THE British obsession with gardening is reflected in the number of our ancestors who were involved with it on a professional basis.

While throughout British history our ancestral homes and formal gardens have employed armies of people to tend the gardens, many homes much further down the social scale also had gardeners - with their employers even providing accommodation for them and their families.

In mid-Victorian times the economy of many towns and villages was dominated by one of the large estates and many people were employed to work the parkland and formal gardens.

All the country gentry employed a head gardener who had a high status in society. His work would not only involve maintenance duties but the development of the garden. He would have served a lengthy apprenticeship, perhaps as a nurseryman, landscaper or seedsman. However, the early years of training were ones of toil - usually involving the mundane tasks of digging, raking and hoeing.

Everyone involved in the profession underwent rigorous training - it was an era of innovation and scientific gardening; the development of new tools and propagation methods. Exotic plants were flooding into Britain during this period of colonial expansion and thousands of experiments were taking place in Britain’s greenhouses and centres of excellence –notably, Kew, Chiswick, Hampton Court and Chatsworth.

The Victorian era marked the heyday of the gardener, for the 20th century, which saw the First World War and then the Great Depression, left little or no money to spend on the upkeep of the large estates –from the middle of the century very few were left to carry on the tradition of working the great English formal gardens.

One of my ancestors was a gardener in South London. Robert Vincent was the head gardener at the home of a merchant from the East India Company in the 1850s. The merchant had a small estate bordering Wandsworth Common but with enough room to provide a cottage for his gardener and family. Robert is described as ’gardener (not domestic)’ in the Census records of the time.

He passed his skills onto his son who started his working life in the profession. It was hardly surprising that there was such continuity of service within families - not many jobs gave such security of tenure and guaranteed income as that of the Victorian gardener.

Many local history libraries hold very old horticultural journals which can be a gold mine for genealogists. For a general overview of horticultural history log on to:
The Garden History Society www.gardenhistorysociety.org
Royal Horticultural Society www.rhs.org.uk
Timothy Mowl: garden history and historic gardens in the UK www.timothymowl.co.uk

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