An acquaintance of the Scotts, Maurice Mason, a Norfolk farmer who grew sugar beet and corn in a big way during the war, developed a garden that contained ten glasshouses, including several tropical ‘stove’ houses. He is commemorated in a widely grown begonia that he bred called Begonia x masoniana.
Amongst wartime combatants, Peter Healing of the Priory, Kemerton, in Worcestershire, had used the time he had been forced to spend in a German POW camp to good effect. He recalled later:
By the end of the war I found myself in Germany with only one book, William Robinson’s [The] English Flower Garden,32 perhaps one of the best gardening books ever written, and it was through him that I pictured the form that the borders must take . . . The main border, some 150 feet long and now eight feet wide, was planned to start with grey foliage through white, cream and pink to pale yellow, working up by strong yellows to a crescendo of reds, maroon and bronze. From there it would fade gradually in the reverse order down to whites and greys in the far distance.
The second border was to be whites and creams, with pale pinks and lavender, while the cross-border under the ruin would be every shade of red. It would never become garish or too strong as there are so many really dark reds and bronze flowers and foliage to choose from and these would absorb the heat of the scarlets.
Such ideas were translated into yards of planting plans and proudly transported home at the end of the war. Little was it realized that not only were very few of the plants or seed available but that these quantities would involve much propagation.33
Although William Robinson is the name on the spine of The English Flower Garden, the chapter on colour was in fact written by Miss Gertrude Jekyll. In it she explained her theory of colour and the way it should progress in a border, from the very palest at the end to the hottest colours in the middle, and then gradually pale again. What Peter Healing created at Kemerton was a classic Jekyllian herbaceous border, and one that became famous in the 1980s, when garden photography really began to do justice to the quality of colourist plantings.
Existing gardens happily rescued from neglect after the war, to become appealing destinations for garden visitors, also included Ralph Dutton’s garden at Hinton Ampner House in Hampshire. This garden had been abandoned in wartime to ‘that rough gardener – Mother Nature’.34
At last the sad years of war ended, and in July 1945 I was back in my house gazing out onto the chaos of what had once been a well-kept garden. The wide terrace had been given up to rough grass, trodden by the two hundred little feet of the children who had inhabited the house during the war. We had no machine to do the work, nor petrol had we possessed one, but I was lucky in finding two elderly men expert in the use of the scythe. Thus during the long summer evenings they spent many hours rhythmically mowing the rough herbage – a Millet scene – till the terrace had once again some semblance of a lawn.35
Another contemporary, the Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley, remembered in 2001 what it was like when she and her husband, Hugh, moved to Cholmondeley Castle in 1949. ‘When friends came to stay for the weekend, we gave them an axe and a saw, and told them to set to. There was thick scrub of laurel and Rhododendron ponticum everywhere, and clearing took years. Things were funny after the war – petrol was rationed, it was hard to get help, and making a garden was practically unheard of.’36 All these people still employed gardeners, but not on anything like the scale that had been commonplace amongst their class before the war.
In more modest and, of course, far more populous gardens, the process of reclamation could happen much more quickly. Gardeners often could scarcely wait to put back their lawns, take the tomatoes out of the herbaceous border and hide the vegetables once more behind the rustic trelliswork. Nella Last in Barrow-in-Furness wasted no time in getting rid of her poultry and reinstating the lawn. A month before VJ Day, she wrote about wanting to get home from an outing in order to cut and roll the lawn: ‘It was just as lovely in the garden, and work was a pleasure. As the sun cooled, people started to come out to cut the lawn and water seedlings; the music from “Music Hall” drifted out through open casements . . . When I looked out of the back-bedroom window, I could not realise that I’d had an untidy hen-run so recently.’37
Wartime measures might be happily abandoned, but on a Sunday afternoon in the second half of the 1940s, there was precious little else that the householder could do except some kind of gardening. Shops were closed, there were no spectator sports like cricket or horse-racing, and few people had access to what limited television there was. Little wonder, therefore, that gardening flourished, especially the specialisms like rock gardening or rose growing, once the nurserymen had recovered their poise and were sending out plants once more.
At the annual general meeting of the RHS in 1948, Lord Aberconway remarked – to laughter – that somebody had suggested to him that the marked increase in membership of the Society was as a result of austerity and the absence of petrol, so that there was little else to live for. The audience might have thought that comment funny, but it contained a great deal of truth.38
There was no denying that the war had changed private gardening, making it a more communal experience. After the conflict, it gradually became more inward-looking once more, mirroring the increasing introspection of a population which gradually, through the 1950s and 60s, traded many of its former public pleasures for the private delights of the television. Gardening was no longer so obviously a shared activity, where vegetables and cultivation tips were exchanged across the garden fence. In the post-war years, gardens were places where amateur enthusiasts grew perfect blooms of chrysanthemums, dahlias or hybrid tea roses, often for exhibiting in the local flower show, but there to prove individual skills rather than the grower’s attachment to national solidarity or a defiant fist shaken at Adolf Hitler.
