The genius behind the lawn at Chatsworth was Capability Brown (1716-1783). In the course of…
Victorian Garden Fashion Reappears
Victorian garden fashion reappears.
Gardening has always been a mix of fashion and style.
A recent article in The English Garden called “Gardening features: the bedding display” demonstrates renewed interest in the bedding out fashion, popular in the nineteenth century.
The magazine traces the history of this Victorian garden practice.
The article says, “Seed merchants sold special bedding plant seeds, which could be sent direct to gardeners using the newly available postal and railway network. By the 1880s, this ‘bedding boom’ had reached even the small suburban garden, with loud displays in island beds proudly placed right in the middle of lawns. These beds came in a variety of forms, all of which – bar the circle – were equally ridiculous. Who in their right mind would choose a star, crescent, heart, butterfly or ‘tadpole’ as a shape for a bed?”
The answer for that period was that many gardeners did, because it was the garden fashion of the day.
The article includes this fabulous photo as well. [below] The scene looks like something out of the nineteenth century garden catalogs.
Peter Henderson, for example, the seed merchant from New York not only encouraged this practice but included an illustration of it on his catalog cover several times.
What is garden fashion at one time may seem strange at a later date.
That is what is happening here.
The idea of bedding out demands not only a lot of plants, but also a great amount of time in maintaining such a bed on the lawn.
I can see why people do not want to garden this way today.
When you see it, however, the first emotion is how beautiful it is, but then you think of the many hours it took to create this colorful design on the lawn.
At the high point of this garden fashion in the nineteenth century American landscape designer Frank J. Scott wrote his famous landscape handbook Suburban Home Grounds (1870).
He said, “To keep a great number of small beds filled through the summer with low blooming flowers and their edges well cut is expensive.
“If they are also planned so that the grass strips between them must be cut with a sickle, few gentlemen of moderate means will long have the patience to keep them with the nice care essential to their good effect.”
The cost of the plants and also the labor made him wonder if the practice was worth it.
Today the issues for bedding out still remain, thus making a gardener hesitate to cultivate such a bedding out scheme of planting.
That does not however stop gardeners from continuing this Victorian fashion.
The article from TEG magazine ends with these words, “It seems many private gardeners still believe in bedding, with bedding plants currently representing a third of UK consumers’ spending on garden plants.”
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