A Green and Pleasant Land

by Ursula Buchan

  There was little discussion of garden planning in newspapers or practical gardening books. One exception was A. G. Hellyer’s Your New Garden (1937), which featured a number of designs for the standard British garden, though these were really only refined versions of the kinds of rectilinear plans that most gardeners instinctively adopted anyway. Hellyer wrote that:

  Garden planning is another immensely important task that looms large at the outset. No matter how thoroughly you prepare the soil or how cleverly you cultivate plants, your garden will never be thoroughly satisfactory if it is badly designed. It is a little ironical that the trained garden architect is usually left to demonstrate his skill on comparatively large and therefore easy plots of ground, whereas the small town garden, which fairly bristles with problems, is planned by an amateur, or, worse still, a careless and unimaginative jobbing gardener.

  All well and good, but he rather spoiled it in the next paragraph by remarking:

  You may even need to become quite a proficient carpenter during the first few years in your new surroundings. It is always useful to be able to wield saw, chisel and plane in a workman-like manner, but never more so than when one is starting a new garden and must equip oneself with tools and potting sheds, frames, greenhouses, arches, pergolas and many other items calling for at least an elementary knowledge of woodworking.4

  So, early on in the book he seems to be addressing an exclusively male readership, and implying that garden planning has as much to do with carpentry as artistry.5

  One contemporary gardening writer, J. Coutts, MBE, VMH,6 broached the design of a new garden in the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society early on in the Second World War: ‘When laying out a small garden it is important to keep it as simple as possible, for such gardens are usually rectangular in shape . . . From this it follows that the correct thing to do is to lay out the garden in straight lines.’7

  The interwar spirit of Modernism, with its belief that ‘traditional’ forms of art, architecture, literature, even daily life were becoming outdated in the contemporary, fully industrialised world, had made remarkably little impact on garden owners of any kind. Even those who had heard of the garden designer Christopher Tunnard were rarely impressed, since he seemed to advocate dull gardens of grass, trees and concrete, with little emphasis on the flowers that Britons loved so well and which they were so good at growing. On the whole, rationality and functionalism seemed to gardeners poor substitutes for colour and life. Tunnard’s book, Gardens in the Modern Landscape, made an impact in rarefied architectural circles, thanks to his emphasis on design which avoided ‘the extremes of both the sentimental expression of the wild garden and the intellectual classicism of the “formal” garden; it embodies rather a spirit of rationalism’.8 However, with these words he risked offending pretty well everybody who called themselves a garden lover. Tunnard certainly had a valid point in wishing to turn garden designers away from that Jekyllian nostalgia for a more innocent age – which must have seemed particularly inappropriate the far side of the ‘war to end all wars’ – but he probably reckoned without humankind’s inability to bear too much reality.

  In any event, when Tunnard departed for the United States in 1939, there were few left to keep the Modernist flame alive. Even those landscape architects with Modernist tendencies, like Geoffrey Jellicoe and Sylvia Crowe, were careful not to frighten away their aristocratic clients with over-adventurous schemes.

  Just as the majority of ordinary British gardens were remarkably similar in their design and maintenance regime, so, in another way, were the large mansion gardens owned by the rich or well-to-do. The spaces immediately around a big house were almost always laid out on geometric lines, and were bounded by walls and hedges. Parterres were expensively bedded out each year with half-hardy annuals in summer and hardy biennials in winter, while other beds were planted with roses or perennials. Sweeping expanses of well-kept grass sward provided an attractive surface for al fresco meals and games. Further away from the house, across the ha-ha, was a less tended, more natural parkland landscape, which had probably not altered much since the eighteenth century except that the trees were now mature. There was usually a large walled garden or gardens, often a fair walk from the house, with elaborate lengths of glasshouse for both ornamental and productive plants. These walled gardens were intensively cultivated by a dozen or more professional gardeners, providing enough fruit and vegetables, as well as pot and cut flowers, to ensure a sufficiency for the house and its occupants at all seasons.

  About a quarter of agricultural land (and the houses that went with it) changed hands in the year after the First World War ended, as a direct result of both the threat of increased death duties in the 1919 Budget and the premature death of many sons of the house. A substantial number of large country houses – perhaps as many as 400 – were pulled down. However, in those that remained, even if in different ownership, the ‘old ways’ were carried on wherever possible. There was no strong imperative to simplify the country-house style of gardening, since labour during the 1920s and 30s was still cheap and plentiful.

  ‘Private service’ gardening, as it was called, had developed during the nineteenth century into an intensely hierarchical system, which had similarities to the guild system of apprenticeship, even using some of the same language, such as ‘journeyman’.9 As late as the 1930s, and despite the generally low wages, it was still the wish of many country dwellers that when a son left school at fourteen, he should be taken on as a garden boy at ‘the big house’. Often he would not be paid more than a shilling a day for a few months until he had proved his staying power, and the tasks he was set were probably the worst he would ever have to accomplish: steeping new clay pots or cleaning old ones in a cold water tank whilst standing on a stone floor, sweeping floors, cleaning out the heating boiler’s stokehole or digging out weeds from the gravel drive with a broken knife. He wore a gardener’s apron, with a pocket for knife and ‘bast’ (raffia), and strong boots. There was no college training involved; everything was learned on the job.

