I've been reading through the content of this blog which goes back to 2014
The Gardens Trust
Its full of things and people from gardening history and contains some hints that to my eye that have a bearing on hidden history.
(The thing that hides history is us. Humans have bern addicted to media hence the numbers of youtubes media articles about AI, and wikipedia as sources which appear on here which many members use for their current opinions.)
There is no thread I can pick up in these blog posts and follow back or even a solid signpost of a shift or change in humanity so I am left to say this is a collection of hints.
Hence the thread title Odds & Sods.
As I go through it should any more come to light I'll add them in, more in hope than anything else, that they may be useful for someone.
“Oh, a dainty plant is the ivy green…”
How does Hibberd attempt to “sell” ivy to the Victorian gardening public? He starts of with a lengthy review of its historical and cultural associations, in ancient Egypt and the classical world and how it became associated with Dionysus/Bacchus and warding off drunkenness. He takes delight in telling us, that since “the leaves have a nauseous taste and stimulate the salivary glands” an infusion will act as a purgative rather than a hangover cure. Neverthless because the god himself, and his attendants were often depicted wearing wreaths of ivy leaves, ivy also somehow became associated with pubs and taverns where an ivy bush or an ivy-wrapped pole outside was an early form of advertising.
This and its use in mid-winter festivals led to ivy being frowned on by the early Christian church who then, as with so many other pagan customs, took it over and adapted it to serve their own purposes. Buying “greens, including ivy, to deck the church became a regular expense for churchwardens. The late Elizabethan chronicler John Stow tells us that, “against the feast of Christmas every man’s house, as also the parish churches, were decked with holme, ivy, and bayes, and whatsoever the season of the year afforded to be given. The conduits and standards in the streets were likewise garnished.”
The Company’s Garden
In 1647 a Dutch East India Company ship, the Haarlem, was wrecked in Table Bay. The survivors returned to Holland to report that the place was fertile and suitable for agriculture while the natives were not cannibals as reported, but friendly and, if kindly treated, could be converted to Christianity and used as servants. The Company, who had trading posts in the East Indies, Japan, Indo-China and Ceylon, decided that they should now establish a small but permanent base to service their ships and provide a proper respite from the long and dangerous voyage between east and west.
John Claudius Loudon…and cemeteries
John Evelyn, for example, argued “that there none so fitt places to bury in, than our Groves and Gardens, where our Graves may bedecked with…fragrant flowers… verdures, & perenniall plants, the most naturall Hieroglyphicks of our future Resurrection and Immortalitie; besides what they will conduce to meditation…and we might worthily declaime against our Custome of interring our dead in the body of our churches, as both undecent [&] unhealthy.” [Elysium Britannicum, p.157].
Meanwhile his friend Christopher Wren suggested something much more formal. Burials should be “in Cemeteries seated in the Out-skirts of the Town… This being inclosed with a strong Brick Wall, and having a Walk round, and two cross Walks, decently planted with Yew-trees, the four Quarters may serve four Parishes, where the Dead need not be disturbed at the Pleasure of the Sexton, or piled four or five upon one another, or Bones thrown out to gain Room.” [Letter of advice to the Commissioners for Building Fifty New City Churches, 1711]
As the Penny Magazine of August 2nd 1832 noted: “There are many church-yards in which the soil has been raised by several feet above the level of the adjoining street by the continual accumulation of mortal matter; and there are others in which the ground is actually probed with a borer before a grave is opened! Many tons of human bones are sent each year from London to the north, where they are crushed in mills contrived for the purpose, and used as manure.”
Which gave a link to this article from 2011, well worth a read.
The very evil custom of interring the dead in towns | London Cemeteries
Wisteria….
Wisterias originated in 3 main locations in the world. The two more obvious ones are China and Japan but the first specimens to reach Europe came from Mark Catesby who was collecting plants in Carolina in 1724.
In many early nursery catalogues it was known as the Carolina Kidney Bean in because its spotted seeds were thought to resemble very small kidney beans.
Much more popular is the chinese wisteria, wisteria sinensis. The first European to mention it was a French Jesuit missionary, Domenic Parennin in the early 18thc who described “the climbing plant teng lo with beautiful violet flowers hanging down in large bunches”. But it was not actually seen in Europe until 1816. It was probably sent by John Reeves who worked for the East India Company in their base near Canton who had acquired it from the garden of a local Chinese merchant whose anglicised name was Consequa. Another specimen, from the same garden source, arrived a few days later on another East Indiaman. This one was given to Thomas Palmer of Bromley.
better appreciated and understood. There are two species indigenous to the Japanese archipelago: Wisteria brachybotrys and the better known Wisteria floribunda. They have both been esteemed, recorded and hybridized for centuries by the Japanese, even featuring in literature and poetry as early as the 8th century.
