Have you created a patio? Perhaps installed some decking in the belief that not only will it provide a site for your barbecue but also suppress weeds? Have you constructed a ‘water feature’ illuminated at night by LED solar lights? If so, you are no better nor worse than our ancestors who fell hook, line and sinker for all the latest gardening fashions. For gardening as we know it today has its roots deep in the past and in our national psyche.

Responsible for many things, including straight roads, good food and fashionable dress, it was the Romans who first demonstrated the art of gardening. With the excavation in 1961 of the Roman villa at Fishbourne, near the Sussex coast, archaeologists explored not only the remains of a large Roman villa but also its surrounding garden. According to historian Jenny Uglow, Fishbourne was exotic in the British landscape. But in the long era of Roman rule nearly 1000 villas small and large were built… [and] as these villas are excavated they reveal traces of the gardens their owners enjoyed. Some had fish ponds. There were formal flower beds and pergolas covered with vines. In the bedding plots found both in front and behind the house – identified by the darker soil, where manure was mixed in, and the marks of spade cuts in the subsoil – hairpins suggest that women worked there. In some places the garden colonnades were partly closed, acknowledging the colder British climate but despite the chilly weather a summer dining couch – a mark of real optimism – has been found at the villa of Rockbourne in Hampshire.

That all sounds rather familiar, does it not? Fish ponds, formal flower beds, pergolas, items accidentally lost by gardeners, lounging furniture? However, there were two basic elements to Roman garden structure that superseded all others: one, the surroundings were taken into consideration so that the garden was designed to give – as far was possible – fine views; two, it was cultivated to a high standard.

Since then, every era has seen developments in horticulture, from monastic gardens, Tudor knot gardens and parterres, 18th landscape and pleasure gardens, to Victorian and Edwardian gardens, the very midwives of the suburban gardens we know today. Indeed, sandwiched between the end of Victoria’s long reign and the shadow which fell on the world in 1914, the Edwardian era was a period of unprecedented changes in every aspect of life and that included gardening.

Wild vs formal
At the turn of the 20th century were there two main styles of gardening. Victorian gardening guru, William Robinson (1839-1935) decided that it was time to go back to the plant itself as the source of inspiration in the making of a garden. Even the word ‘design’ was rejected by him, the plants together making up the garden. In short, he advocated the wild – or plainsman’s – garden.

Robinson, a prolific writer, expressed his view in what has been described as a ‘dogmatic manner’, views challenged by distinguished architect Sir Reginald Blomfield (1856-1942). Blomfield took up the cause of the formal garden (it is possible that he was the first person to use the term ‘formal’ garden). To him gardens were high art: the hand of man must be everywhere in the garden with plants doing little more than supplying the filling between the various architectural features.

While protagonists of the two main gardening styles could not see any common ground, others saw that the very contrast between the wild and the formal offered scope for yet another style of gardening, one in which the whole area might be divided into a number of unequal size ‘rooms’, the larger ones devoted to wild or natural gardening, the smaller ones laid out along formal lines, each connected by paths and vistas. Perhaps the best known example of this kind of garden is at Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire, where a series of enclosures of varying size and scale are formed by high hedges, each with its own strongly marked character.

Hidcote was the creation of Lawrence Waterbury Johnston (1871-1958) who, with his mother, the wealthy Mrs Gertrude Winthrop, arrived in Gloucestershire in 1907 when Johnston was 35. Not only was he a devotee of the Arts and Crafts movement, he was also a great plant collector, not only subscribing to expeditions but also travelling great distances –to South Africa and to China – in search of unusual and exotic species to add to his ever-growing collection. Several plants have thus been named after him, including a climbing rose, a fuchsia, a verbena, a pentstemon, a lavender and Hypericum ‘Hidcote’.

While the arguments rumbled on, the age was actually dominated by the architect Edwin Lutyens and the partnership he formed with the much older plantswoman, Gertrude Jekyll. Indeed, one afternoon in 1889 is of significant importance to garden historians: it was then that Miss Jekyll visited a friend, Mr Harry Mangles of Littleworth, one of the pioneers of rhododendron growing.

