Victorian Gardens

Victorian Gardens

In The Victorian House Book, by Robin Guild, there is a great summary of Victorian gardens states the following:

“The survival of gardens anything like their original form is even more precarious than that of houses.  Where a Victorian house may have endured through a century and then been spoiled by the addition of an inappropriate dormer, it is at least possible to make out the lines of the original.  In the case of gardens, a few months of vigorous reshaping and replanting will obliterate almost all evidence of what was there before.  Conservatories, summer houses, pavilions, pergolas and garden seats are also more at risk than houses.  They are exposed to weather and vulnerable as seasonal accessories, forgotten and abandoned during the winter.  Were it not for these processes of decay, we would have far more evidence today of the various metamorphoses that gardening underwent in the Victorian period, including restoring an original Victorian garden.

The key change was that gardening ceased to be an occupation pursued only by the rich for their pleasure and the poor for their survival, becoming instead a popular pastime for almost anyone with a little plot of land to cultivate.  This popularity reflected not just changes in the distribution of wealth resulting from the Industrial Revolution, but also the much greater variety of plants available, new species having been discovered and brought to England and the United States from all over the world, highlighting the importance of understanding the Victorian period.

It is difficult today, with our immense catalog of readily available species, to realize how restricted was the range of plants in the American and British garden right up to the beginning of the 19th century.  Many of the everyday landscape plants we are likely to take for granted as indigenous species were in fact introduced from abroad during this period.  Dahlias arrived in England in 1788, followed over the next decades by tea roses, hydrangeas, salvias, camellias, hybrid rhododendrons, gardenias, chrysanthemums, and fuchsias, among countless others.  From England these many new varieties were quickly imported into the United States.”