  A bright and ambitious boy would keep his eyes and ears open and eventually be promoted to improver journeyman, then journeyman or sub-foreman, then foreman of a particular gardens department, then under-gardener and, finally, head gardener. In gardens with large staffs, the head gardener was a very considerable person, the outdoors equivalent of the butler, often on terms of mutual respect with his employer and definitely paid a salary, rather than a weekly wage, which he could augment by selling surplus produce.

  However, to achieve that career progression, the lad would almost certainly have to move from one garden to another ‘to improve himself’, hence the many small advertisements which appeared in the weekly periodical The Gardeners’ Chronicle. Until a man was appointed a senior gardener, it was impossible for him to marry, since he would be lodged in the all-male ‘bothy’, usually next to the extensive range of potting and tool sheds which gave access to the glasshouses on one side of the walled garden. The proximity of the bothy was at least partly to ensure that the young gardeners could stoke the boilers late at night and early in the morning, and be on hand for weekend glasshouse duties. Once married, a gardener would move to a tied cottage owned by his employer. The head gardener’s house was often to be found in one corner of the walled garden, so that he only had to open his door and walk out into his domain each morning.

  At its best, private service on a large country estate ensured the finest examples of productive horticulture that this country has ever seen, thanks both to the amount of money that house owners were prepared to expend on it and to this rigid but rigorous apprenticeship system. In particular, the quality of fruit – figs, grapes, peaches, nectarines and apricots – grown under glass was exceptionally high. Percy Thrower, who became the first really successful television gardener after the war, recalled of his time working at the royal gardens in Windsor in the early 1930s:

  The training I had in the fruit houses at Windsor was of
a kind that, since those days, it has been almost impossible for a young gardener to obtain. For to grow fruit under glass is an art in itself. In all things we were taught to do the right thing, at the right time: no half measures . . . We had to do our work properly; if we didn’t we were out, and if one were sacked from a private estate in those days it meant leaving without a reference and consequently having little chance of getting a similar position anywhere else in private service.’10

  As it turned out, the spirit of perfectionism which this system promoted was to prove unhelpful to both employer and employee in wartime.

  An example of particularly lavish pre-war estate gardening was to be found at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. Designed by James Gibbs, with an interior by William Kent, this large mansion was bought by a very rich Anglo-American couple, Ronald and Nancy Tree, in the early 1930s. House, garden and parkland had been neglected by an ancient but declining family, but the Trees brought the estate back to life and Ditchley became a byword for grand but comfortable and stylish country living; it was the scene of many large and smart house parties throughout the decade.

  Nancy Tree was a Southern belle from Virginia with a salty sense of humour, a penetrating intelligence and great taste. She was probably the most talented interior decorator of her time, founding the English interior decorating firm, Colefax and Fowler, after the war. Not surprisingly, she was also an inspired garden maker. She and Ronnie Tree, who had been elected MP for Market Harborough in 1933 and was a political ally of Winston Churchill, made a handsome and charismatic couple.

  At Ditchley, six professional gardeners lived in the bothy, working under the head gardener, Mr Williams, who resided in the larger house that came with the job. There were seventeen indoor and outdoor servants in all, as well as farm workers, gamekeepers and grooms; all of them seemingly necessary to keep the 3,000-acre estate working well.

  On one side of the house was a cricket pitch, laid out and tended by the gardeners; on the other a sunken Italianate parterre designed by the young landscape architect, Geoffrey Jellicoe, using stone from Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, which had recently been sold. Before the war, this parterre was bedded out with red dahlias, pelargoniums and begonias, which sounds very striking, although during hostilities the more restful and easier-to-maintain lavender, rosemary and box replaced them. There was also a beautiful herb garden designed by Jellicoe’s business partner, Russell Page.11 A four-acre kitchen garden, with a range of glasshouses and a ‘cutting’ garden, provided most of the fruit and vegetables, as well as floral decorations for the house.

  Ditchley became one of the most fêted houses in England, the scene of a ball for a thousand guests in June 1937. The women all wore red and white; among them were Mrs Winston (Clementine) Churchill, Lady Diana Cooper, the wife of MP and author Duff Cooper, and Merle Oberon, the American actress. As Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe drove away at the end of this dazzlingly elegant evening, they wondered to each other, perhaps with a shiver of foreboding, whether they would ever see the like again.12

  Ditchley apart, times were already changing even for some of the greatest houses, and by extension for the outdoor staff who worked for them. Percy Thrower, the son of a head gardener, saw that the future for an ambitious young horticulturist was to be found not in the country houses but in the public parks. He left Windsor in 1935 to go to work for Leeds Parks Department.

  In the 1920s and 30s, substantial provision was being made for public parks and recreation facilities, such as playing fields, to accompany the enormous surge in house building in towns and suburbs. In 1925, the National Playing Fields Association was founded; this organisation lobbied the government of the day for five acres of open space per 1,000 head of population, of which one acre would be for parks and four for playgrounds and playing fields. The following year, the Institute of Park Administration came into being; this was the professional body that represented park superintendents.

