Gardening for women

by Viscountess Frances Garnet Wolseley

The profession of gardening offers a considerable amount of freedom, the refining influence of poetry and beauty, contact with intelligent, interesting people, and health and happiness to body and mind. These, to an active, out-of-door, young woman are very great advantages. Then, too, there are different branches of the profession, so that a selection is possible as to which best suits her talents. Should she be fond of teaching, she can hold classes in Nature Study or botany; if she has taste and talent for drawing, she can take up landscape gardening. With a small amount of capital to invest, she may start a market garden, with every prospect of success.

There are, too, the higher branches of horticulture, such as the treatment of rare greenhouse plants, hybridisation, cross-fertilisation, and the handling of orchids. All these intensely interesting, intellectual matters require such dainty skill, so much thought, that there is no doubt whatever they are suited to ladies. Many who practise in these branches employ women to execute the minute operations that are so often entailed, because their light touch is better adapted to the purpose than the heavy hand of a man. Few women have up to the present studied long enough to surpass men in these matters, but there is a certain future for them in such work if they persevere in study.

It must be borne in mind that horticulture is still a comparatively new profession for women, and that unless those who enter it strive to give full time and application to learning its details they cannot hope to be successful. Some few failures have occurred already, much to the regret of all keenly interested onlookers. These have been caused by anxiety to earn something before proficient knowledge had been acquired. It is the same, I believe, in all new professions; and it is only now, after many years of striving, that women have attained success as sick nurses, secretaries, and teachers. The first who went into the arena made mistakes, and possibly paved the way for their successors, who noted the causes of failure, and mended their ways. Let us hope that this will be the case in horticulture, for there is no reason why women should not succeed in it. Moreover, we have already some brilliant examples of success. Those who are thinking of taking it up should spare no pains to gain a complete education, for only then, when they are themselves worth something, can they expect remuneration.

CHAPTER II
THE TRAINING REQUIRED

There are various ways of obtaining the necessary training to be a lady gardener. Both at home and abroad numerous colleges and schools exist where young women are well instructed in all branches of Horticulture. A college course is necessary, but if a girl is not more than twenty years of age (and it is advisable that she should not be much younger when she commences her training) it will help her to be apprenticed for a year or two first in a private garden. Should she prefer, it will be better still to spend two years at a small school where instruction is more individual and personal than in a large college. Here the students are few in number, and carefully selected, and it is possible to learn in the same way that the working man learned, when he began as a garden boy. The pupil will be ordered to do menial jobs, such as turning manure, wheeling refuse, sweeping leaves, or mowing a lawn. This comparative drudgery must be gone through in order to understand how to direct others. Even wheeling a barrow full of soil and washing out pots is interesting if the heart be in the profession and there is the wish to succeed.

In a private garden or small school, too, it will be possible to follow the ultimate use the pots are put to, after they are washed, and the reason for each operation will be more easily made apparent than is the case in a large college, where lectures and theoretical classes are sometimes put before practice. When there is a large number of students, too, it is impossible that all should take part in each operation. Personal interest in the garden is apt to be lost sight of, and teaching becomes a “demonstration,” where the expert does the work, and the students look on. They cannot thus learn in the only thorough way, by working themselves.

In a college course, hours are often suited to the requirements of expert lecturers, and students are apt to ignore the fixed hours of work observed in a private garden. I have known students to whom it never occurred that it might not be agreeable to the family to hear the sound of raking on a gravel path outside the breakfast room, and who were unconscious of its being an offence against garden etiquette for them to shout remarks to fellow students across the flower beds. Then, too, fixed school holidays, which are necessary in large communities, sometimes interfere with the possibility of seeing certain operations performed.

I therefore strongly advocate a course of manual work, like that of the garden boy, as an introduction to more serious training. This routine work will enable the pupil to understand college lectures, when the time comes to attend them. Theoretic teaching can then be applied to the treatment of soil and plants.

Not possessed of the strength and facility for manual work of a man, the girl student must make up for this deficiency by intelligent reasoning. She should follow closely in the footsteps of science, and have a reason for each operation. What is heard in the chemistry laboratory has to be applied in practice in the garden. When the dismal herbaceous border, upon which so much money has been spent, is seen, the cause of failure will be known. After all the talk, trouble and expense, why does it lack colour? Surely some ingredient in the soil is missing—dress it with lime, put more manure or leaf mould, as the case may be.

I believe that some people imagine that a lady gardener is intended always to remain at work amongst the swept-up leaves and garden refuse! But if her intelligence is not sufficient to make her soar speedily beyond the powers of a £1 a week man gardener, she had better take up other work, for she certainly cannot compete with him in physical strength.