When I joined the horticulture industry here in the UK several years ago I hadn’t appreciated that I would take my place not only in the wider community of gardeners but also in a new generation of gardeners following gardeners that went before me. On so many occasions other gardeners have recognised me as one of their number; I sometimes think I can spot a fellow gardener in the crowd but I’m always too scared to approach just in case I get it wrong.

People have dedicated themselves to the craft of gardening for centuries. Wherever the well-heeled have wanted to beautify their land there have been professional gardeners. While much of Europe was still defecating out of windows and baiting bears, the gardeners of Japan were developing a very rich cultural heritage of ornamental gardening around temples, palaces and private homes. The 11th century Sakutakei is likely to be the oldest garden planning text around, and its contents clearly suggest that the art and craft of creating sophisticated gardens was well established at the time.

A Japanese cedar growing in the UK

European ornamental gardening developed so gently over the centuries that it’s hard to define where it began here. As fortunes were made and people became less directly tied to the land for the basics of sustenance, outdoor spaces could be developed for purely ornamental purposes. Palaces and country estates built their great gardens, some of which survive in their original form today while many others have been lost to changes of fashion and fortune. History remembers the people who paid for these gardens, not the people who actually did the work.

The person who bought these Lawson Cypresses probably didn’t actually plant them…

I find myself less drawn to the stories people who commissioned gardens, or even those who designed them, and more to the lives of the ordinary gardeners like me. For centuries men (and in more recent times women too) have been drawn to work with the soil. Many came to gardening because gardening was the only career choice, while others will have spilled over from agriculture. A number will have started gardening because their father, and even grandfather too, had been a gardener.

Gardening is a noble craft. We get bogged down in lambasting and tutting at environmentally insensitive and dubious practices; at its most fundamental gardening is about making the world a better place, if only for your employer. The act of nurturing plants for food or for pleasure is a kindly one, and the best gardeners will always have been those with kind souls. When I look at the efforts that went into creating the big old gardens I visit today, I cannot help but marvel at the work of my horticultural forebears. History has largely forgotten their names- even the names of the Head Gardeners in most cases- but the legacy of the ordinary gardener lives on in every tree-lined avenue and in every towering specimen.

Productive walled garden, Knightshayes, Devon, UK

Nowhere is this legacy more visceral to me than in a walled garden.

In a large estate the walled garden was one of three hubs, alongside the estate workshops and the house itself. High walls protected crops from strong winds, deer and rabbits. In some cases the produce fed just the house, but in others the walled garden provided fruits and vegetables for the wider estate too. As 19th century horticulture became more sophisticated and materials became cheaper, so glasshouses built for peaches, grapes and other sensitive luxuries became more widespread. Pineapple pits used the heat given off by rotting manure to warm what was essentially a technically advanced cold frame; to my knowledge nobody is growing their own pineapples here now, despite the relative simplicity of the technology.

A neglected and battered grape house

Old walled gardens are haunted by the benign spirits of the gardeners who tended them. Gardening as an occupation is a spiritual affair; the gardeners who went before tended the earth and their plants with the same love that gardeners do now. Entering a walled garden it’s especially easy to imagine the space laid out and well tended. Labour was cheap in those days, so a small army of gardeners tending crops was fairly common. It was cheaper and less trouble to grow your own fresh food than to rely on far-off markets.

It saddens me to see a walled garden in a state of disrepair. After the Great War a lot of the gardeners who came back didn’t return to the gardens they had tended; after years of mud and dirt who could blame them? The economic woes of the 1920s and the increased industrialisation of agriculture in the 1930s, followed by another war, pretty much brought about the demise of the productive walled garden. Many limped on in a much reduced sense, some were demolished or abandoned, and others were turned into commercial market gardens.

A once-productive walled garden

Gardening itself underwent enormous changes during the 20th century. I came across a snippet in The Gardener’s Chronicle magazine in the early 1950s talking about the great labour-saving technologies that were revolutionising gardening; petrol (gasoline) lawnmowers were a huge revolution on their own. Technology meant that you could achieve greater results with fewer gardeners, although it’s debatable whether the technology drove the decline in gardeners or the declining number of gardeners drove the development of technologies. It doesn’t really matter.

What’s clear is that the old world of the apprentices, journeymen and whiskered Head Gardeners are long gone. Today’s gardeners are multi-talented, and machinery allows one gardener to achieve what would have taken several gardeners before.

This used to open the greenhouse vents, but the greenhouse is long gone

Yet as I found myself walking around a neglected walled garden I fancied that I could sense the old life of the place. Little hints of now-absent buildings littered the walls, telling their own story of neglect and demolition in the past. Mown grass covered the space where crops should have been, but most telling was the attempt to repurpose old borders for ornamental plants. It was as though the last remnants of the garden’s spirit were desperately holding on.

The old water trough

Of course I’m silly; the men who tended this garden have returned to the soil themselves. Yet the very bricks that bore testament to their hard work at the garden’s zenith seem ready to tell stories of what went before.

Our world is always changing but there will always be gardeners; I wonder if, one day, a gardener like me will look at something I’ve done and wonder about me?