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When Women Became Their Own Gardener

When women became their own gardener

Working in the garden demands various tasks, including digging and raking. Let us not forget of course weeding, deadheading, and pruning.

We all know that the person who performs gardening tasks could be a man or a woman.

The role of a woman as gardener, however, evolved by the end of the nineteenth century.

Jennifer Davies in her book The Victorian Flower Garden shows how the most famous garden writer of the early ninetenth century John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843) advocated for women.

She writes that in 1838 “Loudon thought that this skill [laying out a flower garden] was within the campacity of every woman who could cut out and put together parts of a female dress.”

By 1874 English gardener Sophia Orne Johnson was writing in her book Every Woman Her Own Flower Gardener, “A small set of tools, comprising a rake and hoe on one handle, a trowel, and a spade, are very essential. With their aid much light work can be accomplished without calling upon Mr. O’Shovelem…

“With these implements every woman can be her own gardener – and not only raise all the flowers she may desire, but also contribute a large share of the vegetables that are always welcomed at the table, during both summer and winter.”

American garden writer Ida D. Bennett says in her book The Making of a Flower Garden (1919) “The role of the male in the woman’s flower garden was that of the animated shovel, or as Sophia Johnson called him in the nineteenth century ‘Mr. Shovelem.’ “

“By the end of the century and into the twentieth century most suburban women did not expect to do the digging and other heavy labor, but most of them did plan their own gardens and do much of the planting, weeding, staking, and other tasks”, as Beverly Seaton writes in her wonderful article “Gardening Books for the Commuter’s Wife, 1900-1937.”

Women too eventually became the major garden writers for other women.

Seaton says, “The writers Americanized the garden advice of Gertrude Jekyll and Wiliam Robinson.”

By then women had become their own gardener.

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