Introduction: ‘Mrs Woodcock’s irises’

IT IS A misty November morning. Each blade of grass gleams and leans, heavy with moisture, and the air is so still that leaves from the oak tree at the end of my garden fall straight down, twirling and landing like a whisper. Across the road the young lime trees with their conical shape are bare at the top, their lower branches still clad in skirts of pale yellow-green. Behind them, towering over the mock-Tudor semis, a copper beech burns orange and brown. It is the end of the year when gardens are fading. The shabby annuals are pulled up, the geraniums taken in, the bulbs are planted: sturdy souls are dividing their perennials. On vegetable patches and allotments cabbages are swelling, Brussels sprouts budding, waiting for the first frost. Smoke from illicit bonfires curls through the streets.

Because I want to write about the history of gardens, as I walk to the shop I lean over every wall and wonder. Did the Romans grow broccoli? When did that prunus reach our shores? What genius first noticed that dung made things grow? Which tools hung in an Elizabethan shed? Do many people, like myself, know their plants better by the person who gave them to them – ‘Mrs Woodcock’s yellow irises’ – than by their proper Latin names?

I am writing this book out of curiosity and pleasure, and because a friend asked me some intriguing questions about who had gardens in earlier times and what they grew in them. My aim is modest: a quest to uncover the gardens, plots and people of Britain in the past. I hope to find glimpses of the gardens of both rich and poor, and to see how they changed in response to new conditions – the coming of the monasteries or the rise of empire, the journeys of plant hunters and the building of bungalows.

The British Isles have an amazingly varied, complicated geology and since the old truism that the answer lies in the soil is undoubtedly true, gardens in one area are very different from those in another. Climatic conditions vary, too, from the gulf-stream-warmed western coats to the frosty moors of the Pennines. The climate has changed often: in the ‘sub-Atlantic’ period, from around 500 BC, it was wet and cool, but between AD 1000 and 1300, the south was hotter and vines could be grown here. Then, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century the weather was colder, a ‘mini Ice Age’, while today we are moving into warmer times again. In addition, over centuries tastes change, new plants arrive. So although we all probably have a vague idea of ‘an English garden’, this is a fluid term – I suspect that I will find no such thing as a true native garden, any more than Defoe could find his ‘true-born Englishman’.

Gardens are always unfinished, telling a long tale of immigration and connection and transformation. Even a small backyard or a window box, conceals stories of conquest, empire, aspirations and ideas: you can see this in miniature in the recently created period gardens at the Geffrye Museum, in east London, which show how town gardening changed from the sixteenth century to today. Yet every garden is also the personal creation of those who work in it. Gardening is hard work, as a Victorian apprentice up before dawn in January to sweep the gravel paths of the great could certainly tell you. And it can bring fears as well as pleasure, frets as well as promise: in the middle of the eighteenth century a stout doctor, Erasmus Darwin, was stomping around his garden in his boots and greatcoat, writing the name of every plant in a scuffed brown notebook and mapping his small kingdom ‘near the sundial’, ‘behind the shed’, ‘between the house and the river’ and writing anxious notes like ‘lost’, or, even more poignant, ‘lost?’. Men and women before and after him know what it feels like to breathe deeply when spring comes, smelling the warm earth but wondering what the frost has done.

Gardens are an intimate clock of the seasons. I sometimes imagine a time lapse sequence, sitting in a garden chair, while plants rise and fall, flowers open, the leaves bud and open and darken and fall; fruit swells and ripens and vanishes back to the bare branch. It happens almost imperceptibly, but you only have to be away for a weekend to be amazed at the change. The novel August by Gerard Woodward has a vivid encapsulation of this, as his north London family return from holiday in Wales:

The return to Fernlight Avenue after three weeks’ absence in midsummer was always to a garden of dizzying voluptuousness. Entering the kitchen they were taken aback by the thickening of greenery beyond the windows. The lawn would be a yard high with hay, the trees would be scraping the windows and would have unloaded their fruit on the ground … The roses would have bloomed and fallen, leaving puddles of pink petals on the grass, and the lower end of the garden, where it narrowed to an avenue between soft fruits, would be impenetrable, the blackberries and raspberries having closed the gap between themselves.

