Gardens and Geddes

In gratitude for Geddes and gardens

Elaine MacGillivray

In 2016, the National Gardens Scheme commissioned the King’s Fund to write an independent report on the benefits of gardening and health. This led to the publication of David Buck’s Gardens and health: implications for policy and practice, in which he argues that: Increasing people’s exposure to, and use of, green spaces has been linked to long-term reductions in overall reported health problems (including heart disease, cancer and musculoskeletal conditions)… Gardens can provide other important environmental functions, such as reducing flood risk and moderating climate and pollution, which have knock-on benefits for health (Buck, 2016). While there is a growing body of scientific data to support the individual, public and environmental health benefits of gardens and gardening, particularly in relation to an increasingly urbanised society, these ideas are not new. Over a century ago, gardens and gardening were central to the philosophies of Scottish biologist, sociologist, urban planner, environmental movement pioneer, and one of the most innovative social thinkers of his time— Professor Sir Patrick Geddes (1854- 1932).

Patrick Geddes was born in Ballater, Aberdeenshire, on 2 October 1854. He spent his formative years at Mount Tabor, a cottage on the side of Kinnoull Hill overlooking Perth. There, in its hillside cottage garden, Geddes received practical instruction from his father on the art and value of gardening. He later wrote: I can see my main good fortune lay before school days in a home modest enough in ordinary ways, but with a large garden; —ample fruit-buses, apples and great old wild cherry trees; with vegetables mainly cared for by my father, and a fair variety of flowers, to which my mother was devoted (Defries, 1928).

His formal education began at Perth Academy; he went on to study biology and evolutionary theory at the Royal College of Mines under the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), and to the Sorbonne, Paris, where he studied with French biologist, anatomist and zoologist, Félix Joseph Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers (1821-1901) at his marine station at Roscoff in Brittany. In France, he was exposed to the work of French social theorists Frédéric Le Play (1806-1882) and Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who championed the interconnectedness of the city and its region; Le Play’s concept of ‘Lieu, Travail, Famille’ (‘Place, Work, Family’) was to be a profound inspiration. In 1879, Geddes spent a year in Mexico collecting specimens, returning in 1880 to teach biology at the University of Edinburgh. Thereafter, he held the Chair of Botany at the University of Dundee, and in 1919 was appointed the inaugural Chair of Sociology and Civics at the University of Bombay, India. During his lifetime he contributed civic surveys and town planning reports to Edinburgh, Dublin, Tel Aviv, and over thirty cities in India. He remained in India until 1924, before removing to Montpellier, France.

There he died, aged seventy-seven, having received a knighthood just months earlier. Over the course of his life, Geddes gained a reputation as a true polymath and inter-disciplinarian, with interests encompassing sociology, geography, ecology, education theory, cultural activism and urban planning. The expanse of his interests, however, remained rooted in biology. Geddes was convinced that the development of human communities was fundamentally biological in nature, consisting of interactions among people, their environment and their activities. Throughout his career, gardens remained a constant thread.

It was in Edinburgh in the 1880s and 1890s that Geddes began to develop, refine and put into practice his ideas of urban conservation and renewal, using his own concept of ‘place, work, folk’ as the organising principle. In 1884, he established the Environment Society (later the Edinburgh Social Union) to encourage local residents to survey, plan and improve their environment, and— in an effort to better understand the problems of the community— he moved two years later into Edinburgh’s dilapidated and socially deprived Old Town with his new and pregnant wife, Anna Morton (1857-1917). He and Anna began implementing his approach by cleaning up and improving their own building, and encouraging their neighbours to do the same.

By 1892, he had purchased and refurbished the Outlook Tower at the head of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, a six-storey social laboratory and museum of civics in which he forged and disseminated many of his ideas. The fundamental purpose of Geddes’ Outlook Tower was to undertake the Survey of Edinburgh and its region, a comprehensive record of its geology, geography, climate, economic life and social institutions; it also served a deeply educational function, teaching its visitors to adopt a holistic approach to learning about their environment and visualising the many strands of interconnectedness between the city and its region.

Unlike the typical approach to urban regeneration of the time— which was to demolish derelict buildings and build broad sweeping streets which ultimately displaced the existing community — Geddes believed that civic regeneration ought to be informed by a comprehensive sociological understanding of the city, its region and their inter-relationship; his approach engaged with local residents, advocating for the renovation of historic buildings, the demolition of only those parts that would facilitate improvements in the living conditions and well-being of the community, and the injection of green spaces into the densely crowded city.

To this end, Geddes commissioned the The Outlook Tower Open Spaces Committee to survey every open space in the slums of Edinburgh’s Old Town. They measured no less than seventy-six areas, totalling ten acres. Understanding that Edinburgh’s private gardens, city parks and surrounding countryside were often not within the reach of the Old Town working class and poor, Geddes recommended that garden quadrangles replace the wasted courts and drying greens, so that family members, young and old, could engage together in happy garden activities. This configuration of small proximal green spaces would be far more accessible to Old Town residents, and useful in the daily passage of childhood and family life (Geddes, 1915).

By 1911, over ten of the plots had been reclaimed and transformed into gardens and made accessible to local residents, particularly women and children (Geddes, 1915). Transforming these gap sites into gardens fed into one of the key components of Geddes’ approach, which he called ‘conservative surgery’— carefully and gently transforming an overpopulated slum area into a nourishing space for its residents.