It is only through the work of 3 physicians to the trading posts [all later remembered in the names of plant species] that any knowledge of Japanese plants and gardens reached Europe. Engelbert Kaempfer was there from 1690-92 and published his account of Japan including many plants in 1712 – amongst them the two species of wisteria or Too Fudsi and Jamma Fudsi as he called them. Nearly a century later Carl Thunberg became the trading post’s doctor, and on his return published Flora Japonica in 1794. Later still, in the 1820s, Phillip von Siebold managed to send back both herbarium and living specimens but the Japanese wisteria – Wisteria floribunda – was probably not introduced into cultivation until 1830 in America and probably even later in Europe.
Garden Menageries… 1: Coombe Abbey
As more of the world was explored so more animals and birds were brought back to western europe and to new homes in menageries and collections, and since western empires expanded much more rapidly from the mid-18thc onwards it is from the mid-18thc that we see the appearance of a large number of private menageries.
It’s important to point out that these creatures were not ‘pets’ – a term that according to the Oxford Dictionary doesn’t even appear in English until 1710 – but luxury commodities which could be bought, sold, exchanged, displayed and exploited.
Amongst those listed on our database is the menagerie at Coombe Abbey in Warwickshire. The park was laid out by by Capability Brown for the Earl of Craven in 1770.
It was through reading these that I discovered that Lord Craven’s menagerie was not the first on the site…and indeed was probably not as grand or unusual as the earlier one.
A previous owner, Sir John, later Lord, Harrington of Exton was a courtier who was entrusted with the education of James I’s daughter, Princess Elisabeth – later famous as Elizabeth of Bohemia or the Winter Queen – shortly after the king came to the throne in 1603. She came to live at Coombe Abbey with an entire court in miniature.
Harrington was clearly a highly educated and inquisitive man who was at the cutting edge of advances in science and technology. He and the princess used his microscope “which had been very lately discovered by Dribill, a Dutchman”, for studying insects, and this became “a frequent and favourite Entertainment”. [p.117-8] Lady Frances also reports that “There was one of the best Telescopes at Lord Harrington’s, that had yet been made, (it was not above fifty-two Years that they had been first invented) and the looking through it at the moon and other Planets was always an Entertainment to us.” [p.109]
A camel, giraffe, chameleon in a tree, flying dragon, ichneumon, spider, and various insects and flowers, from Animalium, ferarum et bestiary , engraved by Hollar and published by Stent, 1663
Garden Tools & Equipment…
The first list of tools in England I can find was written by Alexander Neckam, abbot of Cirencester, in 1190. It was a list of suggestions for every well equipped peasant’s shed…broad bladed long knives, a spade and a shovel, a seed box, a billhook for dealing with brambles, 2 baskets, a trap for vermin and a wheelbarrow ….. and finally a snare for wolves!
By 1388 the tools held by the gardener at Abingdon Abbey included the things on Neckam’s list but with the addition of a long handled scythe and two small sickles… and also ii cissorie and a dung pot.
Cardinal Wolsey’s gardener at Hampton court over a hundred years later had much the same list… 3 spades, 2 iron rakes, 2 lines, 4 dibbles, i billhook, a wheel barrow, 2 hatchets, a pick, & a tub to water herbs.
Leonard Mascall writing in 1572, for example, lists 11 different kinds of tools for grafting and pruning work, whilst Walter Blith’s The English Improver Improved of 1653 illustrates 4 different kinds of spades alone – for turfing, gouging, trenching and paring.
John Evelyn certainly had a batterie de jardin of his own – or rather for his gardener – and he describes and illustrates more than 70 tools and pieces of equipment in Elysium Britannicum, including wheelbarows and water barrows, rakes of ‘severall sizes and finesses’, and a veritable array of spades, trowels, hoes, shears and pruning to to say noting of other garden essentials such as flower plots, cases and measuring equipment.
Until the industrial revolution all of these tools would have been hand-made; the metalwork crafted by blacksmiths and the wood worked by carpenters. In much of the country and on self-sufficient estates tools would probably have been to order, but elsewhere, especially in and around towns, a small number tools could probably be bought in shops. For example when Thomas Collins who had an ironmonger’s shop in the parish of St Martin in the Fields [then on the outskirts of London and near plenty of market gardens] died in July 1685, his shop contained ‘7 grafting sawes, 5 paire of Garden sheares, 6 garden hoes, 10 Labourers shovells, 7 Stable Shovells, 2 Stele spades, 1 Clay spade at 20d 1s 8d, 6 ord. spades, and 2 Garden rakes.’ [London Metropolitan Archives AM/PI/1/1685/050]
The Gardens Trust
Its full of things and people from gardening history and contains some hints that to my eye that have a bearing on hidden history.
