Growing Green Fingers

By Linden Groves

Idealistic views of children’s gardening continue to charm – but are not always matched by reality.

Rosy cheeks, excited giggles, little fingers unearthing worms and sowing seeds as youngsters learn new skills – the image we have of teaching children to garden is one that has long captured adult imaginations. From pinching out tomatoes to setting up bean canes, the belief is that gardening will form wholesome characters and inspire a lifetime of sensible choices.

I am one of those adults, having cajoled and marshalled hundreds of four to 11 year olds into gardening at my offspring’s state primary school in London. Over the past decade, well-meaning parents have helped children to plant wheat, woodland trees, strawberries, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, wild meadow flowers and so much more, egged on by schemes such as the Woodland Trust’s ‘Trees for Schools’, the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board’s ‘Grow your own Potatoes’, the Real Bread Campaign’s ‘Bake your Lawn’, and of course the Royal Horticultural Society’s matchless ‘Campaign for School Gardening’, in which schools rise to various challenges from teaching the use of hand tools to holding garden open days in order to win increasingly grand certificates and prizes.

Above: The romantic ideal of children’s gardening has long captured the imagination.

But such initiatives and a desire to help children to garden are nothing new and, being something of a historian, I haven’t been able to resist looking at examples of our predecessors’ attempts.

At a second-hand bookstall in a sleepy Shropshire market town in the heart of England, I found a slim 1947 post-war guide by the name of School Gardeningby G.H. Copley (National Diploma of Horticulture; Joint Organiser Lancashire County Garden Produce and Small Livestock Committee; Horticultural Consultant Member of Gardeners’ Brains Trusts).

Mr Copley’s aim was to help teachers introduce gardening to their schools, explaining that:

“We are on the verge of great developments in education. In future our schools are going to play a more important part in our national life. They will not be the prosaic buildings we were accustomed to in the past, but will be beautiful structures set in gardens. The object of this text-book is to help the teachers who will be instructing their pupils in the principles and practice of horticulture. It is backed by a long teaching experience, and a great love of the work.” Mr Copley recommended the use of gardening to develop minds beyond straight horticultural education:

“I consider that experimental work lies at the very basis of successful school gardening. Without it the subject can be made to possess educational value, but with it school gardening is really made to live in the minds of the students. It makes them realize that they are dealing with marvellous forces, and that they can to some extent control those forces. In short, the proper exploitation of the experimental side will go far towards making the difference between an educated child and one who has collected a certain number of facts, and learned how to do a certain number of operations.” He goes on to suggest experiments in cutting seed potatoes, suckering broad beans, onion sowing, spur pruning apple trees, and a ‘manurial test’ to compare six chrysanthemums grown in bonemeal with six grown in plain manured soil.

Mr Copley was by no means the first to tackle the subject, though. Another second-hand bookshop trawl revealed to me that in 1910, Charles Wyatt, Director of Elementary Education for Manchester, produced a delightful little book called Gardening for Children and Others, in which it is clear just how serious the progressive Manchester authorities were about youth gardening:

“Many thousands of children in the Manchester Public Elementary Schools having, with their teachers, shewn [sic] an interest in the cultivation of plants and flowers, it came

© RHS

Above: Schoolgirls taste mulberries as part of the Campaign for School Gardening. Below left: Nursery children proudly display beetroot they have grown. Below: The charming cover of Charles Wyatt’s 1910 book.

about on the suggestion of the teachers more directly concerned, with the approval of the Education Committee and the City Council, that a Children’s Flower Guild was established in the Spring of 1909; the objects of the Guild being to further practical Nature Study; to organise gardening for children, and to encourage the growing of plants and flowers; to arrange School Flower Shows and help in other like direction by the giving of practical advice and the provision of prizes, medals, and certificates for successful efforts.

“For some years facilities had been afforded by which children were enabled in June of each year to purchase Geraniums or Fuschias, established in pots, and the demand for these plants has now reached 30,000 in number. The plants are taken home, and in August the children bring them to the schools for inspection by the teachers. When anything approaching successful cultivation has been secured, a Card of Merit is awarded, and 25 per cent of the plants are selected for Exhibition. The selected plants are admitted to Children’s Flower Shows, hitherto

held in various public buildings in different districts of the city. Experienced gardeners act as judges, and 100 prizes (Fern Cases) are awarded to the 100 children producing the best plants.

“When the Children’s Flower Guild was established, it was promised, that, from time to time, there should be issued certain modest direction on plant growing and gardening generally. Hence this little work. No merit is claimed for it. Essentially most elementary, it deals only with a few plants – especially those which are easy to grow with some hope of success, even in the most densely populated districts of a great town. The children live in localities where the conditions are not all the same. The aim is to encourage attempts at horticulture in the yard and small garden plots attached to cottages, in the cottage windows, and at the homes of others who are more happily placed with regard to their surroundings.

“The same is true of the schools. With a few only is it possible to have garden plots; with all it is possible to grow some plants in the school-rooms. Happily the love of plants and flowers is frequently the keenest with those who enjoy the fewest opportunities for their cultivation. For all it is hoped that something of use may be found in the following pages. In the great world of gardening the principles which underlie success are the same – and commencing with the growing of a few simple plants and flowers the children may acquire such an interest in their modest possessions that they will be encouraged to go forward and attempt higher flights, enjoying an ever increasing success in the cultivation of flowers, trees and vegetables.”

