‘Mrs Loudon’s Gardening for Ladies’, first published in 1840, became the mid-nineteenth-century’s best-known gardening book for women, selling an astounding 200,000 copies. Jane (nee Webb) had by that time married Britain’s leading horticultural writer, John Claudius Loudon, in 1830. From their partnership, she became enraptured by gardening and learning about natural systems. All this laid the foundations for her own botanical and horticultural writing career.
Born in 1807, Jane had spent her early years in Birmingham. By 17 both her parents had passed away. To support herself, at the age of 20, she published her first novel, The Mummy! Set in the 22nd century, the science fiction novel envisioned a steam-powered machine age featuring the first ever English-language reanimated mummy. Impressed and excited by Jane’s vision of the future, her future husband, John Loudon, set out to find the author whom he assumed to be male. Two years later they met and a few months later married.
This led to what historian Catherine Horwood describes in Gardening Women (2010) as “the most successful horticultural partnership and marriage of the nineteenth century.” Becoming John’s amanuensis, Jane began to attend public lectures, including those by John Lindley, and to study John Loudon’s vast botanical library. Jane’s determination to educate herself is evident; “When I married Mr. Loudon, it is scarcely possible to imagine any person more completely ignorant than I was, of every thing relating to plants and gardening…I was soon heartily ashamed of my ignorance.”
Resolved to learn, and later to teach, Jane set herself the task of helping other women learn to garden — without expense, without being confused by Latin words and technical terms, and by fully informing them as to the reason they were doing something. In ‘Gardening for Ladies’ she explains; “The great point is to exercise our own skill and ingenuity; for we all feel so much more interested in what we do ourselves than in what is done for us, that no lady is likely to become fond of gardening, who does not do a great deal with her own hands.”
From this perspective, Jane rejected the traditional epistolary form and addressed her reader directly. To support her explanations, she became a self-taught botanical artist, adding vibrant illustrations to her works. She wholeheartedly encouraged women to participate in the laborious employments of gardening by using the tools available to them, whether that be a specially designed lady’s spade, lightweight wheelbarrows, modified secateurs, or clogs and gauntlets to protect “small and delicately formed hands and feet.” By the 1840s lawn mowers had become fashionable, and Jane believed them to be “particularly adapted for amateurs, affording excellent exercise to the arms and every part of the body.”
Watching expenses was central to her philosophy. For example, she offers practical tips for constructing plant pots from found materials, which “combined by skilful hands, will produce an almost magical effect.”
Most significantly, Jane believed that women could not only dig and prune as well as men, they could also turn successfully to garden design. Proving the popularity of her design principles and their uptake, by the ninth edition of ‘The Ladies Companion to the Flower Garden’, her chapters on the design and laying out of the garden had moved from the appendix to the opening chapters. Her designs squeezed plants into meticulously planned geometrical garden beds, or parterres. Her style and approach was often later contrasted to Gertrude Jekyll’s more free flowing herbaceous borders which centred on more muted, flowing tones at the turn of the 20th century.
Jane also touches on the fad for ribbon gardening, a mode of arranging flowers in strips or bands of different colours, advocating for contrasting colours. In fact, Jane as particularly famed for her colour theory. Her rules for laying out flowerbeds advocated that no primary colour should be paired with a compound colour composed from it. So, ideally, the contrasting colours of red and green, yellow and purple or blue and orange were suited to each other, while on the other hand, red did not look well with purple (being composed of red and blue). Jane’s other simple design rules included having warm colours matched with lawn and cool colours prevalent in the gravel garden.
