Chapter 9 - THE IDEA OF THE COTTAGE GARDEN

Summary

What did the rural worker's cottage garden mean to those who concerned themselves most with them? Landowners, farmers, horticulturists, philanthropists and not least the workers themselves all had different although often overlapping perceptions of the function and purpose of the garden. These perceptions and beliefs weave an economic, political, social, moral and emotional web binding the different interests together. This chapter teases out the main threads of this web by examining the ideas and the motivation of the improving landowners of the eighteenth century; the horticultural and agricultural writers of the early decades of the 1800s; the philanthropists of the mid-Victorian period; and the land reformers. The voices of the workers are heard only faintly in this genteel hubbub.

Only the improving landowners and their tenant farmers materially affected the gardens of the rural workers directly but all these groups influenced, if they did not manufacture, the moral climate in which cottagers struggled to create and maintain their ‘little portions of the land’.

ENLIGHTENMENT THINKERS

In his influential Elements of Criticism (1762) the legal theorist and philosopher Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) (Plate 27), included gardening amongst the fine arts which, he argued, it was the duty of man, especially the wealthy, to cultivate.1 Moreover,

no occupation attaches a man more to his duty than that of cultivating a taste in the fine arts: a just relish of what is beautiful, proper, elegant, and ornamental, in writing or painting, in architecture or gardening, is a fine preparation for the same just relish of these qualities in character and behaviour.

Kames was a leading member of the coterie of philosophers, economists and social theorists who created the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’. A largely self-taught lawyer and jurist, he published on the law and the science of human nature and was also the patron of Adam Smith, David Hume and others. In keeping with his philosophy, Lord Kames was an energetic and fiercely practical gardener with a relish for improvement. At his estate at Blair Drummond he transformed the policies from ‘a bleak barren waste, without a shrub … [to] the most luxuriant scenes of fancy’ by uniting ‘art to nature, profit to pleasure, and judgement to taste’.