Books about antiques

Magazine Antiques, June, 2004 by Alfred Mayor

Royal gardeners

Alan Titchmarsh is the author of Royal Gardeners: The History of Britain's Royal Gardens, more than thirty books about gardening, four novels, and an autobiography. He writes for various British periodicals and appears on BBC Radio and Television, dispensing advice on gardening. He is also a business, endorsing mugs, watering systems, and related things certified effective by Alan Titchmarsh. This is not a shy Yorkshireman.

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There are no footnotes in Royal Gardeners, which is stuffed with fascinating nickel knowledge that may indeed not be footnotable. Oddly, the author's tale comes full circle from the medieval monastery gardens growing food crops on the estates the Romans had established a millennium earlier, to Prince Charles's Duchy Originals, which sells the organically grown produce from his estate Highgrove in Gloucestershire. Queen Elizabeth also has the Windsor Farm Shop near her castle, a sort of supermarket for the bounty of her estates--milk, cream, yogurt, and ice cream from the royal dairy established by George III, apples and apple juice from the Sandringham Estate, Balmoral Scotch whiskey, and pheasants, often shot by the royals. In a characteristically breezy summary, Titchmarsh writes: "Royal gardeners have come a long way in a thousand years. No longer do they think deadheading means executing an opponent in order to pinch his garden."

Herbs had many uses in the Middle Ages: "for scenting linen, to deter fleas, for strewing on the floor to kill smells and soak up spills ... for first aid, dyeing wool and flavouring ale or wine.... Many of their common names today still reflect their original uses--think of bedstraw, eyebright, self-heal, woundwort and fleabane." Some of these herbs were believed to have been marked by God so that man would know their purpose. Selfheal, for example, bears a sickle-shaped mark to show it would cure cuts. The skullcap is so shaped to infer that it would be useful to treat insomnia and other cranial problems. The spotty leaves of Pulmonaria officinalis, or lungwort, indicated it could cure tuberculosis and other afflictions of the lungs.

Although he looked like an unrepentant carnivore, Henry VIII was a great fan of fruit, which he always ate cooked lest he should come down with dysentery. He ordered up a hundred-acre fruit garden and had strawberries grown for his table at Hampton Court Palace in Surrey. He initiated the practice of eating vegetables during the meat course, and he had a particular weakness for cucumbers, a Roman vegetable that had died out because of its susceptibility to frost. Henry grew his cucumbers in greenhouses that were heated by fermenting manure and probably glazed with mica instead of glass, which could not be produced in large pieces.

Tudor times also produced intricate and closely clipped gardens of scented evergreen herbs like rosemary laid out to resemble elaborate knots. These were not only a pleasure to look down upon from a bedroom window but sent up clouds of agreeable smells to mitigate the fetid interiors. The clippings from these low hedges were then strewn on the floor for the same purpose.

The adventurous Elizabethans brought many foreign plants back to England, especially roses and other decorative flowers, and tomatoes, which were thought to be an aphrodisiac. This made them a fruit of great interest to the Elizabethans who were preoccupied by aphrodisiacs. In 1580 Thomas Tusser published a how-to gardening book entirely in verse. In addition to irritating aphorisms like "What greater crime, than loss of time?" he incorporated much good advice about herbs for healing and flowers for nosegays to see one through the smelly streets.

In the eighteenth century the landscaped look was the rage. This often involved rearranging the countryside to create noble vistas, even if it meant razing villages and carving lakes out of hills. One trick to extend the view was to create a ha-ha at the property line so that the neighbor's property looked like yours as well. A ha-ha was a six-foot deep ditch, vertical at the edge of the property, so that the neighbor's cattle could graze right up to the line, appearing to be one's own. Another trick, used by Horace Walpole, was to keep a herd of dwarf cows on his pastures to make his property seem larger.

The book is enlivened graphically by separate passages about topics only tangentially related to the main thread. To cite one example, one two-page spread is comprised of a short history of the breadfruit, picturing a breadfruit, a section entitled "Joseph Banks and the Plant-Hunters," a statement of Banks's legacy, with a picture of the well-fed naturalist, and a section entitled "Prince George and High Society." These two pages have much to teach. Breadfruit was introduced to the West Indies from Tahiti with the hope that it would provide cheap food for the slaves who worked the British plantations. However, Titchmarsh comments: "as it was pretty unpalatable, the slaves refused to eat it!" Banks was the first director of Kew Gardens and was responsible for introducing at least seven thousand new plant species to England. In 1768 he sailed as the resident botanist on Captain James Cook's circumnavigation, taking with him a library of natural history and nine assistants. In New Zealand Banks visited a group of Maori who "hospitably demonstrated the correct technique for eating a human arm. On 28 April 1770 the ship dropped anchor off the eastern coast of Australia, and Banks found so many specimens that the place became known as Botany Bay." The section about Prince George relates that in 1783 George, "who had a notoriously soft spot for 18-course dinners--went to a little fishing village called Brighton to take his stomach for a sea-water 'cure.'" Liking the place he commissioned "the ultimate holiday home--Brighton Pavilion."