History of the English Garden, Part 1

An overview of the English garden.

Lavandula angustifolia ‘Royal Velvet’
Item # 63118 		Lavandula angustifolia ‘Royal Velvet’
Royal Velvet English Lavender

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  • Topic: Garden Design
  • Author: Cindy Bellinger
  • Keywords: garden design, plant history, History of the English Garden, Part I, History of the English Garden, Part I, Other, gardens
  • Date: November 2003

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Yes, it’s a wide sweeping topic and certainly can’t be covered in 300 words. But I’ve recently returned from two weeks in England and have become intrigued with the English garden. Since the history of gardening itself takes in architecture, art, theater, people’s relation with nature and history itself, I better start small and do this in bits and pieces.

In 54 BC the Romans entered England, a kind way of putting it, considering what they did to the people already living there. Over time the Romans began building abbeys, and it was within these abbeys that gardening, as we know it today, began.

I visited Whitby Abbey, which took my breath away when the ruin came into view. Started in 657 AD by Hild, a 30 year old woman (later to become St. Hilda), her abbey became a model of religious scholarship. While supervising the construction of the massive stone building, she also saw that the surrounding land grew enough food to support hundreds of people—monks and nuns, persons of royalty and many laborers.

I enjoyed learning that archeologists have found small garden plots around the early abbeys, and many of the plants grown in them came from Europe, copying the monks’ gardens in Italy. Though crude and without much forethought to design, a kind of aesthetic pleasure began to emerge. Also, around 970 gardens were deliberately created to soften the massive, stately cathedrals.

Then later, William the Conqueror sailed in from Normandy in 1066, took over, and crowned himself King of England. In building his castles he imported stone from the continent. Within the stone were seeds.

The seeds turned out to be the plants which grew in the stone walls of Caen in France—Dianthus caryophullus (Wild Carnation) and Erysimum cheiri, the Wallflower. And the descendents of those plants are still much preferred for garden borders in England.

To be continued…