It is a chilly California Saturday morning. My sister and I are watching cartoons on the TV when Mom says, “Let’s go to the garden”. We moan a bit but make our way outside. Mom hands us each a bucket, and we step our way through the carefully planted beds collecting snails that are eating away at them and putting them in our buckets. For every snail we collect, we get 10 cents to use later to get a toy at the store.

We slowly make our way through the beds while Mom tends to the rest of the garden, pulling weeds and watering. When we are finished, we hand our buckets to Mom and dash back in to catch a few more minutes of cartoons before we head out for the day to run errands together.

Women in the Garden

In The Story of Gardening, Martin Hoyles outlines the mystery of women in the history of gardening. While it is known that most narratives leave out the woman, gardening is no different. Records dating back to the fourteenth-century show women on the wage list for weeding and digging vines while being paid half of what the men made. In the 16th century, women were paid “for removing charlock, nettles, convolvulus, dodder, thistles, dandelions, and groundsel from the gardens at Hampton Court.” (Hoyles, 1991)

Women were not allowed in horticultural programmes until 1891 and were not welcome to work at places like Kew Gardens until 1895. Even after that, women were seen as keepers of the “domestic” garden while men did serious work like digging, planting, and mowing. (Hoyles, 1991)

The Royal Horticultural Society held an exhibition as part of the 2023 Chelsea Flower Show to honour women in horticulture. The dedication states, “It is a woman’s business to be interested in the environment. It’s an extended form of housekeeping.” (RHS, 2023)

Garden maintenance has a strange separation of traditional roles of men and women. Women grow flowers and vegetables, while men mow lawns and build fences. Mowing the lawn is deeply rooted in the “man’s work”. After WWII, women were sold Pyrex dishes and hoovers, and men were sold lawnmowers. (Steinberg, 2007) In America, the perfect mowed lawn is a competitive game. In Scientific American, Krystal D'Costa states, "Lawns continue to be markers of success. Many people do employ landscapers who provide weekly or monthly maintenance so that they do not need to invest their own time in the mundane tasks of cutting and bagging their grass and edging their lawns.” (D'Costa, 2017) This attitude returns to the intense need to control an image, not a living, breathing system. Where in nature does a straight line exist?

Advertisements for lawnmowers targeted men, while kitchen supplies were for women. The John Bull cover from 1959 shows a man fixing a lawnmower and a woman behind him with pruning shears and gardening gloves. (Left: John Bull, 1959; Right, Pyrex, 1947)

Clément writes about this, saying, "Landscapes that have been anthropomorphised, that is to say controlled and fashioned by humans, can usually be recognised by a simple strict geometry - ponds, reservoirs, terraces - whereas nature is organised in a complex and seemingly barely legible way." (Clément, 2016)

These domains tie back to the conversation about landscape versus the garden. The landscape is still the male's, and the garden is the female's. The lawn is a static, predictable, controllable landscape, while the garden is ephemeral, moving, and sometimes illegible. Capability Brown, England's most famous landscape designer of the 18th century (Cox, 2023), said gardens were too small to contain any "capabilities", hence why he focused on grand, sweeping gestures with large lawns and lakes. (Hoyles, 1991)

In a way, the smaller jobs like pruning, weeding, and watering were the ‘gardener’ jobs. The women probably had a better understanding of the garden than the men did. By pulling the weeds, watering, and clearing dead leaves, the women were the ones that paid close attention to details that helped the garden thrive while also watching the life cycle of the plants, from growth to death. Victoria Adukwei Bulley says, “Gardening, then, is a practice of sustained noticing.” (Bulley, 2021) For the weeding women, they were constantly noticing changes in the garden and responding in the best way.

DAISY: What kind of garden do you come from?

ALICE: Oh, I don’t come from a garden.

DAISY: Do you suppose she’s a wildflower?

ALICE: Oh no, I’m not a wildflower.

ROSE: Just what species or, shall we say, genus are you, my dear?

ALICE: Well, I suppose you call me a genus humanus Alice.

DAISY: Ever seen an Alice with a blossom like that?

IRIS: Come to think of it, did you ever see an Alice?

DAISY: Yes, and did you notice her petals? What a peculiar colour.

IRIS: And no fragrance.

DAISY: Just look at those stems.

IRIS: Rather scrawny, I’d say.