(The thing that hides history is us. Humans have bern addicted to media hence the numbers of youtubes media articles about AI, and wikipedia as sources which appear on here which many members use for their current opinions.)
There is no thread I can pick up in these blog posts and follow back or even a solid signpost of a shift or change in humanity so I am left to say this is a collection of hints.
Hence the thread title Odds & Sods.
As I go through it should any more come to light I'll add them in, more in hope than anything else, that they may be useful for someone.
“Oh, a dainty plant is the ivy green…”
How does Hibberd attempt to “sell” ivy to the Victorian gardening public? He starts of with a lengthy review of its historical and cultural associations, in ancient Egypt and the classical world and how it became associated with Dionysus/Bacchus and warding off drunkenness. He takes delight in telling us, that since “the leaves have a nauseous taste and stimulate the salivary glands” an infusion will act as a purgative rather than a hangover cure. Neverthless because the god himself, and his attendants were often depicted wearing wreaths of ivy leaves, ivy also somehow became associated with pubs and taverns where an ivy bush or an ivy-wrapped pole outside was an early form of advertising.
This and its use in mid-winter festivals led to ivy being frowned on by the early Christian church who then, as with so many other pagan customs, took it over and adapted it to serve their own purposes. Buying “greens, including ivy, to deck the church became a regular expense for churchwardens. The late Elizabethan chronicler John Stow tells us that, “against the feast of Christmas every man’s house, as also the parish churches, were decked with holme, ivy, and bayes, and whatsoever the season of the year afforded to be given. The conduits and standards in the streets were likewise garnished.”
The Company’s Garden
In 1647 a Dutch East India Company ship, the Haarlem, was wrecked in Table Bay. The survivors returned to Holland to report that the place was fertile and suitable for agriculture while the natives were not cannibals as reported, but friendly and, if kindly treated, could be converted to Christianity and used as servants. The Company, who had trading posts in the East Indies, Japan, Indo-China and Ceylon, decided that they should now establish a small but permanent base to service their ships and provide a proper respite from the long and dangerous voyage between east and west.
John Claudius Loudon…and cemeteries
John Evelyn, for example, argued “that there none so fitt places to bury in, than our Groves and Gardens, where our Graves may bedecked with…fragrant flowers… verdures, & perenniall plants, the most naturall Hieroglyphicks of our future Resurrection and Immortalitie; besides what they will conduce to meditation…and we might worthily declaime against our Custome of interring our dead in the body of our churches, as both undecent [&] unhealthy.” [Elysium Britannicum, p.157].
Meanwhile his friend Christopher Wren suggested something much more formal. Burials should be “in Cemeteries seated in the Out-skirts of the Town… This being inclosed with a strong Brick Wall, and having a Walk round, and two cross Walks, decently planted with Yew-trees, the four Quarters may serve four Parishes, where the Dead need not be disturbed at the Pleasure of the Sexton, or piled four or five upon one another, or Bones thrown out to gain Room.” [Letter of advice to the Commissioners for Building Fifty New City Churches, 1711]
As the Penny Magazine of August 2nd 1832 noted: “There are many church-yards in which the soil has been raised by several feet above the level of the adjoining street by the continual accumulation of mortal matter; and there are others in which the ground is actually probed with a borer before a grave is opened! Many tons of human bones are sent each year from London to the north, where they are crushed in mills contrived for the purpose, and used as manure.”
In 1813 Loudon had undertaken an extraordinary journey. In the midst of the Napoleonic wars, and in the immediate aftermath of the disastrous French retreat from Moscow he had set out to cross the continent and visited Poland, before going along the Baltic coast to St Petersburg and then moving on to Moscow. Apart from the obvious horrors of seeing countless unburied soldiers rotting in roadside ditches, he explains in the Preface to On the Laying Out, Planting and Managing of Cemeteries and on the Improvement of Churchyards which was eventually published in 1843, that…Which gave a link to this article from 2011, well worth a read.
The very evil custom of interring the dead in towns | London Cemeteries
Wisteria….
Wisterias originated in 3 main locations in the world. The two more obvious ones are China and Japan but the first specimens to reach Europe came from Mark Catesby who was collecting plants in Carolina in 1724.
In many early nursery catalogues it was known as the Carolina Kidney Bean in because its spotted seeds were thought to resemble very small kidney beans.
Much more popular is the chinese wisteria, wisteria sinensis. The first European to mention it was a French Jesuit missionary, Domenic Parennin in the early 18thc who described “the climbing plant teng lo with beautiful violet flowers hanging down in large bunches”. But it was not actually seen in Europe until 1816. It was probably sent by John Reeves who worked for the East India Company in their base near Canton who had acquired it from the garden of a local Chinese merchant whose anglicised name was Consequa. Another specimen, from the same garden source, arrived a few days later on another East Indiaman. This one was given to Thomas Palmer of Bromley.
better appreciated and understood. There are two species indigenous to the Japanese archipelago: Wisteria brachybotrys and the better known Wisteria floribunda. They have both been esteemed, recorded and hybridized for centuries by the Japanese, even featuring in literature and poetry as early as the 8th century.
