This series of talks is part of a longer programme from The Gardens Trust for autumn/winter 2021/22 on Commercial Plant Nurseries, Plant Hunters and Pioneers.
This ticket is for the entire course of 3 sessions, and tickets are not available for individual sessions.
Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the first talk, which will be the same link throughout (If you do not receive this link please contact us), and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.
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Commercial gardening has long been the Cinderella - or perhaps more accurately the Ugly Sister - in the history of horticulture. It is not always glamorous and has never attracted the same attention as garden design or ornamental gardening. Yet its history is at least as interesting and brings us into closer contact with the ordinary gardeners of the past.
Until the mid-17thc gardeners were never simply market gardeners or nurserymen; indeed, they would have struggled to understand those terms. Although specialisation seems to have started slowly around the time of the Restoration the word “gardener” usually carried a much more general meaning well until into the 19thc. meanings. Everything from those who ran the gardens of the elite and commanded large teams of labourers, to those who worked on small family run field-based market gardens. It could include seedsmen, nurserymen, and flower growers, as well as jobbing gardeners or servants who did a bit of garden work in addition to their other duties. To make things more complicated most individuals could have several jobs or occupations at the same time or seasonally, or over the course of their lifetime.
Without much “standard” evidence such as account books or letters, telling the story of commercial gardening or even of gardening as a profession has been fraught with complexities and hard to do.
But all that is about to change! The Gardens Trust is pleased to be hosting a whole series of lectures over the next few months which will begin to uncover the story of nurserymen, market gardeners and their associates.
The series begins in September with three introductory lectures, looking at how commercial gardening developed in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, with specialist trades such as nurseryman, seedsman and market gardener gradually begin to emerge.
It will be followed in October by a series of four lectures on the Veitch family, their nurseries and plant collectors, who were probably the most significant commercial gardening dynasty of all time. After that, in November and December, researchers mainly from county gardens trusts all around the country will be showcasing their work on uncovering the stories of local nurseries and the families who ran them.
Week 1: 13 Sept. Overview and the world of commercial gardening before the Restoration with David Marsh and Jill Francis
Week 2: 20 Sept. The emergence of specialist trades with David Marsh
Week 3: 27 Sept. Eighteenth Century Nurseries with David Marsh
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After a career as a head teacher in Inner London, David Marsh took very early retirement (the best thing he ever did) and returned to education on his own account and did an MA and then a PhD in garden history. Now he lectures on garden history anywhere that will listen to him and helps organize the Garden History Seminar at London University’s Institute of Historical Research. He is co-chair of the Education and Events Committee of The Gardens Trust, for whom he organises courses and writes a weekly garden history blog which you can find at The Gardens Trust Blog.
Jill Francis is an early modern historian, specialising in gardens and gardening in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. She teaches history at the University of Birmingham and the University of Worcester and contributes to the MA programme on West Midlands History at Birmingham. She is an occasional lecturer on the IHR Garden and Landscape History programme and is becoming increasing involved with the Gardens’ Trust online provision. She also works at the Shakespeare Institute Library in Stratford-upon-Avon. Her first book, Gardens and Gardening in Early Modern England and Wales, was published by Yale University Press in June 2018.