Although we set out to control nature, whether we plan sweeping landscapes or small roof gardens, year in year out it still takes us by surprise. The garden is merely a boundary between us and the wild, a tamed sphere that always wants to revert to wilderness. It is sexy and fecund, prone to chaos and pests, but controlled (we hope) into beauty and order. The word ‘garden’ itself comes from ghordos, an ancient Indo-European word for ‘enclosure’, and the same root is in ‘yard’ and ‘orchard’. Garden historians remind us, too, that the ancient Persian word for ‘enclosure’ was pairidaeza – which applied both to the hunting parks of kings and to walled gardens for produce and ornamental plants. This became pardes in the Old Testament, paradeisos in Greek and our ‘park’ in English. But of course it is also ‘paradise’, the Garden of Eden and the fields of heaven, free from the ravages of death and of time. There have always been two main types of garden, although often mixed together. One is the useful plot of vegetables and herbs and fruit for the household, at one remove from farming. The other is the pleasure garden, which may be a sensual haven of flowers and trees and scent, or a tended green landscape. Beyond them lies the park, the tamed landscape, and mingled with them all, perhaps, is the idea of the garden as the sacred grove, the haunt of gods.

So, to begin at the beginning. Or at least in the prehistory of British gardening, when the last great Ice Age retreated. There were a few areas, perhaps, where the ice had held back, like the western coast of Ireland where old species from a warmer world such as the strawberry tree clung on during the frozen era, but elsewhere all that was left after the glaciers was a tundra-like desert of lichen and moss. Into this world men and women came from Europe across the land bridge – and plants came too, borne by the wind, carried by animals and birds, moving northwards as the climate warmed over millennia: birches and willows, oak and elm and Scots pine. Around 5000 BC Britain became an island, but as wanderers crossed the narrow straits they also brought their plants with them – and we have been introducing new species ever since.

As Timothy Mowl wrote recently, much of the history of gardens has been written from an academic or literary perspective, seizing on a poem or a painting for evidence rather than ransacking record offices and then undertaking a ‘walking history’, searching and exploring Britain’s hidden gardens. I have delved a little and walked a lot, but I still follow the trail of poets and painters and writers and I have deliberately included famous gardens like Hatfield, Stowe, Stourhead, Chatsworth, because so many of us visit them and they really do stand as landmarks of change. This is a long history but a shortish book, so birth and death dates have been placed, by and large, in the index. I am following in the footsteps of garden historians from the Victorians to today and we each, inevitably, echo each other – nipping quotations and examples, as avid garden visitors pinch irresistible cuttings. I hope I have acknowledged my many debts, but some odd gleanings may well have got transplanted without my thinking and if so, I apologise. And if the map I draw is familiar to experts, I hope that for many others – like myself – the changing landscape of the garden will be new.

I

SEED

1

Did the Romans have rakes?

WELL, YES – AND they grew turnips. When the Roman legions came, bringing their roads and amphitheatres, town plans and temples, baths and underfloor heating, they also brought their gardening lore. They created our first plant-filled spaces intended purely for enjoyment, adapting the patterns of the Mediterranean to the cold climate, just as they had in Germany and Gaul.

In 54 BC Julius Caesar described the land as thickly studded with homesteads. Tribes of Belgae, immigrants from the Continent two generations before, grew wheat and tended cattle in the valleys while the native British, the older Celtic peoples, lived on the uplands, ‘on milk and meat and wear skins’. Caesar saw no true gardens, nothing but clearings amid dense forests and swampy treacherous marshes.

Yet even the earliest nomadic peoples had cultivated the land, clearing the forests of birch, ash, hazel and holly with stone axes, grubbing up trees with scapula made from the shoulder-blades of oxen, tilling the earth with stone hoes and wooden digging-sticks. More settled ways of life began around 2000 BC and by 1200 BC the ancient wildwood had already diminished. Some long-lived settlements like Fengate and Flag Fen near Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, which lasted for nearly 2000 years, show Neolithic, Bronze Age and later Iron Age field patterns, a long record of tilling and toil. In winter the families stayed on the dry fen edge and in spring, when water levels fell, they moved out with their sheep and a few cows to the open fen pastures: among the treasures found here are beautiful bronze shears in a special wooden case. Were they gardeners?

When the Celtic tribes, spreading slowly west from the Danube, arrived around 700 BC they brought their own tradition of agriculture, tending flocks and using shallow ploughs, storing the grain in great underground granaries. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, the Celts lived in well-organised tribes, their ranks descending from the high-ranking nobles and warriors and the priestly Druids to the virtual slaves who worked the soil. They loved bright colours, gold and jewels, and they knew the power of plants: in Welsh myth the legendary Doctors of Myddvai were the sons of Nelferch, a fairy woman who came out of a lake in the Black Mountains and instructed them in the healing arts of herbs.