Mr Wyatt goes on to offer practical gardening tips, but brilliantly intersperses these with snippets of garden history so that children learn not only how to regenerate old fuschias, but also that:

“In 1760 there was in business at Hammersmith a gardener, James Lee, who had formerly been employed in the gardens of the adjacent Sion House, one of the homes of the Duke of Northumberland. Lee in the course of his

Above: The royal family on the terrace at Osborne House, where the children were encouraged to learn practical gardening skills. Below: The fruit and vegetable plots tended by the children of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

business introduced many foreign plants into England, and one day he saw a Fuschia in the window of a small house at Wapping. An old woman lived in the house and Lee asked her to sell the plant. It had been sent home by the woman’s husband, who was a sailor, and naturally she did not want to part with it, but gave way at last when Lee offered her 8 guineas and threw into the bargain a promise of two more plants when he had raised his cuttings. From it Lee struck 300 cuttings. It was then a complete novelty and he sold them for 21s. each, making more than £300.”

I have a professional interest in children’s play in historic gardens and whilst researching this I was delighted to ‘meet’ gaggles of privileged Victorian and Edwardian children engaged by their affluent parents in worthy gardening activities. Of course, the famous example is that set by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who gave their many children their own gardens at their home at Osborne on the Isle of Wight. Each child had a 12ft x 5ft (3.66m x 1.5m) plot, which he or she was to maintain using child-size tools. The children grew fruit and vegetables, which they were encouraged to sell to their father in the spirit of true market gardeners. In this way, the royal children were expected to learn practical skills, a work ethos, business acumen, a sense of responsibility and an awareness of nature.

At the estate of Kingston Lacy in Dorset (home for 400 years to the Bankes family, powerful Dorset landowners), the family’s children in the early 20th century, were given their own gardens, as Viola Bankes describes in her Reminiscences: “He [Mr Hill, head gardener] also advised Daphne and me in the cultivation of our own plots. These were next to the kitchen garden in the flower garden, divided by a high, old yew hedge from the part where the flowers for cutting were grown, including a quarter of an acre of bulbs –daffodils, narcissi, jonquils and tulips. Ralph was never at

home long enough, once his school days had started, to keep up with gardening, but Daphne and I industriously dug and planted and hoed, delighted to see our flowers obediently springing up. I grew violas, of course, and pansies, blue scabious, hyacinths and a variety of vivid annuals.”

But children’s gardening was not necessarily part of a scheme to encourage their independence. Irene Ravensdale remembered gardening with her father, Lord Curzon, at Hackwood in Hampshire in around 1908:

“Most vividly of all in my memory stands out the plantain digging on the lawn of Hackwood. On our arrival, my father complained to the astonished gardener, secure of his post for many years, that he did not know how to keep lawns free of plantains. He would proceed to show him the correct method. Week-end after week-end three drab pig-tailed daughters would stand like sentinels round the crouching figure of their father, spiking out the plantains, leaving them to collect the roots and remains into little wicker baskets and a wheel-barrow. Before commencing on each occasion, a footman would emerge with a small rush mat for my father’s right knee to kneel on, carrying the murderous pronged spud to break up the insidious growth of the vile weed. Sixpences rewarded us for the discovery of fresh plantains; shillings for anything so monstrous as thistles.”

No doubt these well-meaning adults were egged on by the great Gertrude Jekyll who, in 1908, wrote Children and Gardens (the purchase of an original copy was my biggest indulgence, and it is kept carefully wrapped), in which one of her recommendations was that:

“It is very nice to grow Mustard and Cress in the letters of one’s name. You prepare a little long-shaped bed, and stretch two strings with wooden pegs at their ends about eight inches

apart. Between these strings you stretch out the shallowest possible hollow, an inch wide, in the shape of the letters. It looks more finished if you have a border all round. You can make the sowing-place for the border by laying down the handle of a rake before you take up the strings that were your guide for the height of the letters. You just press on the lyingdown rake handle, and it leaves a little shallow trough, just right for sowing the seeds in. Then you barely cover the seeds with earth and wait till they come up.” These examples are only snippets of a bigger picture, gathered as fortune has thrown them my way. I think of them often though as I struggle to persuade yet another clutch of five year olds to please “put the peas in a line” or “do not snap the stalks”. For the truth unacknowledged either in my predecessors’ writings or by me before now is that gardening with children is certainly very worthwhile, but is never the wholesome and scenic activity we all imagine when setting out to shape a new green-fingered generation. A fascination with horse poo, squeamishness about insects, and disgust for eating the vegetables they grow are far more accurate experiences than my rose-tinted opening lines, and I often wonder whether my predecessors felt the same!

Linden Groves is a landscape historian with a particular interest in engaging children with historic gardens – see www.outdoorchildren.co.uk and www.hahahopscotch.co.uk

Top: An old postcard showing the child-sized gardening tools used at Osborne House. Middle: Pupils at Hollickwood Primary School in London are always keen to decorate the school entrance with flowering plants. Left: In 1908 Gertrude Jekyll suggested children could grow their names in mustard and cress. Her book Children and Gardenswas full of delightful pictures of youngsters in the garden.