Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 1 (2009), p. 135

Academics with their zest for specialization have separated agricultural history from the history of gardening for food, to the detriment of both; our scholarly studies will benefit when those links are forged again. Such reflections are prompted by these two books on gardening, though they touch only briefly on practical gardening and veer quickly away.

Before 1500 gardening was the women’s job: they grew the food to eat, and all male writers took it for granted that women attended to the herbs, greenstuff, roots, and soft fruit; much of the tree fruit came wild from the hedgerows. In the next hundred years gardening was transformed into a professional skill, and in public discussion it was firmly appropriated by men. Women were deemed unskilful, needing to work under male guidance.

At two different levels, these volumes under review present and analyse the evidence on the gendering of gardening; Jennifer Munroe is editor and author of both. The first offers facsimile texts of relevant sections of farming/gardening books printed between 1574 (by Tusser) and 1718 (by Charles, not John, Evelyn), all (inevitably) written by men. Some of the facsimiles disconcertingly end in mid-sentence, but they readily offer a spread of viewpoints through a century and a half.

The reader sees the men-folk gradually becoming more and more confident of their superiority as gardeners, claiming to be the ‘curious, cunning’ ones, and cheerfully dismissing the skills of women, since, as Evelyn proclaimed, ‘common observation, easily acquired’ was enough to cope with kitchen gardening.

In the second book, Munroe closely examines the words and experiences of certain well-to-do, literate women who were enthusiastic gardeners, and voiced their discontent at being thus sidelined. It is a finely executed literary analysis, and extremely instructive in its information about these particular women. Munroe does not tackle directly the fact that gardening has two faces: one may garden for food or for the aesthetic satisfaction of designing a space filled with beautiful flowers. These women found their satisfaction in flowers. Historians are familiar with the differences between the two kinds of gardening yawning into a chasm in the seventeenth century.

Masculine viewpoints, claiming for men the dominant authority, are numerous. Munroe presents many examples, though she gives overmuch space to Edmund Spenser’s critical words about Queen Elizabeth’s policy in Ireland, which is interesting, but a diversion from the main theme. More relevant is the way women in general were praised for expressing their creativity in embroidery, depicting gardens on canvas. Thereby they kept themselves occupied in the house, and removed themselves from the public world. But the literate women fretted, feeling themselves caged, made invisible, their creativity ignored.

The four protesting women brought into view here were the Ladies Margaret and Anne Clifford, Lady Mary Wroth, daughter of the Sidney family at Penshurst, and most outspoken of all, the poet Aemilia Lanyer. It is likely that the Clifford ladies and Lanyer had had some sympathetic debates among themselves on the injustices of their lot; at some time, probably between 1604 and 1609, they had enjoyed close companionship in a country house with a fine garden, and, likely as not, they had discussed their frustrations at the status of women in their world. A second grievance vexing them was the injustice of having their legally owned land appropriated by the men in their families. The Cliffords fought long legal struggles to keep their property, and Anne Clifford did recover her lands in the end through the convenient deaths of male claimants; Aemilia Lanyer, on the other hand, found comfort in her poetry, persuading herself that, while dispossessed on earth, the women would inherit the kingdom of Christ in heaven.

Sensitively interpreted by Munroe, these women’s writings illuminate strands in the cultural/social background of the early seventeenth century that plainly troubled gender relationships. Tensions crystallized around gardens and gardening, when that activity was clearly expanding and opened new opportunities both to men and women. Indeed, Munroe could have delved even deeper into this turmoil about new chances frustrated, for it seems to have been unusually tempestuous among the upper classes in the period between about 1590 and 1630.

Agricultural historians do not ordinarily fasten on such literature, of course, but since the frustrations of upper class women have a place in the cultural canvas of the seventeenth century, their story enlarges our perspective on the age; moreover, professional women nowadays recognize the scene when they fret at ‘the glass ceiling’. So it may console them to know that those seventeenth-century tensions did fade somewhat in a couple of generations, while workaday women meanwhile surely continued their routines unperturbed.