It is recognised internationally that the English are passionate, if not obsessive, about their gardens! They have a special relationship with these patches of privately owned land, whether they are the size of a pocket handkerchief outside a suburban semi or a grand estate landscaped by Capability Brown. 

The Museum of Garden History is a little window on this world, focusing on the personal and eccentric side of gardening and containing numerous unexpected and delightful treasures. There is an extensive collection of garden gnomes jostling alongside more serious exhibits on the work of famous botanists such as Dampier, Banks, Forest and Wilson. You can see Gertrude Jekyll’s potting shed desk or marvel at the weird and wonderful collection of gardening tools.

The Museum is a tribute to a hobby as both art form and national obsession.  As Anne Jennings says, “The Museum of Garden History is a quirky and unique place. Above all, it appeals to this great British passion and asks the question: why is gardening so obsessively British?”

 

Hedge history

Roaming through the museum’s tranquil surroundings, ICONS began to piece together the part that hedges play in the history of English gardens…

 
The earliest reason for using hedges in gardens was for security and enclosure: to keep the marauding beasts out and the lady of the house safe inside. Hedges enabled gardens to be secure havens where people could relax.

 

Before the 17th century, hedges were also important as a way of introducing decoration because it wasn’t yet common to import ornamental plants. During the relative economic stability of the later Tudor times, people had time and money to spend on their homes and wanted something more from their gardens than just rows of well-ordered plants to stock the kitchen or medicine cabinet. 

Without lots of exotic foreign flowers to give variety, they chose to grow hedges in 3D shapes (topiary) or in intricate patterns to please the eye when gazing from the first floor window (in Tudor times the living quarters of the home were always upstairs). This fashion for complex patterns, or knot gardens as they were known, was influenced by French and Italian garden design, but the English versions were much smaller scale enclosures – possibly reflecting our mentality as a small island!

• To find out more about knot gardens, click here.
  

 

Hedges could also be useful as framing devices for features of the garden you were particularly proud of. You could cut a hole in a hedge to make a window to view a special corner of the garden, or plant hedges around a very special flower. During the plant collecting crazes of the 17th and 18th centuries, a prize specimen, such as a tulip, might have a hedge grown around it to protect it, draw attention to it and show off your status and wealth.

 

The Museum of Garden History has lots of tools to illustrate cultivation techniques and the creativity of Victorian gardeners when it came to their hedges. 

 

English gardens feature many different plants in their hedges but not all of them are native species. The Romans brought over the box plant, the classic low hedging plant so common in borders and knot gardens. This became such an important part of the classic English garden that when the fungal disease Box Blight (cylindrocladium) struck in the mid-1990s it caused devastation to many ornamental features in some of the most important English gardens, and near hysteria in the gardening world.

Those harking after a rural idyll may choose to grow hedges of native hawthorn and wild roses, the prickles being good for keeping out unwanted guests. As urban gardens became more common, privet hedges were seen as the answer. Pollution-resistant, quick-growing, cheap and dense for that all-important privacy factor, privet hedges are a staple of the English urban garden. Last but not least is the “scourge of suburbia”, the leylandii hedge. In the quest for utter privacy in over-populated cities, the thick, dark green leylandii conifer has become ubiquitous. Because it grows so tall and fast, it has been the cause of more than 10,000 neighbourly (or not so neighbourly) disputes in the last few years, even requiring government legislation to curb them in 2003. Read more about suburban hedges here.

 

As you can see, the history of hedges is intimately tied up with the English attitude to their gardens. The Museum of Garden History provides a fascinating starting point to explore this further. You can visit the museum online at http://www.compulink.co.uk/~museumgh/ or in person at the Church of St Mary in Lambeth. For full details see Places to Go under the What Next? section.