By Ella Finney, Assistant Curator
Eleanour Rohde (1881–1950) was a British gardener, garden designer, and horticultural writer. She was known to be shy, solitary and a strict vegetarian. For much of her life, she lived at Cranham Lodge, in Reigate, Surrey where she grew and collected uncommon herb and vegetable varieties in her large garden. In 1921 she became the first woman to design a show garden at The RHS Chelsea Flower Show. She authored thirty books on gardening between 1913 and 1948, and is best known for her book, The Scented Garden, published in 1931.
In 1940 she published The Wartime Vegetable Garden. Like many of the gardener’s ‘dig for victory’ handbooks published during this time, Rohde uses simple language and easy to follow instructions for novice gardeners wanting to do their bit towards the war effort. However, Rohde went a step further than the usual manual, pairing each vegetable’s planting guide with suitable recipes.
Rohde understood that for women who were perhaps more comfortable in the kitchen than the garden, knowing what to do with the end product was just as important as learning how to grow the vegetables. Each of her recipes is very simple, to cater to the war-time reality of subsistence farming on allotments. She rarely lists more than four ingredients per vegetable dish.
Perhaps as a vegetarian, Rohde’s appreciated more than others that ‘few vegetables are so badly treated a greens. Served boiled in the usual way they are mostly roughage and for most people decidedly indigestible.’ In fact she proselytizes, ‘they are at their best raw.’ Her culinary knowledge of vegetables was expansive, with recommendations for dishes made with unusual vegetables, like Golden Thistle (scolymus hispanicus), seakale, salsify, black Spanish radish and asparagus peas, as well as more conventional choices. However, Rohde was still English. For Turnips she recommends ‘steam or boil them in their skins. Large parsnips take less than an hour.’ Not something we’ll be trying anytime soon!