Ladies Day
Sunday gone, the 8th of March, was International Women's Day. Women have had a large impact on the art and science of horticulture throughout history. Marianne North, a botanist and botanical artist, traversed the globe and scaled mountains capturing the plants she saw with her paintbrush. Beatrix Potter, aside from her career as children's author, was a keen conservationist and made hundreds of painstakingly detailed botanical illustrations of fungi. And let's not forget Fanny Wilkinson, the first female landscape gardener in Britain, and the first woman principal of Swanley Horticultural College, a place that produced several successful female horticulturalists.
And that's only three significant figures, there are many more. And many perhaps who history has forgotten, who planted borders with precision, and turned away from the stresses of day to cultivate their gardens. In a Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf invented a fictional sister for Shakespeare, who she imagined as being as brilliant as he was as thought experiment to explore how such a woman may have been denied the opportunity to nurture her talent. So too one might conjure up a skilled sister for Capability Brown or André Le Nôtre to imagine the green fingered women in history who laid their trowels aside until their gifts became "all overgrown with cunning moss, all interspersed with weed," to quote Dickinson slightly obliquely.
Whether you're a hobbyist or a professional, reading about our horticultural foremothers can be an enlightening experience.
You can get started with two of our previous posts on here if you like:
And happy belated International Women's Day!