It is only through the work of 3 physicians to the trading posts [all later remembered in the names of plant species] that any knowledge of Japanese plants and gardens reached Europe. Engelbert Kaempfer was there from 1690-92 and published his account of Japan including many plants in 1712 – amongst them the two species of wisteria or Too Fudsi and Jamma Fudsi as he called them. Nearly a century later Carl Thunberg became the trading post’s doctor, and on his return published Flora Japonica in 1794. Later still, in the 1820s, Phillip von Siebold managed to send back both herbarium and living specimens but the Japanese wisteria – Wisteria floribunda – was probably not introduced into cultivation until 1830 in America and probably even later in Europe.
Garden Menageries… 1: Coombe Abbey
As more of the world was explored so more animals and birds were brought back to western europe and to new homes in menageries and collections, and since western empires expanded much more rapidly from the mid-18thc onwards it is from the mid-18thc that we see the appearance of a large number of private menageries.
It’s important to point out that these creatures were not ‘pets’ – a term that according to the Oxford Dictionary doesn’t even appear in English until 1710 – but luxury commodities which could be bought, sold, exchanged, displayed and exploited.
Amongst those listed on our database is the menagerie at Coombe Abbey in Warwickshire. The park was laid out by by Capability Brown for the Earl of Craven in 1770.
It was through reading these that I discovered that Lord Craven’s menagerie was not the first on the site…and indeed was probably not as grand or unusual as the earlier one.
A previous owner, Sir John, later Lord, Harrington of Exton was a courtier who was entrusted with the education of James I’s daughter, Princess Elisabeth – later famous as Elizabeth of Bohemia or the Winter Queen – shortly after the king came to the throne in 1603. She came to live at Coombe Abbey with an entire court in miniature.
Harrington was clearly a highly educated and inquisitive man who was at the cutting edge of advances in science and technology. He and the princess used his microscope “which had been very lately discovered by Dribill, a Dutchman”, for studying insects, and this became “a frequent and favourite Entertainment”. [p.117-8] Lady Frances also reports that “There was one of the best Telescopes at Lord Harrington’s, that had yet been made, (it was not above fifty-two Years that they had been first invented) and the looking through it at the moon and other Planets was always an Entertainment to us.” [p.109]
The first list of tools in England I can find was written by Alexander Neckam, abbot of Cirencester, in 1190. It was a list of suggestions for every well equipped peasant’s shed…broad bladed long knives, a spade and a shovel, a seed box, a billhook for dealing with brambles, 2 baskets, a trap for vermin and a wheelbarrow ….. and finally a snare for wolves!
By 1388 the tools held by the gardener at Abingdon Abbey included the things on Neckam’s list but with the addition of a long handled scythe and two small sickles… and also ii cissorie and a dung pot.
Cardinal Wolsey’s gardener at Hampton court over a hundred years later had much the same list… 3 spades, 2 iron rakes, 2 lines, 4 dibbles, i billhook, a wheel barrow, 2 hatchets, a pick, & a tub to water herbs.
Leonard Mascall writing in 1572, for example, lists 11 different kinds of tools for grafting and pruning work, whilst Walter Blith’s The English Improver Improved of 1653 illustrates 4 different kinds of spades alone – for turfing, gouging, trenching and paring.
John Evelyn certainly had a batterie de jardin of his own – or rather for his gardener – and he describes and illustrates more than 70 tools and pieces of equipment in Elysium Britannicum, including wheelbarows and water barrows, rakes of ‘severall sizes and finesses’, and a veritable array of spades, trowels, hoes, shears and pruning to to say noting of other garden essentials such as flower plots, cases and measuring equipment.
Until the industrial revolution all of these tools would have been hand-made; the metalwork crafted by blacksmiths and the wood worked by carpenters. In much of the country and on self-sufficient estates tools would probably have been to order, but elsewhere, especially in and around towns, a small number tools could probably be bought in shops. For example when Thomas Collins who had an ironmonger’s shop in the parish of St Martin in the Fields [then on the outskirts of London and near plenty of market gardens] died in July 1685, his shop contained ‘7 grafting sawes, 5 paire of Garden sheares, 6 garden hoes, 10 Labourers shovells, 7 Stable Shovells, 2 Stele spades, 1 Clay spade at 20d 1s 8d, 6 ord. spades, and 2 Garden rakes.’ [London Metropolitan Archives AM/PI/1/1685/050]
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