The great hill forts, like Danebury or Maiden Castle, with round dwellings and grain storage pits clustered within the mighty earth walls, tell a long tale of tribal conflict. But there were lowland settlements, too, where a palisade or ditch encircled round houses of timber and thatch, or stone and turf, and webs of ditches marked out fields, with larger areas for cattle and cereals: the Celts became such skilled farmers that they were renowned for producing two crops in a year. Bones show that families kept sheep, cattle and pigs, and excavations turn up iron sickles and stone querns for grinding corn, while evidence from pollen reveals the plants they used: nuts and fruit, like crab apples, wild pears and strawberries and sloes; celery, carrots, beet, leafy brassicas and asparagus, black bindweed and the spinach-like Good King Henry and Fat Hen with its rich seeds.

This is farming and gathering more than gardening, but it does seem that they kept small plots closer to home, protected from animals by a sprouting hazel hedge, or belt of hawthorn set by striking winter hardwood cuttings. Some vegetables go back to the Iron Age, like the broad bean, the beet and the tall, celery-like alexanders (still grown in Victorian kitchen gardens), now more often found in roadside verges. The Britons also grew peas and the tubers of onion-couch, and herbs like mint and coriander and even the opium poppy, brought by traders from the East. They had domelike wickerwork beehives, covered with dung or clay. And they had sacred ‘gardens’, too, groves where they worshipped their gods at a tree or spring – often marked by later Roman temples.

At the start of the first millennium Britain was far from isolated. The tribes exported their surplus grain and metals to the Continent, and took in refugees from Roman-dominated lands, who brought new knowledge of tools and farming techniques. But within the first decade of Roman conquest the landscape changed. The old upland tracks were replaced by a new web of roads; garrisons were housed in forts and old soldiers were granted settlements or ‘colonia’. When Agricola became governor in AD 78 he started to build towns, which pulled in the rural communities through their markets. Many farmers profited from the Roman stay and British tribal leaders became local princes.

The Romans brought the legacy of the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean and Middle East. Before 3000 BC the Sumerian tribes were irrigating the swampy land between the Tigris and Euphrates, and in Egypt the first gardeners were protecting their produce from the desert winds with high palisades. Lotus, daisies, roses, lilies, olives and date palms all appear in ancient architecture or jewellery, and the first garden picture, from an Egyptian tomb around 1475 BC, shows a funeral ceremony, with lotus flowering on a deep blue pool, fringed with date and sycamore. The rectangular lines, easier for irrigation, dictated the formal shape of gardens for generations. This is the small, enclosed courtyard garden. But in Assyria, as the centuries passed the kings also laid out great hunting grounds, and made the beautiful parks of Nineveh and the seventh-century hanging gardens of Babylon, while to the east the Persians created their own intimate garden, their ‘paradise’.

After Alexander the Great marched through Persia in 330 BC, the Greeks took to horticulture: Aristotle’s students raised plants from seeds; Persian-style pleasure gardens were built; scholars made the first classification of plants and their medicinal uses. Later, in Rome, many such herbals were written and the most famous, the De Materia Medica of Dioscorides, remained a standard work for many centuries. Rome also had its agricultural authorities like Cato, Varro and Columella, a farmer from Gadez (Cadiz) in Spain who composed a down-to-earth manual, even providing a monthly calendar of tasks and writing a wonderfully energetic, plant-packed hymn to his own small garden, rejoicing in the good crumbly soil and bewailing ‘the bramble-bush to legs unkind’.

By the time the Romans were building their first towns in Britain, gardening was fashionable. Rome was full of plant hunters, outdoing each other in seeking exotic species from distant parts of the empire, or hunting down new forms of the ever popular rose. The city had nursery gardens and workshops to provide statuary and pots, and most houses, like those at Pompeii, had an inner courtyard garden with shrubs, pools, fountains and formal planting, and sometimes with statuary or stone dining couches and frescoes evoking the life of the country outside. The poets of the day celebrated the joys of retreating to the country life and wealthy landowners laid out lavish estates, practising ‘rural simplicity’ in luxurious style. In his letters, Pliny the Younger (whose uncle was also a great horticulturalist) described his two country houses, one by the sea and one in the Tuscan hills, surrounded by wild-flower meadows and woods. At the seaside he had a court for ball games, walkways edged with box and rosemary, a banqueting house and a large kitchen garden. In the hills there were beds of acanthus, a sunlit yard full of roses, a courtyard with a fountain and box alleys trimmed into curious shapes. Pliny’s ‘garden rooms’ were always offset by outward-looking views, and the style he evokes would inspire the grand Renaissance gardens of Europe and the British landscape gardens of the eighteenth century.

