Hertfordshire Garden History
A miscellany
Edited by Anne Rowe
Historic parks and gardens are an important part of our heritage, perhaps particularly so in Hertfordshire where the proximity of London has exerted powerful influences, both positive and negative. For centuries those who have made their fortunes in the capital have often preferred to live elsewhere. The attractive countryside of Hertfordshire, with its good communication links to north and south, was a natural choice for many and much money was lavished on the laying out of parks and gardens according to the prevailing fashions. By the nineteenth century south Hertfordshire had some of the highest densities of parkland in the country and these are precisely the areas which, during the twentieth century, suffered most from suburbanisation.
These factors, analysed in Tom Williamson’s overview, makes researching garden history in Hertfordshire particularly interesting and important. Other essays in this fascinating collection look at a garden created in the seventeenth century by the Earl of Salisbury at his hunting lodge at Quickswood, the discovery of a remarkable ‘lost’ eighteenth-century garden near Hertingfordbury, and the effects of wartime shortages on the creation of an early-twentieth-century garden (now Queenswood School). Elsewhere, the impact of wealth derived from the East India Company on the county’s gardens is described and the works of two famous eighteenth-century landscape designers, Charles Bridgeman and Richard Woods, are examined together with the garden and famous grotto created by John Scott of Amwell. Also included are the histories of two Hertfordshire businesses whose impact on horticulture was felt well beyond the county boundary: the Pulham family of Broxbourne who created rock gardens for royalty, and Frederick Sander, known to Victorians as ‘the Orchid King’, whose nursery was in St Albans.
Anne Rowe is a freelance landscape historian whose recent work has focused on Hertfordshire’s medieval parks. She has co-ordinated the research work of the Hertfordshire Gardens Trust since 1998 and teaches courses in landscape and garden history for the Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education.
ISBN-10 1-905313-38-1
ISBN-13 978-1-905313-38-9
July 2007, 236pp
Paperback £16.99 / US$33.95