On this occasion there was another guest who was to prove of special interest, a young man aged twenty and working nearby on this first architectural commission, says the late Betty Massingham in her monograph on Jekyll. It was Lutyens whom Miss Jekyll must have liked as she invited him to tea with her at her home, Munstead Wood in Surrey, the following Saturday. The friendship and the architectural and horticultural collaborations that followed are now legendary. Typical Lutyens features include raised walks bisected by rills, and straight lines broken by stone-edged pools which control the water flow by providing planting places for water-loving plants. Hestercombe, on the southern slopes of the Quantock Hills in Somerset, has been said to mark the peak of the Lutyens/Jekyll collaboration.

While the wild or formal gardens predominated in Edwardian times, there were plenty of gardeners who were extolling the virtues of the Italian style according to garden writer Anna Pavord, the most eclectic being Sir George Sitwell who created an important garden at Renishaw in Derbyshire and who published his Essay on the Making of Gardens, the fruits of his own research in 200 Italian gardens, in 1909.

Another advocate of the Italian style was architect-gardener, Harold Peto (1854-1933). He was particularly attracted by their charm, where flowers occupied a subordinate place among the majestic cypress trees, the statues and the pools, and it is easy to see the Italian influence at the Peto Garden at Iford Manor in Wiltshire which was Peto’s home from 1899 to 1933.

Garden cities
As we became a more industrialised nation, concern for the growing number of people being squeezed into town and city gave rise to the Garden City Movement. In Garden Cities of Tomorrow, Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) explained his philosophy for a new type of town, with fresh air, sunlight and breathing space. His philosophy was turned into reality with, in 1902, the first garden city: Letchworth, in Hertfordshire, where low-density buildings, avenues of trees, and country greens surrounded by cottages complemented the rural theme.

Gardening had, at last, become a pastime for all; it was no longer the preserve of the wealthy for pleasure or the poor for necessity. Greenhouses and conservatories became popular, practical gardening magazines and books proliferated, and nurseries (such as Veitch Nurseries of Exeter, Devon, the largest group of family-run nurseries in Europe in the 19th century) and seed merchants (such as Suttons, founded in Reading, Berkshire, in 1806), dare I say it, mushroomed. Large commercial nurseries were commissioning plant hunters to find new specimens for propagation and sale, and the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew was overseeing the movement of plants throughout the Empire. In recent years, many nurseries have developed almost beyond recognition into garden centres, in the process becoming leisure destinations.

The high demand for houses in the first part of the 20th century resulted in many more homes for the middle-classes being built on the fringes of towns, houses with back and front gardens. Indeed, a house with a front garden now distinguished its owners as middle- and not lower-class. Furthermore, the Allotments Acts of 1887, 1890, 1907 and 1908, says garden historian Twigs Way, which made allotments available to rural workers, also provided for land to be found in the urban areas… and at the outbreak of the First World War there were between 450,000 and 600,000 allotments in England .

It was in the 1920s that people first listened to ‘the wireless’, a new luxury, and novelist Marion Cran broadcast the first gardening programmes in 1923. Says Jenny Uglow: Her talks and idiosyncratic writing made it clear she was speaking to a new audience: her first book was The Garden of Ignorance and her second The Garden of Experience. In 1934 C M Middleton took over, and Mr Middleton’s In Your Garden was required listening.

For the middle-classes as well as the poorer army veterans, in the 1920s and the depression years of the 1930s the garden was a place for relaxation, a place of escape from the demands of daily life. There was often a terrace for deckchairs, an herbaceous border, and a rose garden for the new hybrid teas. Between the wars, over 4 million houses were built and many of them used land far more generously than the Victorian suburban terraces. Furthermore, gadgets – the lawn mower (invented in 1831 by Edward Budding) and tools specifically for cutting, pruning, digging and weeding – made gardening easier and therefore more pleasurable.

The inter-war building boom, however, provided many houses with sufficient garden space in which to grow vegetables without the need for an allotment. But for the less-well-off, the urban workers and the unemployed, such homes with gardens were a luxury they couldn’t afford and thus allotments became synonymous with the lower-classes. But within a month of the declaration of World War Two the Minister of Agriculture announced that half a million more allotments would be made available. The country, as one, Dug for Victory.

Fashions in gardens come and go, and climate change threatens both drought and floods. But with more than a thousand years of gardening history in our genes, I am convinced that gardeners are up to facing the horticultural challenges that lie ahead.

In the print edition
Read Margaret Powling’s article about spa towns in Issue 4 of Discover Your Ancestors, available online at www.discoveryourancestors.co.uk