Pompeian peristyle garden, from W. Gell, Pompeiana, 1832.

Roman gardeners were also skilled plantsmen, knowledgeable about techniques of grafting and layering, and the use of manure. For vegetables they laid out raised beds, three to six feet wide, separated by narrow paths for easy weeding. They were experts at forcing: when the Emperor Tiberius developed a passion for cucumbers his gardeners kept a perpetual crop ready by raising them in wheeled basketwork beds full of dung, brought into the sun even on cool days with their heat intensified by thin sheets of mica – like portable cold frames. They knew about pesticides, applying tar and bitumen, ammonia and lime, and amurca – a poisonous byproduct of olive oil making. They fumigated their orchards with smoke from a sulphurous mixture brewed in copper cauldrons, and attacked mildew, gnats and cankers with smoke pellets made of dried dung and vinegar. This was the expertise that they brought to Britain.

Gardening flourished first here in the countryside, around the luxurious rural villas of the late first century. One of the greatest was at Fishbourne, near Chichester in Sussex. This is often linked with the British Cogidubnus, the king of the Artrebates, an educated ally of Rome, but all we know for sure is that it was an army depot until, in the ad 60s, a large house was built with mosaic floors, marble veneers and richly painted walls. There was a bath suite to the south, close to the sea, and a garden with colonnades, their columns topped with richly carved capitals.

Fishbourne was discovered by pure luck in 1961, when a workman digging a trench for a water main hacked through some tiles. Soon the mosaic floors were found and then the first traces of the formal garden, shown by differences in the soil, where the gardeners had filled trenches with loam to offset the acid and gravel. The large courtyard with its pool was enclosed like a cloister by colonnaded walkways, and divided by an avenue forty feet long, leading to the great audience chamber. The two halves, probably with grassy lawns, were marked out by topiary, with alternate square and semicircular niches, maybe for statues or urns or decorative shrubs. Gravel paths ran around the sides, between the small hedges (almost certainly of box, which the Romans loved), and beneath them ran a water pipe, feeding fountains and filling ornamental marble basins. The visitor, crunching across the gravel, would look back at a range of fruit trees, symmetrically planted in a framework of supporting timber, and behind them a mass of climbing plants. (One outside wall was even frescoed with roses and leaves, like the houses at Pompeii.)

Gardeners who knew about landscape design must have come here to work, bringing familiar elements like the great court and the intimate peristyle gardens, the clipped box and the fountains, the orchard and kitchen garden, the landscaped park with its distant views. At Fishbourne, as at Pliny’s seaside villa, the view stretched down to the fields and the sea. The cost of levelling the land and bringing in trained men must have been huge, and all this would need a well-regulated, skilled workforce: perhaps Romans or freedmen from the northern provinces, directing local British labourers or slaves. The estate was run by an agent, with specialists in charge of the vegetables (the olitor), the trees (aborator), the clipped hedges and shrubs (topiarius). Each area had its own workers, both men and women, with their own tools: pruning hooks and special knives, wooden spades with metal ‘shoes’ to give a good cutting blade; rakes with four or six teeth, hurdles and baskets and watering pots, hoes and shears and sickles. Boys would be out at first light raking the gravel, scything the grass to keep its velvet sheen, trimming the topiary – then vanishing, retreating to the work of the kitchen garden and remaining invisible when the family and guests emerged, leaving the garden as if nature alone had created the spectacle just for their delight. A pattern, in fact, very like that of a Victorian country house.

And what did they grow? After a long cold period at the start of the first millennium BC, the climate was mild and many Mediterranean species flourished here. Tacitus (who was married to the daughter of the governor, Agricola) reported that the weather was unpleasant, ‘with frequent rain and mist’ but no severe cold, and that the soil was fertile and suitable for ‘all crops except the vine, olive and other plants requiring warmer climes’. The juniper and box for the decorative edges established themselves quickly. In the beds behind them there might be lilies, acanthus and rosemary, native violets and periwinkles, new flowers like the crocus and pansy, and different species of roses. The Romans brought new trees like the sweet chestnut, eating its nuts raw or roasted and grinding them for flour. They also introduced walnuts and almonds, apricots and quince, plums and figs, mulberries and medlars. The sweet cherry, or bird cherry, ancestor of the varieties we eat straight from the tree, was already here – it grows all over Europe – but the Romans brought the sour cherry, the origin of the cooking varieties, originally discovered on the southern shores of the Black Sea: it was growing here by AD 46, three years after the invasion. Locally made pots with perforated bases have been found, which would allow trees to be raised in big nurseries in the area and planted when needed.

