Reason, nature and the human being in the West: Part 3

3.2 The Gardening Revolution

The Gardening Revolution

Keith Thomas delineates what he calls the 'gardening revolution' in Man and the Natural World. You might like to read this now. Some notes are here.

What do you think?

What might have caused the 'gardening Revolution'? What was the social significance of these developments?
Discussion site

Possible social significance of growth of interest in gardening.

"The fact is that the garden had become one of the arenas in which the rapidly changing relationship between nature and humankind was being graphically expressed. On the one hand there was human dominance, and of putting nature - in this instance quite literally - in its place; on the other, the new notions of nature as worthy of admiration and celebration, perhaps as a positive force or contributing partner."

Richard Mabey, Gilbert White, 1986, Dent, p.53.

1. Gardens as a mark of respectability, and therefore a tool for social control.

"Honeysuckle around a cottage door a sign of the sobriety, industry and cleanliness of the inhabitants within." (Thomas)

"Gardening attached a man to his home and it spread a taste for neatness and elegance". (Thomas)

Landlords building model cottages often built them with the garden to the front, where they could be fully inspected by the passer-by: a well-kept garden showed social contentment as well as presenting a pleasant appearance.

A Scottish clergyman reported that on his visits to parishioners he had never had an unfriendly reception in a house which had a flowerpot in the window.

2. The significance of flower-gardening's appeal to town-dwellers.

As people went into the towns, they tried to take a little bit of the country with them - that was the contemporary interpretation. Here for example is the poet William Cowper:

"Are they not all proofs
That man immured in cities, still retains his inborn
inextinguishable thirst
Of rural scenes, compensating this loss
By supplemental shifts, the best he may? ...
Are they that never pass their brick-wall bounds
To range the fields and treat their lungs with air
Yet feel the burning instinct; overhead
Suspend their crazy boxes, planted thick,
And watered duly. There the pitcher stands
A fragment, and the spoutless teapot there;
Sad witnesses how close-pent man regrets
The country, with what order he contrives
A peep at nature, when he can no more."

3. Gardening was seen to have a spiritual dimension.

There is a long tradition to the idea of Paradise as a garden and in the 17th Century gardens were regarded as peculiarly appropriate resorts for meditation and reflection. This continued into the 18th, with gardening being regarded as especially suitable for "clergymen and other studious persons that have a taste for beauty and order". (John Laurence, 1726; quoted by Thomas, p. 237).

4. The garden was a powerful source of personal satisfaction.

"From heavy hearts and doleful dumps, the garden chaseth quite"(Guiney, an Elizabethan poet).

(The lawn derived from the Tudor bowling alley...)

If this is the story of gardens and gardening and the rise of this interest throughout the early modern period, and especially in the 18th, similar stories can be told of a specific interest in trees and forests. In particular, there were enormous forestry projects throughout the 18th C, belonging properly to the programme of any self-respecting "improving" landlord.

The notes above are meant as a taster for Thomas, whose book is full of interest, and an enjoyable read.

'Capability' Brown's lake at Blenheim, bridge by Vanburgh Courtesy Arcadia Web, who introduce Brown

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