch for cutting wire (1864); the Aubert, with a single spring (1865); and then the anvil secateur.

The Marquis de Moleville escaped the guillotine in the French Revolution, and died knowing that he had established a means by which countless gardeners could in future protect their hands while pruning.

3 GEORGE ACLAND’S JUTE TWINE

BELOVED FOR ITS ORGANIC simplicity, an indispensable tool for every gardener’s pocket is a ball of twine, which – if it is green – will almost certainly be made of jute. It is taken for granted now, yet until 1828 there was no jute twine in Europe. Hitherto, gardeners who wanted to tie plants to a frame, or string up their runners, had to use hazel strips or raffia, which was of unreliable strength and not readily available in urban areas.

The founder of the jute manufacturing industry was Englishman George Acland, who began his nautical career as a midshipman in the Royal Navy and then served with the East India Marine Service. On leaving the Service he took up commercial activities, first in Ceylon and later in Bengal. Acland realised the commercial potential of jute when he saw it being used by Oriya gardeners employed in the botanical gardens of the East India Company. They called it ‘jhut’, a term from which the modern name seems to have derived. At this time, jute was still virtually unknown outside India where its fibres had been used for centuries to make twine, cord and coarse fibres. It grew best in a hot, moist atmosphere in areas with considerable rainfall, and most was produced in India’s Bengal province, where it flourished, especially in the highland districts. The stalks, which were either cut down with a sickle or pulled up by hand, were gathered into bundles and immersed in stagnant pools or streams to undergo the process known as ‘retting’, which loosened the fibres and separated them from the stem. To speed up this process, the operator would stand in the pool and beat and shake the stems to strip away the resinous bark. After the fibres had been agitated in the water to remove the vegetable impurities, they were wrung out and suspended on a line to dry in the sun. The fibres would then be made up into bundles and carefully sorted according to quality.

Yet a means had never been devised of producing it by a mechanical process. Acland got in touch with manufacturers of paper at Serampore who were experimenting with fibres in the hope of improving and cheapening their output, and this seems to have prompted the idea in Acland’s mind of finding a better means of making twine. He became excited – although the market for cotton, hemp, flax and other fibres was huge, they were relatively expensive. Jute was not as strong, but it was hard-wearing and tear-resistant, and had the advantage of being much cheaper. Thus it would be the ideal material for garden jobs for which the requirements were medium strength and low cost.

Acland went to Scotland to raise capital for his new business venture and to find a location for a factory. He opted for Dundee, which at that period was an important textile centre based around flax and hemp; it was, in consequence, only natural that the longer, coarser, but otherwise apparently similar jute fibres should be tested on the machinery already used for the preparation and spinning of flax and hemp. Or so Acland thought. In 1828 he established the Chapelshade works, where he struggled to overcome the many difficulties that resulted from the use of unsuitable machinery, because jute is far more woody and brittle than either flax or hemp. These difficulties, however, were gradually overcome. It was found that by mixing the fibres of two plants, Corchorus olitorius and Corchorus capsularis, an effective substitute for flax could be produced. Although the best jute was inferior in durability and strength to hemp and flax, and even single strands were of variable tenacity throughout their length, it was found that by making the twine three-ply its strength could be greatly increased.

Manufacturing began in 1832, yet business was initially slow. But in 1838 a representative of the Dutch government placed a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Tools of the Trade
• 2 Plant Finders
• 3 Water Features
• 4 Growing Exotics
• 5 Lawns
• 6 Supports, Climbers and Hedges
• 7 Fertilisers and Pest Controls
• 8 Garden Writings
• 9 Gardening Movements
• 10 Nurseries
• 11 Containers
• Further Reading
• Image Credits