One definite boost to gardening, especially commercial growing, was the revival of the Chelsea Flower Show in 1947, much encouraged by the horticulturally sophisticated King George VI. The nurserymen were initially very dubious about whether it was possible, and the show was certainly rather smaller than the pre-war exhibitions. However, Lord Aberconway averred that it was ‘as full of artistry . . . and of interest . . . The exhibitors thought they could not do it, but they rose to the occasion wonderfully and they did it.’39 The Chelsea Flower Show continued to be an important event in the annual ‘London Season’; in those years it was smart to be seen there, since it was not yet the seething mass of humanity that it became in the 1970s.
In the same year, 1947, the RHS published The Fruit Garden Displayed. Like its companion, The Vegetable Garden Displayed, this book remained in print for decades. The Royal Horticultural Society had had ‘a good war’, and peacetime would consolidate its pre-eminence as the main adviser to keen amateur gardeners, in England at least.
Those nurseries which exhibited at Chelsea were facing a very different world. Some embraced the opportunities, while others faltered. For Cheals, an old-fashioned family concern that had prided itself on its high standards of cultivation and its exalted clientele before the war, the winds of change were very cold. Many country estates were broken up, the houses frequently sold for institutional use or carved up into flats, if not demolished, and much land in the south-east of England was sold for housing development. Garden design commissions, which of course had had such a beneficial effect on their nursery plant sales, became decidedly more modest.
Worse still, there was hardly any plant stock left at the end of the war – it had either been sold and not replaced, or had grown too big to be easily sellable – so although there was a sudden substantial demand from gardeners, many nurseries could not meet it. Customers had to order in spring for an autumn delivery, and even had to pay in advance. In desperation, Cheals turned to the Dutch to provide wholesale trees and shrubs, because the wonderfully fertile soil at Boskoop meant that they grew more quickly there.
At Sunningdale Nurseries, which had been in such a sorry state during the
war, the future was brighter. James (Jim) Russell set about reclaiming the nurseries, and laid out roads, lawns, show borders and a propagation unit. He also had the sense to employ Graham Stuart Thomas, who was to become the pre-eminent expert on shrub roses, as his manager in 1956.
Generally, the nurseries that recovered best were those that catered for the massed ranks of modest gardeners. Harry Wheatcroft, with his brother, discovered that they had sustained grievous losses amongst rose varieties during the war. He particularly mourned the disappearance of a rose he had bred called ‘Peter Pan’, never to be resurrected. Nevertheless, their nursery recovered quickly, Wheatcroft believed because of the loyalty of pre-war customers, and was soon winning prizes again, notably at the 1949 National Rose Society’s autumn show. The nursery staff also helped to lay out a new trial ground for the National Rose Society, near St Albans. This Society achieved its largest membership in the 1950s. Everybody could grow roses in their gardens, and most people wanted to. Indeed, roses positively thrived in industrial cities before the Clean Air Act of 1956, because the sulphur in the atmosphere kept ‘blackspot’ fungus at bay.
Wheatcroft’s fortunes were also boosted by something that happened at the beginning of the war. As France was about to be overrun, François Meilland, a young rose grower in the south of France, managed to smuggle out – via the American consulate in Lyons – a small package of budded rootstocks of a new hybrid tea rose that had impressed rosarians at a conference in France in the summer of 1939. This rose was remarkable for its healthy and strong growth, and the size and shape of its golden-yellow flowers, with their distinctive and, to my mind, rather dispiriting pink edge. After the war, it was named ‘Peace’, in the English-speaking world at least. Harry Wheatcroft initially bought 10,000 ‘eyes’ (to ‘bud’ onto rootstocks), but the rose’s popularity grew so rapidly that in the end he sold far more than that. ‘Peace’ captured the public imagination, and it was planted in most post-war rose gardens, often no doubt where the wartime vegetables had once grown.
Suttons of Reading, the seedsmen, also recovered relatively quickly. The firm had a stroke of luck in September 1945, when the Dutch somehow managed to export 5,000 tons of bulbs to the United Kingdom, which meant that Suttons could fulfil that autumn’s bulb order after all. The company’s garden construction department also thrived; it collaborated with a firm of garden architects, Messrs Milner Son and White, and sent its own workmen to carry out the Milner plans for herbaceous and shrub borders, lily ponds and rock gardens, terracing and hedging. A 1950s advertisement read: ‘Character, simplicity, charm and restfulness are the keynotes of a garden designed by SUTTON’S of READING.’40
Those people living without gardens in towns and cities saw their main pleasure grounds, the public parks, regain much of their pre-war attraction, with the return of the brilliantly colourful bedding schemes of old and the grassing over of utilitarian model allotments. Parks were definitely the beneficiaries of the move of ambitious trained gardeners away from private service, since public authorities could offer more advantageous terms and conditions, and did not require such a level of old-fashioned deference from their employees.
However, the question of wilful and accidental damage in parks was still an issue: ‘to practice horticulture as we knew it in pre-war days in fenceless parks is not only heart-breaking but a waste of time, money and labour’, wrote a gloomy park superintendent in 1948.41 Even after the railings were put back in many parks, the vandalism continued. It was not as widespread as in the war years, but it never again disappeared entirely.
