A good place to start is Alex Pankhurst’s ‘Who Does Your Garden Grow?’ published in 1992. In Kari’s own garden, she discovered that the tall, double Delphinium ‘Alice Artindale’ was named by John Artindale from Sheffield for his wife, and that Campanula lactiflora ‘Prichard’s Variety’ was bred by James Prichard from Christchurch, now Dorset but then in Hampshire.

The first record of British gardens as places of pleasure is from 1260, but only for the nobility. It is not until the 16th century that garden flowers can be found along with vegetables in the grounds of tenant farmers or yeomen – as can be seen at the restored Bayleaf Mediaeval Farmstead in West Sussex dating from 1540. In 1597 John Gerrard published his ‘Herball’ where cottage gardens are referenced.

Paintings are another reference source for finding out what plants were around when. Aquilegia, a native plant, was certainly known in gardens in 1503, when a Flemish painter depicted double aquilegias in a vase among other flowers. Double A. ‘Nora Barlow’ was named after a grandchild of Darwin who studied plant biology and genetics at Cambridge. After leaving Cambridge she carried on her cross-breeding work. She herself didn’t particularly like her namesake, but passed the plant on to the nurseryman Alan Bloom for propagation and distribution.

Gertrude Jekyll, who designed over 400 gardens, not all with Lutyens, said ‘Why do we always have to go after the new?’ In 1904 she published ‘Old West Surrey’ describing traditional rural life where she lived, including illustrations of gardens. Working at the same time, Helen Allingham (1848-1926) was an illustrator and painter. A flower that pops up in her pictures of cottages and their gardens is the hollyhock. But its history in illustration goes back to at least 1486, in Herat, Afghanistan. By the 1600s big double hollyhocks had been bred. In Saffron Walden, Mr Chater (1802-85) was famous for his double hollyhocks of which he had 117 different varieties. Then along came hollyhock rust from South Africa, putting paid to his stock (fortunately he grew other things as well)! Helen Allingham’s painting of Gertrude Jekyll’s garden shows that it also included hollyhocks. The illustration on the cover of the Metro-land guide (Metro-land was the name given to the housing development – about 3,500 houses to the north west of London that took place between the two world wars) showed a large house with hollyhocks in the garden. Hollyhocks were also depicted on a well-known Sanderson fabric design.

Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) is a Flemish painter famous for her still lifes with flowers, depicting among other things aconites, ranunculus, tulips, hyacinths and carnations. At one point double hyacinths were more expensive than tulips, and there were many more varieties than there are now. In the 1790s a bulb of the variety called ‘gloria mundi’ cost the equivalent of £30 in today’s terms. It was the stripes in tulips, caused by a virus, that led to the excesses of tulip mania. Striped tulips can be seen on Meissen china from the 1740s. William Pegg’s designs for Royal Crown Derby in the early 19th century also included striped tulips. By the early 20th century a Dutch company had bought up Flemish tulip stock, and started breeding solid colours giving predictability – the Darwin tulip. A Darwin variety surviving to this day is ‘Bleu Aimable’.

Florists’ societies had flourished in the 18th century, exclusively male and meeting in pubs, devoted to the growing of a specific flower, eg pinks. Even though the societies gradually died out, flower showing continued, and in 1804 the Royal Horticultural Society was founded. Its first show was in 1827, to which 3,000 people came. The population was growing, and so was the middle class. Greenhouses were no longer the prerogative only of the upper classes, indeed by the end of the century they had moved on to wilder gardening. Pelargoniums, of which Charles Dickens was very fond,  required greenhouses, and a particularly fine red called ‘Paul Crampel’ was bred in 1892 which is still widely grown today. 

Dahlias were first recorded by Hernandez in 1570 in Mexico. They appeared in Europe when some  tubers were sent to the Director of the Madrid Botanic Gardens in 1791. Originally there was confusion about the name – Dahlia or Georgina (which it is still known by in Eastern Europe – ed.)  – but Dahlia won, and it is of course a plant widely grown today. Treseder & Son of Cardiff were responsible for breeding the very well-known D. ‘Bishop of Llandaff’ (along with Pelargonium ‘Lord Bute’). 

Sweet peas are another flower that is still with us. The original sweet pea was first noted around 1700, of which ‘Painted Lady’ is probably a sport. Henry Eckford (1823-1905) bred 214 of the 264 cultivars known in the 19th century. One of those was ‘Dorothy Eckford’, still grown, white and quite small flowered. The variety ‘Prima Donna’ (pale pink) gave rise to the Spencer sweet peas – bigger, frillier with longer stems for showing, but with less scent.

Although roses are generally associated with France, it was the Dutch who first dealt in roses. R. centifolia, the cabbage or Provence rose, was developed by the Dutch. It is well-known that Josephine Bonaparte had at least 200 different cultivars in her garden. One of the main rose nurserymen then was Descemet, most of whose stock was acquired by Vibert, who greatly increased the number of cultivars available. In the 1800s in the UK Henry Bennett, a cattle farmer from Wiltshire, diversified into rose breeding and moved to Middlesex, being responsible for many of the new hybrid tea rose varieties of the time. Constance Spry started collecting old roses when she saw varieties disappearing – one of her favourites was R . ‘Mme Isaac Pereire’, a rose originally bred by Garçon in France.

In a fast-paced, wide-ranging and much appreciated talk, Kari covered many other plants and their stories including wallflowers, auriculas, lupins, anemones, daffodils and snowdrops. She started and finished by quoting from Plant Heritage, formerly known as the National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens: ‘If garden plants go, a tantalising slice of social, cultural and horticultural history dies with them’.

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