Vineyards were established and in AD 270 restrictions on British wine production were lifted by imperial edict: Emperor Probus allegedly came to England to plant the first vine himself, supposedly at The Vyne, in Hampshire. And the Romans brought leeks, onions, turnips, radishes, cucumbers, lettuce and kale, artichokes and asparagus, and herbs like dill, marjoram, parsley and mustard; Maggie Campbell-Culver tells us that dill was used to make a mild soothing drink (our name comes from the Anglo-Saxon dillan, ‘to lull’). And with the legions came the white lily, later ‘the Madonna Lily’, originally from western Asia, and the perfumed Rosa gallica, which grew wild across Europe to Persia and beyond, and had long been cultivated in the gardens of Greece and Rome.

Fishbourne was exotic in the British landscape. But in the long era of Roman rule nearly 1000 villas small and large were built. Their rich owners might be Roman officials but were most likely to be British merchants, traders and councillors who had done well out of the occupation, or even wealthy incomers from Gaul, moving to a more peaceful land. Chedworth, in a slumbering fold of the Cotswolds, had a courtyard garden with colonnades, a spring flowing quietly into a deep pool and an elegant fountain house. Other villas nearby included Great Witcombe, standing proud on a terraced hillside near Gloucester, the huge courtyard complex of North Leigh and the palace of Woodchester, near Stroud. These were equalled by Bignor in Sussex, Lullingstone in Kent and Latimer in Buckinghamshire, which was a long low house with different garden areas, including formal gardens and rows of beds for planting vegetables or orchard trees.

Reconstruction of Chedworth, from the Illustrated London News.

As these villas are excavated, they reveal traces of the gardens their owners enjoyed. Some had fish ponds, like the large rectangular ponds placed between the two wings at Eccles in Kent, so that they could be seen from the rooms and corridors, or the pool set in the ornamental garden which fronted the villa at Darenth in the same county. There were formal flower beds and pergolas covered with vines, trailing plants or roses. Even at the smaller Frocester Court, in Gloucestershire, a drive approached the villa, flanked by grass edges with rectangular flower beds. In the bedding plots found both in front and behind the house – identified by the darker soil, where manure was mixed in, and the marks of spade cuts in the subsoil – hairpins suggest that women worked here. In some places the garden colonnades were partly closed, acknowledging the colder British climate, but despite the chilly weather a summer dining couch – a mark of real optimism – has been found at the villa of Rockbourne in Hampshire.

Fishbourne was abandoned after a fire around 270 and a hundred years later many other villas lay desolate. The end was near. After a long period of attack by Picts and Scots as well as Saxons, in 410 BC the Emperor Honorius recalled his troops. Romano-British institutions clung on, but slowly the towns declined and the villas crumbled. Some were taken over by new Germanic settlers, others were gradually dismantled, their stones used for other buildings, their neatly tended gardens succumbing to the creeping march of nettles and saplings, their pools the haunt of frogs and wading birds. The great Roman legacy disappeared, to be discovered again in centuries to come.

2

Aelfric’s list

THERE IS A small cul-de-sac on the Isle of Dogs in London, running down to the Thames. Behind low walls every front garden is astoundingly neat, a mass of colour in summer with geraniums, petunias and lobelia: every garden except one, where rubbish bins and broken bikes replace shrubs and fuchsias: people tut-tut loudly as they pass. Anglo-Saxon gardening is a bit like this. Historians scurry past it, averting their gaze, noting tersely ‘there was no gardening in Anglo-Saxon England’ and moving straight on to the monasteries and the Normans. But can this really be so? Could Britain have lost the love of gardening for half a millennium or more?