To make way for returning demobbed male gardeners, as well as refugees from country house gardens, not to mention new machinery, women mainly lost their jobs in parks and public gardens. The fifty girl gardeners at Kew had been reduced to six by 1946. In any event, many Land Girls married straight after the war and left market gardening or farm work for good. Not until 1975 did those few female gardeners who remained in horticulture achieve equal pay with men. Today, in very changed circumstances in the labour market, there are probably more women in managerial positions in horticulture, both professional and commercial, than there have been at any time since the very particular conditions of wartime.
The research stations that had contributed markedly to the success of wartime commercial horticulture were brought under the control of the Ministry of Agriculture after the war. One regretted consequence of this was the ending of the student traineeship scheme at the John Innes Horticultural Institution. However, with their public reputations enhanced, the stations expanded in both size and number, most notably with the foundation of the Glasshouse Crops Research Institute in Littlehampton and the National Vegetable Research Station at Wellesbourne.
The country’s gratitude to agriculture and horticulture for the part they played in feeding the nation ensured a fair wind for reforms in the immediate post-war years. Sir Daniel Hall’s blueprint for the future, Reconstruction and the Land, formed the basis of the 1947 Agriculture Act. This provided guaranteed prices and subsidies to farmers and promoted the rapid mechanisation of agriculture, which had begun in wartime, thus ensuring a more efficient industry at a time of rapidly increasing population and expectations.
One of the Act’s effects was to encourage the use of pesticides, in the interests of cost savings and productivity. Gardeners were not slow to follow farmers, and for a generation, they sprayed lavishly. However, in the 1970s, as the evidence of damage to land and wildlife gathered strength – and public opinion gradually turned against chemicals – the organic gardening movement, spearheaded by Lawrence Hills and his Henry Doubleday Research Association,42 expanded. The leading lights of this movement readily acknowledged their debt to the pioneers of thirty years before, in particular Sir Albert Howard, Lady Eve Balfour and the other founders of the Soil Association.
In A Green and Pleasant Land, I have attempted to bring to the reader’s attention those gardeners who particularly deserve to be remembered for their contributions to the war effort. These were the parks superintendents, who abandoned their much loved floral displays to teach urban novices how to grow Brussels sprouts, together with the massed ranks of unmarried women – Miss Elizabeth Hess, Miss Viola Williams, Miss Edith Walker, Miss Dorothy Hinchcliffe, Miss Beatrix Havergal amongst them – who, unencumbered by husband or children, worked tirelessly on county horticultural committees and in horticultural colleges, or drove around the countryside in the pitch black to teach other ladies in draughty village halls how to sow peas or collect medicinal herbs. As important were the middle-aged nurserymen and older professional gardeners, as well as the girls of the Women’s Land Army, who together grew the vegetable produce that really made a difference to the nation’s health. These people showed an impressive devotion to duty, which could probably only be sustained while there was a pressing external threat to life and livelihood.
As for amateur gardeners, their horticultural efforts had been a significant feature of their war, bringing them together with others and giving them a sense of common purpose. Their hours of patient gardening became part of the accumulated shared memories of civilian life, especially each spring when thoughts turned once more to sowing seeds and spending weekend afternoons with neighbours and children on the allotment. The success of the Dig for Victory campaign might have been more apparent than real – the result of a collusion between government, press and professional gardeners – but its very existence and persistence enhanced the self-image and morale of gardeners and even of those who never dug up their gardens or rented an allotment but knew somebody who did. In short, ‘growing your own’ became a shared and positive national experience, sufficiently strong and pervasive to survive to this day.
For those people still alive who went through the war, there is satisfaction and pride in the memory of how they and their contemporaries thoroughly confounded the politicians, the military hierarchy and, most particularly, the psychiatrists by their behaviour. With insignificant exceptions, tho
se battling on the Home Front showed themselves equal to the tasks required of them. They refused to buckle under the pressure brought about by restrictions, shortages, overwork, lack of money and security, strain, danger and demoralisation. The growing of, and delight in, vegetables, fruit and flowers helped a significant number of them to do that. Those of us who came afterwards have much upon which to reflect, and for which to be grateful.
Before the war, 90% of onions were imported so they quickly became the scarcest vegetable in shops. Throughout the conflict, the Ministry of Agriculture produced many of these kinds of advertisements for newspapers and magazines; they were cheap to create and could respond to changing circumstances.
Carrot lollies were heavily promoted by the Ministry of Food, since ice creams and other sweets were scarce, but it is unlikely that these children thought them an adequate substitute, especially as they cost the same amount as the real thing.
Schoolboys from the Drury Falls Council School at Hornchurch in Essex arrive at their allotment in October 1941. They ran a shop where they sold their produce.
The best known of all Dig for Victory images, the foot on the spade was also used as a small logo on many other government posters. It is likely that this image was ‘manufactured’ in a studio.
C. H. Middleton, the most successful wartime radio gardener, discusses produce grown in Nottingham’s parks with a Ministry of Agriculture official at the city’s WAEC (‘War Ag’) show in September 1944.
A Green and Pleasant Land Page 33