  In the 1930s, Parliament passed a number of helpful measures, including the Physical Training and Recreation Act, which enabled grants to be made for the purchase and development of land for these purposes. Crucially, the London County Council Green Belt Scheme was introduced in April 1935, to protect the countryside around London from unfettered and undesirable development. After King George V died in 1936, the public donated money to a fund to boost the provision of memorial gardens, playing fields, tennis courts and the like.

  Many of the new suburban parks were designed by their superintendents, although often in conjunction with landscape architects. In 1926, the celebrated landscape architect and town planner Thomas Mawson, working on Stanley Park in Blackpool, incorporated a rose garden and Italian garden amongst the many different types of sports pitches in an innovative design.

  Mawson also did some work with one of the best-known park superintendents, Captain A. Sandys-Winch, who laid out no fewer than seven parks in Norwich in the 1920s and early 1930s, including Waterloo Park, which boasted an impressive 300-yard-long herbaceous border.13 As was frequently the case elsewhere, much of the work was done by labourers on unemployment relief schemes.

  In the interwar years, park superintendents tried very hard to please local residents, especially in the way of colourful bedding displays, carpet bedding and floral clocks, using many of the same horticultural techniques as estate gardeners employed. Most bedding was grown in glasshouses on site. This required a twice-yearly explosion of activity, firstly in May when the spring bedding of biennials and bulbs was pulled up and replaced with half-hardy annuals – especially the reliable pelargoniums and begonias – and in autumn when the reverse happened. It was a very labour-intensive process, but the results were extremely popular with the public and had the practical advantage that no plant stayed in the ground long enough to be adversely affected by the smoky atmosphere which choked all industrial cities until the Clean Air Acts of the 1950s. Public parks, then as now, were for leisure and relaxation in pleasant surroundings; parks superintendents did not concern themselves with food production.

  Paid relief schemes for unemployed men, such as those which provided labour in the public parks, were commonplace in the early 1930s. Unemployment amongst working-class men was very high, particularly in the heavy-industry centres, and the dole was simply not enough for families to live on without considerable hardship. January 193314 saw the nadir of the country’s economic fortunes, with 2,955,000 people out of work, a quarter of the workforce. Enforced idleness turned a fair few of them to allotment gardening, in order to help feed their families.

  An allotment was a piece of ground usually, but not exclusively, ten square rods in area, which was 302.5 square yards or one sixteenth of an acre. This parcel of ground could be rented for a modest sum – usually one shilling a rod – from a landowner, a charity or a local council. The allotment, as a means whereby those without gardens could grow edible produce, dates from the huge upheaval created after 1750 by the Enclosure Movement, which effectively took away common grazing rights from landless rural labourers. For a variety of reasons – some paternalistically philanthropic, others self-interested – landowners began to make land in small parcels available to labourers who had lost their common rights. The first Enclosure Act to stipulate that some land be set aside for ‘poor gardens’ was that for Great Somerford in Wiltshire in 1806.15

  Agitation for better and more reliable allotment provision, especially in the towns, led to the Allotments Act of 1887, which gave local authorities powers to acquire land for allotments. The Smallholding and Allotments Acts of 1907 and 1908 required councils to look for suitable land, both in country and town, and to provide allotments where there was a demand for them.

  During the First World War, the progressive shortage of food at home prompted the government in December 1916 to give local authorities power to take over unoccupied land for allotments. By the end of 1917, there were one and a half million plots, producing, it was said, two million tons of vegetables a year.16 After the war ended, mo
re than 50,000 acres of requisitioned land were taken back out of cultivation by local authorities, and mainly used for residential developments. By 1929, the number of allotments had sunk below one million; the numbers had slid further, down to 819,000 by 1939. Of these, many were ‘statutory allotments’17, in other words they were on land specifically bought by the authorities for use as allotments, and which could not be sold for building, say, without the permission of the Minister of Agriculture. Others included railway allotments, of which there were a great many. The railway companies had a tradition of leasing land on each side of railway lines as allotments; indeed the four main railway companies were important landlords in this respect. That said, the allotment had come to be seen as the preserve of the urban and rural poor, and the interest in allotment gardening of the early years of the century was long gone.

  However, allotments did have a champion in the shape of the National Allotments Society (NAS), which had originally been founded as a small co-operative in 1901, but had grown substantially by the 1930s to represent many local allotment societies. Indeed, affiliation fees were the Society’s main source of income. The NAS mediated with landlords and government departments on behalf of local societies, acted as an information bureau, helped recover compensation for damage on allotments, ran a fire insurance scheme, and also provided publicity and advice material.

  The extreme danger and uncertainty of the international situation, culminating in the Munich crisis of September 1938,18 concentrated the minds of the officers of the National Allotments Society on the possible forthcoming conflict. Its annual report averred that:

  It [the Society] still holds steadfastly to the opinion that allotments are of immense service to the nation in times of peace, and are indispensable in times of war; and that the contribution which they make to personal and public health are immeasurable, and it believes that no other spare-time occupation combines so many recreative and economic advantages.19