Certainly there is no evidence of trowel-wielding Angles or Jutes. There was a word for garden – wyrttun – but gardens go unmentioned in wills, charters and land grants: the poetry we know best is of battles and blood and monsters, of seascapes, and drinking round the fire in the lord’s hall. But these people had different cultural priorities: a heroic literature does not necessarily mean that outside the hall no one was cultivating a specially loved patch. Some Saxons had arrived even before the Romans withdrew at the start of the fifth century and they began to settle in earnest about AD 450. By then many towns and villas were already decaying. As for the gardens, it took no time for the brambles to annihilate the geometric plans and smother the imported plants. Some garden plants colonised the wild, like fennel, ground-elder and wormwood, brought by the Romans to cure wind, gout and worms. The sweet and sour cherry and the plums were too hardy to die out altogether, and went on blossoming and fruiting in odd gardens all through Saxon times. Among the vegetables and herbs, dill, fennel, lettuce, kale, radish and beet are old Roman survivals. Fruit trees like the fig, the almond and the peach, and glamorous vegetables like the artichoke may also have endured, or they may have vanished in these dark centuries and been reintroduced in the Middle Ages – we cannot be sure. As the Saxons gradually settled the land, odd British enclaves hung on. One was the little kingdom of Elmet in south Yorkshire, whose last king was Cedric. This was not conquered until 627 and could have remained an oasis of Roman gardening. As the historian John Harvey notes, it may not be a coincidence that this area is famous for its fine-flavoured ‘winesour’ plums, raised from suckers rather than by grafting. ‘May we legitimately ask’, Harvey wonders, if this variety ‘is a survival, through fifteen centuries of storm and stress, from the royal orchards of the Romano-British ancestors of King Cedric?’

The Anglo-Saxons recognised some plants and trees as incomers, like the walnut, whose name comes from wealh, ‘far away, foreign’. And we can make a guess at the Roman gardening survivors from a curious document, a Colloquy, or dialogue for teaching Latin, which the teacher Aelfric of Eynsham compiled and which was written down by his student, Aelfric Bata, in 995. He gives a long list of garden plants and, although this was primarily a vocabulary exercise so we have to tread with care, he chose words which were used in daily life. From his 200 names of plants and trees, we can guess which ones had lasted since the Romans because their Anglo-Saxon name is very similar to the Latin – this was what the plant was called when the Saxons first encountered it. Here are a few examples:

These plants and their names with the old Roman echoes are with us today.

The settlers from the north Germanic tribes were farmers and warriors, not organised citizens. They used the sea and the rivers for their main routes, letting weeds grow through the paving stones of the roads built by the legions. They built in wood, not stone, and instead of moving into the Roman towns or villas they tended to build alongside them, ignoring the old gardens. Small farming communities remained, and some centres like Canterbury show continual occupation, but elsewhere the towns were deserted, perhaps even ploughed over, before the Saxons moved back to them again.

Romano-British culture crumbled: pottery and glass making ceased; the stopping of the coinage brought the end of trade. Many Britons fell into servitude – the Anglo-Saxon for Briton is the same as that for ‘slave’ – and others drifted away towards the western fringes. By the middle of the sixth century the separate Saxon kingdoms were firmly established: Kent, Sussex, Wessex; Essex and East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia. The restless, battling mode of life did not encourage the development of fine gardens. But slowly, under the sway of the Christian Church, came the first impulse towards a revival. In the fifth century British missionaries who had been trained in France, like St Patrick and St Ninian, converted the Irish and preached to the Picts. The Celtic bishops roamed widely, with no fixed diocese, and the monks lived austerely in small communities or hermitages, often on windswept islands, surviving off the few fields near their cells, where they had livestock, grain and vegetables. A second, different, wave came later, after Gregory the Great sent St Augustine to England in 597, and this time the stress was on organisation, with settled bishoprics and larger monasteries. The synod of Whitby in 664, where the two branches settled their differences, ushered in a veritable Saxon renaissance.

As the Saxon rulers were converted, so cathedrals and abbeys were built and monasteries established. One of the monks’ first duties was to clear the land: when Bede wrote the lives of the abbots of Wearmouth, he told how even the abbots had to put their hand to the plough and help to forge the ‘instruments of husbandry upon an anvil’. Writing from his monastery at Jarrow in the early eighth century, Bede noted that Britain was rich in grain and trees, and that in some places vines still flourished. Monastic farms and lands were always in better order than those of laymen, and in their gardens they grew mulberries, apples, pears and nuts.

Saxon monasteries were rich: their churches had silver bowls and fine carvings, and their libraries held precious illuminated manuscripts. Ironically, however, all the anecdotes about horticultural Anglo-Saxon monks concern their lives abroad. There is St Teilo, Bishop of Llandaff, for example, who planted a forest of fruit trees in Brittany in the mid-sixth century. Or the Irish nobleman, St Fiacre, who founded a monastery at Breuil in France in the mid-seventh century, where he cleared the woods and created such a miraculous garden that he became the patron saint of gardeners in France. Or Bede’s contemporary, the Devon-born St Boniface, who travelled as a missionary in northern Europe and was asked to send home ‘segmentum’, perhaps cuttings of medicinal plants; or Alcuin, in the next generation, master of the cathedral school at York, who ended his life as abbot of St Martin at Tours, where he decorated his cell with white lilies and red roses.

