Chapter 7 - COMPETITIONS AND SHOWS

Summary

Introducing a round-up of local newspaper reports of British flower shows, J. C. Loudon wrote in the Gardener's Magazine of 1836:

The most remarkable feature of the horticultural societies of the present year is the increasing attention which has been paid throughout the country to the exhibitions of the poor. The produce of the cottagers’ gardens has been generally admired; and the influence which these exhibitions are likely to have on the condition of the cottagers is most important. It is gratifying to see the rich sympathising with the poor and this must in the end, lead to the moral and intellectual elevation of the former.

Was the last word a misprint? Or a deliberate jog to the elbow of the rich to remind them of their responsibilities? This chapter tells the story of the very unequal partnership between the rich and the poor that underlay the best-kept garden competitions and cottage garden flower shows in the nineteenth century.

In Scotland, no less than elsewhere in the British Isles, it was in the 1830s that the much-praised ‘spirit of emulation’ descended on cottage gardeners in the form of best-kept cottage garden competitions and cottage garden societies. Mostly initiated, promoted and sponsored by the rich, they survived and prospered because of the enthusiastic participation of the poor. Every county and in some counties almost every village saw keen and expert cottage gardeners running societies and organising flower shows. Even best-kept garden competitions, originally pet projects of landowners, were taken up by cottage garden societies and developed by them in imaginative ways. In the early decades the hand of the minister and local landowners is very visible. Later in the century, as tradesmen and artisans began to take leading roles in the societies, their masters appear to have taken a step back, with one notable exception: in the mining districts the guiding hand of the coal owner never seemed to let go.

Press coverage of the competitions and the shows, both local and national, was extensive (although very uneven), running to several columns and even whole pages during their 1880s heyday. Large shows became holiday events in the rural calendar, attracting hundreds and sometimes thousands of visitors from far and wide. Smaller village shows became festivals and we know that whole streets and groups of neighbours would enter flower shows and best-kept garden competitions.