The beginning of May marks the Royal Horticultural Society’s National Gardening Week, but many of the Parliamentarians in our volumes didn’t need extra encouragement to tend to their gardens. In this, the first of two blogs, guest blogger Dr Jonathan Denby looks at differing level of importance that was placed on gardening for MPs across the 19th and 20th centuries…
Sir Roderick Floud’s magisterial ‘An Economic History of the English Garden’ revealed for the first time to the general public and to his fellow historians the importance of gardens and gardening to the economy over the last five centuries. Nowadays, gardening supports an industry with a turnover of £11 billion a year, the gardens of the National Trust attract 16 million visitors a year and hands on gardening is a much-loved hobby for a large part of the population. In the nineteenth century gardening was just as important, perhaps more so than now, particularly for the upper echelons of society for whom gardening was at the heart of their cultural and social life, especially so amongst parliamentarians.
The relative importance of gardening in the nineteenth century compared with the twentieth can be seen from an examination of the preferences of the political elite in the two centuries. In 1880 a cabinet of 13 led by Disraeli was replaced by a cabinet of 14 led by Gladstone. Every single member of the two administrations occupied a country seat with an ornamental garden and a fully productive kitchen garden with a gardening staff of about 20, but sometimes many more. Their involvement in gardening went much further than being responsible for a large estate. At Hawarden, it was a fixture of Gladstone’s calendar to host the annual horticultural society show in his garden, giving an address on horticulture, which was later published as a pamphlet. Disraeli coined his famous aphorism ‘The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy’ at a meeting of the Wynyard Horticultural Society, correlating happiness with the cultivation of a garden and adding ‘A woman is never seen to greater advantage than in the garden’. John Bright, a commoner member of Gladstone’s cabinet, would practice his House of Commons speeches on his gardener Benjamin Oldham and would sometimes quote him in support of his patriarchal opinions. Another member of Disraeli’s cabinet, the newsagent W.H. Smith, developed the magnificent gardens of Greenlands at Henley where he employed 30 gardeners and was a frequent winner in the local horticultural shows.
One hundred years later, in 1980, Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet had 22 members of whom only one, Michael Heseltine, owned a country seat of the kind occupied by the members of the Disraeli and Gladstone administrations. One other, Lord Carrington, owned a garden of great merit, the Manor House at Bledlow, but this was on a much smaller scale. Of his colleagues, three expressed an interest in gardening in their Who’s Who entry, but none of those possessed a garden of any importance. There were several cabinet members from old money backgrounds, notably Lord Hailsham and William Whitelaw, but Hailsham had sold his ancestral home as the cost of upkeep was too great, and Whitelaw lived in a mansion house with a garden of relatively modest size.
When Disraeli became a rising star of the Tory party his supporters provided him with the money to buy Hughenden, as it was considered essential for him to have a country estate. A mansion in Mayfair would not do; if he was to conform with the norms of upper class society he had to have the sporting and recreational facilities of an estate with an ornamental garden to enable him to entertain in style. Similar motives impelled Joseph Chamberlain, who was President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone’s cabinet, when he built a mansion which he called Highbury, together with accompanying parkland and garden on virgin land outside Birmingham. Chamberlain’s closest neighbour was Richard Cadbury, the enlightened Bournville factory owner, who marked his entry into society by creating an estate similar to Highbury.
Hughenden Manor, in The County Seats of the Noblemen and Gentlemen of Great Britain and Ireland, Francis Orpen Morris, via Wikimedia Commons
The tables below record the current status of the 28 landed estates of the Disraeli and Gladstone cabinet members (there are 28 as one of the 27 cabinet members, the Duke of Richmond, occupied two estates). Three no longer exist, as the houses have been demolished, and the land redeveloped. Of the remainder, 12 of the gardens have been listed and are open to the public, two of which are run by the National Trust, and a further three are also open to public view. Most of the other houses have found an alternative use, as a hotel, a wedding venue or as flats, with a private garden attached on a much smaller scale than formerly. Of the kitchen gardens most have been destroyed or built on, but nine are either fully or partially cultivated. Of those gardens which survive, most have a skeleton workforce; at Belvoir, there is a single head gardener and a team of volunteers. This reflects the reduced scale of the gardens and the fact that the beating heart of the garden, the kitchen garden with its array of hothouses and forcing pits, no longer exists. Visitors to those gardens which survive will admire their beauty without knowing just how much more magnificent they were in the past, or their significance in the social and cultural lives of their former owners.
JD
Look out for the second part of Jonathan’s series, for a closer comparison of two great parliamentary gardeners!
Jonathan Denby holds a D.Phil in Economic and Social History from Oxford University and an MA in Garden History from Buckingham University. His research interests are gardens, gardening and economic and social conditions in the C19th. Find out about Jonathan’s own garden here.
The History of Parliament 
