Q When did gardening become a popular pastime for aesthetic rather than practical reasons?
Paul Bloomfield, Bath
Akitchen garden or a
vegetable plot of some kind was usual in larger dwellings from the medieval period, and there would often be an ornamental aspect to these – a seat or bower surrounded by roses and other shrubs, perhaps, or a turf lawn. By the mid-16th century it was not uncommon for larger townhouses (of merchants or lawyers) to boast an ornamental garden – a ‘parterre’ of grass plats, hedges and gravel.
Domestic gardening as we know it developed from the Regency period onwards. The landscape designer Humphry Repton and others recommended enclosed areas near the house, with amorphous flowerbeds and railings, which gave on to the wider parkland. For those who did not boast parkland it was possible to imagine merely the enclosed garden element.
This idea was developed in the early to mid-19th century by authors and journalists writing for the emergent ‘middling sort’ – chiefly John Claudius Loudon who came up with scores of templates for gardens with lawns, shrubberies, flowerbeds and productive areas, in a style that became known as ‘gardenesque’. Even those in small terraced houses began to experiment with ornamental features in their tiny yards – a ‘pretension’ that was satirised in periodicals such as Punch.
The next big development came in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods with the Arts and Crafts movement, which placed an emphasis on herbaceous borders and creating a feeling of ‘Olde England’ by means of ornamental stonework.
However, this was still largely the preserve of the upper middle classes. True democratisation in gardening developed in the interwar period with the advent of the housebuilding boom of the 1920s and 30s, when thousands of new houses were endowed with gardens that were essentially miniaturised versions of the Arts and Crafts prescription. Housebuilders sometimes provided the garden features themselves, or worked with local nurseries. Tim Richardson, garden historian and author of Oxford University’s online course on English landscape history