Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 64

about the gardeners who were responsible for the main structural movements of the
Great Tradition. All these texts reference key names and associate them with peak
moments in garden history; for example, Addison, Pope and Lord Burlington are
credited for the English Landscape movement and Charles II, Mollet and Le Notre
with the French Formal tradition. As a result, the focus on great gardens and the
great gardeners who constructed them results in a largely white, male, elite history
of gardeners.
Unfortunately, even when some of these accounts do seek to flesh out the
standard great tradition with further examples of great gardeners from more mundane
quarters, the focus on male, white, middle-class privilege is never entirely dislodged.
In The Pleasure Garden (1977) for example, Scott-James and Lancaster devote their
chapter 'The Parsonage Garden' to the innovative contribution, particularly in plant
breeding, of eighteenth and nineteenth century country priests. However, as they
argue, priests such as Gilbert White and the Rev. the Hon. William Herbert were
in a unique position to research and practice botany, 'as his property and status
increased,' argues Scott-James of the typical parish priest, 'he became a natural
leader in most country pursuits, having more education and a better library than any
of his parishioners, and would tend to have the best garden in the village' (1977,
75). While these instances provide examples of gardeners who foray beyond royalty
and the aristocracy, they still add to a middle-class version of gardeners in garden
history.
In these ways the liberal humanist tradition establishes a small group of revered
legislators who are white, male, elite (or at least upper middle-class) and European.
These are the figures responsible for the 'great' movements and gardens that liberal
humanist histories laud. In this sense, the issue of class is never mentioned or
addressed; the reader is merely delivered a 'great' history of 'great' yet extremely
privileged people. Ordinary people and the working-class are nowhere to be found
in these histories and one could be forgiven for thinking that women have made no
contribution to 'great' gardens. It is to feminist literature on gardens, in search of
histories where at least gender is taken in to account, that this section now turns.
Great white women: feminist approaches
Available feminist histories of gardening tend to use the strategy of uncovering a
specifically female contribution to the construction of great gardens or gardening
trends. Susan Groag-Bell's (1990) essay on eighteenth century English garden history
for example, argues that the 'ongoing' and 'commonplace' trends of the eighteenth
century - flower and shrub gardening - often practised by female gardeners, have
been obscured in traditional garden history as a result of the tendency to concentrate
on the key developments of the 'Landscape Movement'. Yet as Groag-Bell argues
the, 'absence of women from eighteenth-century gardens is an historical anomaly'
(Groag-Bell 1990, 473). Using gardening advice books, magazines, travel accounts,
letters and diaries, Groag-Bell traces 'considerable evidence' of 'women's
participation in garden art' (1990, 476). In an article on gardening by the female
editor of the Female Spectator (1745) for example, Groag-Bell notes that the author
encourages female readers to be knowledgeable about gardening and to undertake