Hermit in the Garden

Garden hermits, or ornamental hermits, were once people encouraged to live alone in purpose-built hermitages, follies, grottoes, or rockeries on the estates of wealthy landowners.

It is an old English garden tradition and dates from the 18h and 19th centuries. It included a living, breathing person in your garden as a hermit. The garden owner would give the hermit food and shelter.

There are examples of this form of garden or landscape in the book English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan.

The musical group Max Machine [below] uses the hermit in the garden imagery for its new album called Hermit’s Grove .

The history of the hermit in the garden is an interesting one.

Landowners peopled their hermitages either with imaginary hermits or with real hermits – in some cases the landowner even became his own hermit. Those who took employment as garden hermits were typically required to refrain from cutting their hair or washing, and some were dressed as druids. Unlike the hermits of the Middle Ages, these were wholly secular hermits, products of the eighteenth century fondness for ‘pleasing melancholy’. 

Although the fashion for them had fizzled out by the end of the eighteenth century, they had left their indelible mark on both the literature as well as the gardens of the period. And, as Gordon Campbell,auhor of The Hermit in the Garden shows, they live on in the art, literature, and drama of our own day – as well as in the figure of the modern-day garden gnome. 

The practice almost ended when Henry VIII closed the monasteries and nunneries in England.

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Campbell’s engaging and generously illustrated book takes the reader on a journey that is at once illuminating and whimsical, both through the history of the ornamental hermit and also around the sites of many of the surviving hermitages themselves, which remain scattered throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland.