In March 1910, readers of The Daily Mail were confronted with an advertisement that read, ‘Ten Thousand Englishwomen could be ranged in a line and shot. No one would be sorry. Everyone would be glad. There isn’t any place for them.’ This was pretty strong stuff, but it was just an extreme example of a widely held belief: that the country was burdened with ‘surplus women’. In 1854, author and social campaigner Harriet Martineau estimated that there were over 500,000 more women than men in Great Britain; by 1891, the number had risen to over 900,000. The chief reason given at the time was the high level of emigration among young men seeking opportunities across the British Empire. Every young man signing up to be a colonist, a member of the armed forces, a civil servant or a trader in the British colonies was one less for the women left at home to woo and catch. There was real anxiety that as a result there were ‘surplus women’ who would not find a husband to take care of them after their fathers died. The ‘surplus’ or ‘redundant’ women that bothered commentators most were middle- and upper-class women. Single working-class women were not viewed as surplus; they could go into paid occupations deemed suitable to their station, such as domestic service or factories. For ‘respectable’ women higher up the social scale, however, conventional society offered very few options.
For many commentators, the solution to the excess supply of unsupported spinsters was obvious: the wholesale shipment of single women to the colonies where the marriageable men were. The Daily Mail advertisement quoted earlier was actually placed by the Canadian Pacific Railway as part of a campaign to encourage female emigration to Canada. However, many women were not content to admit that marriage and motherhood were the only viable and valuable roles they could play in society. Nowadays we rightly remember and celebrate the pioneers who broke through into male professions and public life and politics. But the role that gardening and horticulture played in facilitating female emancipation and self-expression has been relatively overlooked. Yet there was a time when many single women, who felt that society had no role or place for them, made a place of their own in the garden. In a relatively short period of 21 years, between 1893 and 1914, and starting from a point where the gardening profession was almost exclusively male, more than 500 women sat the RHS National Examination in Horticulture, making up around 13 per cent of the total number of entrants in that period. This is probably an underestimate, as it is based only on the entrants that I could categorically prove were female (a task made harder when from 1903 onwards the RHS stopped publishing first names of candidates). Many more women never took examinations, but still made a serious effort to build a career in gardening.
This book will focus on six of them, with the hope that their experiences will illuminate a wider story that has been largely ignored or forgotten. None of the six we will follow enjoyed the distinction of being the very first woman to achieve what they did. The exceptional women who blazed a trail are exactly that, exceptional. I am more interested in the more ordinary people who follow immediately behind, the ones equipped with a more relatable set of talents, circumstances and ambitions. Their achievements may not have won them prizes in posterity – no blue plaques or statues for them – but by normalising new ways of living, they were every bit as influential in creating social change. The six women I have chosen ranged in age, education, political outlook and, to a degree, social class; but they all managed to make a self-sufficient living through horticulture. These particular women are also interesting because their choice of gardening as a career was not just a way to earn a living for themselves (itself a relatively radical act); horticulture offered them the opportunity to live a lifestyle that chimed with their beliefs and make a real contribution to improving the world around them. In their different ways, the women in this book had strong ideals, and training as gardeners gave them a set of skills that empowered them to make a difference.
We start our story in 1891, just before serious horticultural training for women became a realistic possibility. It is also a convenient date to begin our story because 1891 was a census year, so we can gain an accurate picture of what the six women, who ranged in age from 15 to 35, were up to before they entered the gardening profession. At this point Ada Brown, Isobel Turner, Edith Bradley, Olive Cockerell, Madeline Agar and Gertrude Cope had little idea that their future lives would be dedicated to a career in horticulture. Even just nine years shy of the 20th century, a career in gardening was still an unlikely prospect for a woman. Progression as a professional gardener generally depended on serving a long apprenticeship whilst living in an all-male barracks known as a ‘bothy’, effectively making gardening as a serious career inaccessible to women. While working-class women had been doing paid work in gardens for centuries, they were restricted to the very simplest tasks requiring no horticultural education or training and worked for a low day rate, often on a casual or seasonal basis.
The six women we shall follow all came from middle- or lower-middle-class backgrounds and this type of menial, physical labour was simply out of the question for them. They were raised in a world that had very narrow and rigid definitions of respectability for women of their social class. The conventional genteel lady was destined by God and nature to be man’s helpmate, nurture his children and protect the sanctity of his home. Indeed, many people argued that women’s largely ornamental role, freed from the need to work for subsistence, was as a sign of a ‘higher civilisation’.
Over the course of the 19th century, the increasing wealth of the middle classes had enabled them to hand over domestic chores to servants and the care of children to governesses and nurses. Thus the homely eighteenth- century housewife had turned into a lady of leisure and the idea had gained currency that paid work for women was demeaning. Passive and delicate, such a woman had supposedly neither the strength nor inclination to undertake strenuous physical activity. In 1864, the influential writer and art critic John Ruskin gave his famous lecture ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ in which he declared, ‘The man, in his rough open world, must encounter all peril and trial ... But he guards the woman from this; within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger ... This is the true nature of the home – it is the place of peace.’ In truth the idea of ‘separate spheres’, with women at home and men monopolising the world of work, was never universally applied – there were always exceptional women who broke through – yet it was nonetheless a powerful social norm that shaped the world in which our six women grew up.
Extracted from An Almost Impossible Thing: The Radical Lives of Britain’s Pioneering Women Gardeners, published by Little Toller Books, which is out in paperback on April 3