The establishment of pockets of garden was intended to support public health and the well-being of the Old Town residents; but this was not Geddes’ sole aim. He believed that gardens were multi-purpose. His aim was to entirely shift the received wisdom from thinking of the city as being separate from countryside, to seeing the two as intricately interwoven— with green corridors leading from urban squares, marketplaces and allotments to tree-lined boulevards and out to the forests beyond. He perceived gardens as linking to networks of other gardens, from small to semi-public ones and thence to parks and boulevards (MacDonald, 2020). He also saw gardens as tools for social change and engendering active citizenship, enabling community cohesion, local food production, and as a stimulus to environmental stewardship: The culture of our cities is founded on our dependence on plants. Thus parks and gardens are not a kind of decorative element in an urban plan, they are links within the city to the wider ecology of the planet, our route of return to nature…to understand our human condition – itself a part of nature. (Geddes, 1904)

In 1903, Geddes was commissioned by the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust to report on a plan for Pittencrieff Park. The resulting 238- page report, City Development: A study of Parks, Gardens and Culture Institutes, was published in 1904 and, although never implemented, it is considered to be one of Geddes’ most influential early urban planning works. In it, Geddes includes detailed plans for no fewer than seven different gardens: a rock garden; a wild garden; an old mansion garden; a botanic garden; a school garden; a bee garden; and the Queen’s garden, which would give way to a bog garden and bog shrubbery.

He talks of crop rotation, of raising and lowering of various walls to optimise growing conditions; he discusses the aspect and soil conditions, the position of grass walks and flower borders. His plan includes measures for the gardener to become a teaching horticulturalist and, through this role, a natural leader in the regional horticultural societies and increasingly connected with local schools.

Gardens were intrinsically linked to Geddes’ educational philosophy, which was, like his approach to urban planning, entirely holistic and interdisciplinary in nature. In what has been described as a ‘whole-body’ approach to learning, Geddes’ ‘heart, hand, head’ educational philosophy was a move away from the three R’s of ‘reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic’ that dominated the schooling of the day (McFadyen, 2015). Geddes believed that learning should engage the emotions and include physical activity, and that intellectual learning would naturally follow (Defries, 1928); drawing on his own early experiences of Mount Tabor’s cottage garden, he advocated for the school garden movement, arguing that they should be central to education and not a small peripheral aspect (Geddes, 1904).

Geddes championed access to nature and natural conditions as essential to mental and physical health, and brought public beauty to areas of former squalor. Just fifty metres from Edinburgh Castle’s Esplanade, we can, in 2022, still find evidence of the legacy of Patrick Geddes’ efforts to renew and green Edinburgh’s Old Town. Just to the south of Johnston Terrace, wedged between the terrace and the Patrick Geddes steps in the East Garden, we can find 0.07 hectares of wildlife reserve. Johnston Terrace Gardens was one of the gap sites reclaimed by Geddes and the local community, and it is today the smallest of one hundred and twenty-three wildlife reserves managed by the Scottish Wildlife Trust. Nearby, on a steep terraced slope between the West Port and Edinburgh College of Art, is the green oasis of the West Port Garden; it was opened in 1910 as an initiative of Patrick Geddes, and is now maintained by the Grassmarket Residents’ Association in partnership with the City of Edinburgh Council.

In an era of increasing urbanisation and climate catastrophe, we need these local pockets of greenery more than ever. Lest we forget: This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent on the leaves. By leaves we live. Some people have strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of coins. Whereas the world is mainly a vast leaf colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests (Geddes, 1919; in Defries, 1928).

Geddes’ ideas took root a century ago; now is the time for them to bear fruit.

Images

All images from the Patrick Geddes Collection at the University of Edinburgh, reproduced with permission

Patrick Geddes, courtesy of the University of Edinburgh and the Geddes Family (Ref: Coll- 1869/1/14) Geddes with a group of children in front of the Outlook Tower, courtesy of the University of Edinburgh (Ref: Coll-1167/B/23/12) Survey of Open Spaces in the Old Town, courtesy of the University of Edinburgh (Ref: Coll-1167/B/24/1) King’s Wall Garden, Johnstone Terrace, courtesy of the University of Edinburgh (Ref: Coll-1167/B/27/10/9) Outlook Tower Garden from above, courtesy of the University of Edinburgh (Ref: Coll- 1167/B/27/1/12)

References

Buck, D. (2016) Gardens and health: implications for policy and practice. King’s Fund: London

Defries, A. (1928) The Interpreter Geddes: The Man and his Gospel. Boni & Liverlight: New York City

Geddes, P. (1904) City Development: A study of Parks, Gardens and Culture Institutes: A Report to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust. Geddes and Company: Edinburgh Geddes, P. (1915) Cities in Evolution. Williams & Norgate: London MacDonald, M. (2020) Patrick Geddes’s Intellectual Origins. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh McFadyen, M. (2015) ‘The Cultural-Ecological Imagination of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932)’ Lecture given talk given at the second Celtic Summer School, The Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh. Available at mairimcfadyen.scot/blog/2015 [Accessed 14/01/2022]