English monastic learning was so valued that when Charlemagne was crowned emperor in 800 he sent for Alcuin to establish the court school. Alcuin dispatched plants to Benedict of Aniane, near Montpellier in the south of France, the abbot who probably drew up the emperor’s famous decree, the Capitulare de Villis. This laid down that every city should have a garden planted with all the ‘herbs’ (over seventy species of flowers and vegetables as well as herbs) and also sixteen kinds of fruit and nut trees. This list is one clue to the breadth of contemporary knowledge. Another is an early ninth-century plan for an idealised monastery, preserved through the ages at the abbey of St Gall in Switzerland.

The St Gall plan shows the whole community, from the fields for livestock to the stables and kilns, the cellars and baths and barns, the school and the guest house. The different gardens cover about three acres. In the north-east corner, next to the physician’s house and near to the infirmary, is the walled physic garden where the ‘Infirmarer’ raised his herbs. Rather alarmingly, but sensibly, nearby is the monks’ cemetery, laid out as an ornamental orchard and nuttery, with thirteen kinds of tree from medlars and mulberries to chestnuts and walnuts. South of the graveyard, alongside the poultry yard and within easy wheelbarrow distance of the refectory, is a large square garden for vegetables. The eighteen vegetable beds, arranged in two neat rows, are marked with separate names, which include favourites like onions, garlic, leeks and shallots, and ‘eating herbs’: parsley, chervil, coriander and dill. The paths were wide enough for a monk to kneel and the raised beds, edged with boards, were narrow enough to reach the centre without treading on the soil. The plan even has a gardener’s house with a shed for his tools.

The Benedictine abbeys in England needed substantial gardens to feed the community, and for herbs to heal the sick among the brethren and in the neighbourhood. There are no British records for this time – everything we know about monastic gardens here comes from after the conquest – but the culture of the abbeys was similar to that on the Continent and, if we want to imagine a monk’s gardening life, we can turn to Walafrid Strabo, who lived on Lake Constance and who wrote a lyrical hymn to gardens around AD 840, in his poem Hortulus, ‘The Little Garden’. In his verse he hacks away at nettles, raises tender plants from seeds and cuttings, and mixes in some sound advice on manure and weeds. We can almost see him, tucking up his robes to keep them out of the mud, revelling in the scent and beauty (and medical usefulness) of the flat-iris and sage, the lily and rose.

The St Gall plan (815–20) for an ideal monastery, redrawn by the Revd R. Willis.

To help our imaginations, we can visit reconstructions, like ‘Bede’s World’ in Jarrow in Northumberland, which has an Anglo-Saxon farm and a courtyard garden, and a herb garden with raised beds containing Anglo-Saxon medicinal, aromatic and culinary herbs. An extra bonus is a small textile production area where they grow dye plants – woad, weld and madder – and fibrous plants for weaving, like nettles and flax.

And what of the laymen? The court was not interested. The kings and queens and their entourage spent much of the year travelling, staying on one noble estate after another, or moving between seasonal centres, like the seventh-century ‘palace’ of the Northumbrian kings discovered at Yeavering. Beneath the king came the nobles, the ealdormen, then the ceorls and below them the serfs. The ceorls worked the land in kinship groups, holding strips of arable or meadow land within great common fields. Most would also have a croft with a herb bed for medicine and seasoning, and for the inevitable kale or colewort (this was so much a part of the Anglo-Saxon diet that February was actually named ‘Sproutkele’). In this patch they also kept bees to give honey for sweetening and to make mead.

The Saxon courts of the eighth century, like that of King Offa in Mercia, were impressed by the continental Carolingian renaissance, as we can see from the outpouring of decorated works, jewellery, bowls, carved caskets, and from poems like Beowulf, written down two centuries later. Yet in a Britain dogged by Viking raids there was never a long enough age of peace for the art of gardening to flourish, until Alfred managed to check the invaders. His dynasty brought stability and slowly more settled patterns of life developed. The great officials of the court, the ealdormen, held large tracts of land and their halls and courtyards were fenced.

In this climate a new rank of landowners emerged, the thegns (or thanes). Some thanes’ landholdings were only a few acres, but others were vast, like those of Wulfric Spott, who founded the monastery at Burton-on-Trent in 1004 and who owned seventy-two estates spread across the Midlands. Over the years these men built fortified manor houses, enclosed in walls that allowed a garden to flourish, with a small parish church and cemetery next door. Such dwellings have been excavated at Portchester Castle in Hampshire, at Raunds in Northamptonshire and at Goltho in Lincolnshire, where an ordinary farmhouse was extended into a substantial settlement arranged around a courtyard. By now there were set parishes with well-defined boundaries and the land was gradually reordered into plots with single owners, a boost to production. Farming and gardening were helped by a shift in climate to longer, warmer summers and shorter, milder winters.

