Well, it’s actually a hundred and twelve years ago. And, I confess, (surprise) not truly Garden Rant. It was British, and they called themselves The Guild of The Garden Lovers.

The Guild of the Garden Lovers.

I love this book.

If for nothing else than it tells us that people were thinking some of the same things as us, all that time ago. For example: “If from association, or any other cause, you have a liking for the “quilled rosettes” of the double dahlia, don’t be bullied out of it.” And “it would be truly disastrous if people took to making sham Japanese gardens, for sham they would be and lifeless imitations, however well carried out, because the symbolism of which they are full to the Japanese, must be an unknown tongue to us. But seeing the gardens, or pictures or models of them, is exceedingly useful, because they show us the value of simplicity and moderation…..” 

I wrote about it in The Bad Tempered Gardener: 

Text from The Bad Tempered Gardener

It came about from a desire to share:

“Well, we all seem to feel that exchanging our private experiences in the garden, is often a useful supplement to even the best professional advice”….”What I want to come at is some way of making these exchanges and generally comparing notes in a tolerably regular fashion, so as to be really useful” so: “Let us make a Society”. I wonder if this has any echoes of the beginnings of Garden Rant?

What follows is much garden talk and exchanges of letters, on such topics as ‘Heather’s Problem’, My Neighbours’ Gardens’, ‘The Garden in Winter’, ‘Being Away’ and so on.

delicate gardeners

You could take ‘delicate’ to describe any of us wanting to reduce garden work…..

The book has been preserved,

as you will find on Amazon – “This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible…..Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public.”

I do agree. I’d love to meet these ‘Scholars’. But I think most of all, it is all so poignant. This is us, dead and gone, but so alive and so recognisable. As so often with history, I long to be able to reach out and speak to these women. I can find nothing further about them. If you know more, please let me know?

frontispiece.