Gem From The Archive
Fiona Davison, head of libraries and exhibitions at the Royal Horticultural Society, shares a historic register containing the CVs of budding gardeners
A 19th-century gardeners’ register from the RHS
Based at the Royal Horticultural Society’s London headquarters, the Lindley Library is home to thousands of rare books and records covering the history of horticulture, practical gardening and botanical art. It also houses the charity’s own archives, dating back to its previous incarnation as the Horticultural Society of London (1804–1861).
Here the society’s head of libraries and exhibitions Fiona Davison discusses a source at Lindley that sheds light on the charity during this early phase in its history.
Can You Describe The Document?
It’s a register named ‘The Handwriting of Under Gardeners and Labourers’ (1822–1829). It contains 105 handwritten entries by young men who were applying to join the training scheme at the society’s experimental garden in Chiswick, West London.
The society had originally founded the Chiswick garden in 1821 to grow plants from all over the world and test out new horticultural techniques, but it also wanted to establish an elite school of gardeners. The idea was to recruit the most promising young talents from across the country and train them at this experimental site. Once they had completed the programme, the men would be able to apply the skills they had learnt at Chiswick to gardens throughout Britain and the empire.
The register was essentially a mechanism for finding out whether the men were qualified to join the training scheme. As part of the application process, they would have to stand in front of the society’s secretary and write out a short paragraph containing their date and place of birth, as well as details of their previous gardening experience.
Crucially, they would also have to record their father’s name and occupation, along with the name of the society fellow who had recommended them (an important requirement).
Why Did You Choose The Register?
One of the things that
I really like about the register is that it provides rare insight into the lives and careers of workingclass men before the 1841 census.
Most of the gardeners left school between the ages of 12 and 16, before going on to find work as ‘garden boys’ in a range of different environments, such as kitchen gardens or hothouses. They then rose up through the ranks and gained further experience by moving from site to site, based on personal recommendations. It’s quite surprising to see how mobile they were – especially in an age before the railways.
Note too that the register was also used to test each applicant’s literacy. If a gardener was capable of writing his entry to a high standard, it showed that he was more likely to benefit from the training that he was due to receive. It was certainly a rigorous scheme: in the summer the men would work in the garden from 6am until 6pm, and then undertake further academic study before bedtime, reading books and memorising the Latin names of plants.
Overall, the standard of spelling and handwriting throughout the register is really impressive, and it’s just such a joy to be able to read the men’s life stories in their own words. Their personalities shine through.
What Happened To The Gardeners After They Left Chiswick?
The register has long been an important item in our collections because it features a young Joseph Paxton (1803–1865) – the gardener and architect who would
design the Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition.
However, no one had actually researched the other men in the register until relatively recently, when I decided to take on the task myself. By combining the men’s details with other sources, I discovered that some of them ended up working in gardens as far afield as Egypt, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Australia!
I became so obsessed with tracing their stories that I ended up writing a book about them entitled The Hidden Horticulturalists: The Untold Story of the Men Who Shaped Britain’s Gardens (Atlantic, 2019).
Why Does The Register Cover Only Seven Years?
One of the things that puzzled me is that the register is only a quarter full – it stops abruptly in 1829. However, it turns out that the society was actually the victim of fraud. The assistant secretary money, and although the society tried to cover it up, word got out and people cancelled their membership.
The society became financially unstable, and was forced to abandon the Chiswick scheme altogether. It wouldn’t run a similar training programme until 1907, when it established a new School of Horticulture at its garden in Wisley, Surrey.
What Other Resources Do You Offer?
Our free genealogy guide ( bit.ly/rhs-family-history) has further details about items in our collections such as magazines and postcards that can shed light on someone’s career. Our main archive is housed at the Lindley Library, but we can still offer advice in our smaller libraries at Wisley and Harlow Carr, North Yorkshire.
Later this year we will also be launching an online collections platform with digitised records for family historians to explore at home. This will include photographs of gardeners dating back to the 1850s.