Women Who Gardened

Gardening Women: Their Stories from 1600 to the Present by Catherine Horwood covers over 2000 years from Flora the Roman goddess of plants to today’s media gardeners. It of necessity concentrates on the last 400 years.

What to Expect in the Book of the Month

• An interesting feature is about the battles fought against male-dominated institutions.
• The history of women illustrators of botanical books is dealt with a some length .
• One reviewer called the book a ‘forking over’ not a ‘double digging’ but it is hard to cover such a large topic in a way that suits everyone, even with 450 pages.
• The trials and triumphs of the women who gardened are often covered by lists and light coverage. Gertrude Jekyll and other famous women gardeners are well covered in other works but more could have been said about some of the lesser known women gardeners

Who Wants to Read ‘Gardening Women: Their Stories from 1600 to the Present’

• Women gardeners traditionally grew vegetables for their kitchens and herbs for their medicine cupboards. Anyone who wants to know who taught young women about gardening twenty-five years before women’s horticultural schools officially existed, can gain from reading this book.
• Students of horticulture should be appraised of the roles women have played in the development of gardening.
• Sociologists may find the research a bit skimpy but for a gardening tome there are ample references and scope for further study.

Buy ‘Gardening Women: Their Stories from 1600 to the Present’ by Catherine Horwood from Amazon

A bit more challenging is Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism and Rebellion in the Garden also available from amazon

Quick Thoughts of the Month

• Women do a lot of work in the urban and contemporary gardens of the UK and deserve recognition for their efforts. This work could have gone much further and done more.
• The RHS and Kew have promoted the idea of women gardeners and now have senior executives within their traditionally male bastions.
• Many garden authors and women writers on gardening write on the subject from an upper middle class perspective. Lets have a book on women gardeners that gets down to earth!