When the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West created a garden at Sissinghurst in Kent, she excluded all plants that she thought socially common. Azaleas were ‘Ascot, Sunningdale sort of plants’; rhododendrons were like ‘fat stockbrokers, whom we do not want to have to dinner’. She despised the middle classes – whom she called ‘bedints’ – with their dahlias and tidy lawns, while the proletariat was redeemed only by working the land in time-honoured agricultural fashion.
There is a haughty portrait of Vita as the gaiters-wearing squire of Sissinghurst in the Garden Museum’s archive, but it is atypical, the chance bequest of a photographer’s widow. The rest of this paper museum represents something far less predictable than posh gardening’s greatest hits. Comprised mainly of hundreds of picture postcards, seed packets, gardening catalogues, advertisements and snapshots from family albums, it jumps in towards the end of the 19th century as the discipline of garden history falters to a close, giving way to the plurality of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The whole amounts to a gloriously democratic vision of gardening as practised confidently by the ‘bedint’ classes.
This archive was not assembled by an expert committee or curatorial initiative, which is precisely why it is so attractive. It is the work of one man – Philip Norman, the museum’s honorary curator, who has been collecting steadily for 30 years. In the 1980s, he joined what was then known as the Museum of Garden History, founded in 1977 by enthusiasts John and Rosemary Nicholson MBE in the Medieval church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, then under threat of demolition. The church is best known for the fantastically carved tomb of John Tradescant and his son, plant finders and gardeners to Charles I and II, now surrounded by a knot garden designed by the museum’s president, the Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury.
Running on a shoestring, the museum’s first acquisitions were garden tools. Philip took up residence in the belfry, and began hunting for pictures and documents illustrating the story of modern British gardening in junk shops and postcard fairs, at Portobello and Bermondsey, funding his purchases by making garden implements for the museum shop. It is his instinctive eye for the curious, funny, period and picturesque that gives this archive its character. Once overlooked as something of a sideshow, it is now recognised as one of the museum's most valuable assets.
‘Gardening for All’ and ‘Easy Gardening’ are the mottoes in its pamphlets and advertorials. There are sepia snapshots of Edwardian croquet matches, Victorian glasshouses, head gardeners and Arundel Castle with its long-vanished topiary garden, but a plethora of seed packets and catalogues eclipses them. Suppliers wooed potential customers with the graphic ebullience and brilliant colour of their bouquets of peapods and carrots, their still life’s of tulips and roses.
Rotary mowers are another concern. Some early models are pushed and pulled by urchin schoolboys, a stylish 1930s lady gardener in a striped tie, and a slender 1950s siren. But by the 1960s, the masterful figure of ‘Dad’ reappears, manning his machine with shirtsleeves rolled in a burlesque of a rural ploughing match. A decade later, the Qualcast catalogue showcases a fleet of bright-blue motor mowers, coralled on a tiny suburban lawn and attended by a neat family of three. It cost Philip £6 (‘Look at that, she can’t possibly garden in those heels’) but, for such ‘visual stimulation’, as he puts it, he would happily have paid double.
As the working classes owned fewer cameras, records of their gardening are more rare but, in war and peacetime, both classes vied to grow their own food. One and All Gardening, a pamphlet published by the Agricultural and Horticultural Association in 1911, sternly addresses itself to ‘amateurs, allotment holders and working gardeners’, but even so, one of the cover figures drawn among cabbages and bee skeps is watering a nursery-rhyme bower of tulips and briar roses. Wartime privations made the garden in to a site for more horticultural hortation. A 1944 seed catalogue shows ‘vegetables of national importance’ – nourishing brassicas, carrots and parsnips – and a picture postcard of an elderly allotment holder is captioned ‘Too old to fight, but doing his bit to beat the U-boats.’ Postwar, more women take to the garden in slacks, as a generation of Land Girls come in to their own. Butchers’ Seed and Bulb Catalogue for 1954 nods to this quasi-independence with a crinolined lady pitted against a flower-bed-straddling, trousered blonde, under the headline ‘90 years progress’. But within a decade the status quo is firmly re-established as the mini-skirted lovelies in Hortico’s amazingly vivid colour plates pose seductively before the flower-beds, while hubby digs in with the spade. Elsewhere in the archive are beautifully delineated instructional cards, once given away inside every pack of 20 Woodbines.
Gardening fashions move quickly nowadays and so the museum is venturing beyond its role as chronicler of the nation’s garden history. In the summer of 2008, a new interior – designed by Dow Jones Architects – provided dedicated spaces for the permanent collections, shop and café, while preserving the open central space in the nave for exhibitions, lectures and debates introduced by innovative museum director Christopher Woodward. The museum is remaking itself as a forum for new ideas by practising gardeners and garden designers. Exhibitions documenting the work of Jean Cooke and a history of the British garden are promised, but upstairs, where the archive is on display, you can still pick up instructions on how to turf a lawn, lay crazy paving or even build a beehive.
Garden Museum, 5 Lambeth Palace Rd, London SE1 7LB. For more information, visit gardenmuseum.org.uk
A version of this story appeared in the November 2008 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
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