Perhaps the garden historians are right to ignore this warlike era. Yet, to return to Aelfric’s list at the end of the tenth century, this does translate a common term for garden, amoenus locus, as a luffendliche stede, a lovely place. There are different kinds of gardens: wyrttun implies an orchard garden, while lectun is a ‘vegetable enclosure’, or ‘leek enclosure’. Aelfric also distinguishes between woods and groves and copses, and speaks of ‘sprouts’ and seedlings and pruning. He and his contemporaries undoubtedly valued plants more for use than beauty. Even decorative flowers had their role: peony for pain relief; the root of Christmas roses (Helleborus niger) for mania and melancholy; the periwinkle for love and fertility (‘something borrowed, something blue’). Many Anglo-Saxon plant names derive from the plant’s practical value, like the foaming meadow-sweet, which was not named for the scent it brought to the pastures and meadows but was medowyrt, the plant that flavoured mead; or the teasel (from taesan, to tease), which was used for raising the nap on newly woven cloth. Other common plants had magical powers, like the nettle, netele, for warding off sorcery. Still more combined magical and medical virtue, like the yarrow, gearwe, which was pounded with grease and used to salve wounds, or the foxglove, foxes glofa, which gives us digitalis and was used from earliest times as a vomit or purge.

In the next phase of history the monks would develop the use of these herbs and many of the pagan native names would be Christianised – the foxglove becoming ‘Virgin’s fingers’ – or were given classical names. And just as the wild plant magic was tamed, so true gardens would be created, vegetables and orchards, pleasure gardens and bowers. But the Anglo-Saxons had their own feeling for nature. They revered the passing of the seasons, the blossoming and fruiting, the harvest and the false death of winter. And perhaps we should leave these non-gardeners, half Christian, half pagan, with a charm of their own for unfruitful land, the ‘acerbot charm’, holding a promise for better times ahead:

Take by night, before it dawns, four turfs from the four corners of the plot, and make a note of where they belonged. Then take oil and honey and yeast, and milk from each beast that is on the land, and a portion of each type of tree that is growing on the land, apart from the harder woods, and a portion of each nameable plant, excepting buckbean only, and then apply holy water and let it drip thrice on the underside of the turf and say then these words: grow, and multiply, and fill the earth.

3

Monastic lore

AFTER A HARD day’s digging or pruning or grafting, a monk, it seems, could get clay on his feet and clippings on his coat just like any other mortal: the list of duties of the gardener at Westminster in the thirteenth century makes a special point of asking him to take off his cape and his boots before going into the church. But the monk in charge of the garden was a respected figure and in the festive run-up to Christmas an appropriate antiphon, ‘O radix Jesse’ (‘O tree of Jesse’) was sung in his honour: he led the singing and took a day off work, and his fellow monks laid on a special feast for him.

Since earliest times the blend of prayer and work was the basis of monastic life. When St Benedict founded Europe’s first great monastery at Monte Cassino in AD 530 he decreed in his rule that gardening was a worthy, virtuous and godly occupation; one chapter of the rule even discusses the importance of caring for the gardener’s tools. Everything the community needed had to be provided by the monks themselves, so that they could live without depending on outsiders. The vegetable garden was central, since Benedictines were vegetarian, while the later order of Cistercians (founded in Burgundy in 1098) even ruled out eating fish and eggs.

If I were a crow, flying across the British Isles in the tenth century, I would see forests and fields, iron forges and salt pans, small towns and settlements – occasionally I could circle over a deep park, or swoop down and feed on an orchard of ripe fruit, or pull worms from the newly turned earth in a small allotment. But by the twelfth century I would swoop over a different landscape of towns and castles, manor houses and villages, all with their flowers and fruit, herbs and vegetables. And the richest pickings of all would come from the monasteries.

The Normans changed the map of the countryside almost as fast, although not as drastically, as the Romans. The first step William the Conqueror took after his arrival was to build castles, bringing his own building materials from across the Channel. With the stones from Caen, so legend has it, came the first clove pinks, still found in their wild form around Norman ruins. To bring in the taxes William then undertook the ‘Great Inquisition’ of landholdings, the Domesday Book, completed by 1086, where many of our villages were formally named for the first time.

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