In Six Thousand Years up the Garden Path, a seasoned horticulturalist takes others on a light-hearted and magical journey through the history of gardens. Ian Robertson has spent a lifetime working in the world of plants and design and relies on his experience as an international garden designer to narrate a fascinating history of gardening. Beginning with Sumerians learning to garden between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Robertson transports others through the Fertile Crescent to western Europe, forward to the British Isles, and onward to the New World all while describing the beauty of the gardens of Andrew Jackson Downing, Wolfgang Oehme, Frederick Law Olmstead, and many others. Included in his story of the foliage and blossoms that surrounded kings, princes, queens, and mistresses, Robertson shares a timeline, glossary, and roadside stopovers that make the journey up the garden path even more delightful. Tailored for the enjoyment of either experienced or novice gardeners immersed in the second fastest growing hobby in America, Robertson provides insights into the people, events, and plants that have vibrantly colored the landscape of the world for thousands of years.
Six Thousand Years Up the Garden Path
An Exceptional JourneyBy Ian RobertsoniUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Ian Robertson
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-1014-0Contents
INTRODUCTION..............................................................................1CHAPTER ONE: A LONG, LONG, TIME AGO.......................................................3CHAPTER TWO: OF SEVERAL MIGHTY CIVILIZATIONS..............................................13CHAPTER THREE: PLUMBING THE DEPTHS OF DARKNESS............................................35CHAPTER FOUR: A WORLD FULL OF WARRIORS-AND BESS...........................................49CHAPTER FIVE: BEYOND THE BLUE HORIZON.....................................................65CHAPTER SIX: COME LET'S JET LAG...........................................................79CHAPTER SEVEN: AH, THE ROMANCE OF IT ALL..................................................91CHAPTER EIGHT: IT'S ONLY A NAME AFTER ALL.................................................111CHAPTER NINE: HEROIC STRUGGLES............................................................127CHAPTER TEN: HERMITS-THE MAD HATTER'S TEA PARTY, AND THE WELBECK MOLE.....................143CHAPTER ELEVEN: MICRO TO MECCA............................................................155CHAPTER TWELVE: A ROTTEN PLACE TO CAMP....................................................171CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE ADMIRABLE MR. OLMSTEAD..............................................183CHAPTER FOURTEEN: DESIGNING WOMEN.........................................................195CHAPTER FIFTEEN: NOW THEY ALMOST DRESS LIKE US............................................205CHAPTER SIXTEEN: YES, GARDEN HISTORY LIVES!...............................................217CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: HERE WE ARE. ALL CHANGE!...............................................231GLOSSARY..................................................................................239BIBLIOGRAPHY..............................................................................243
Chapter One
A LONG, LONG TIME AGO
Of literary studies: "Such studies profit youth and rejoice old age." Cicero (143-106 BCE)
Introduction, not to be skipped over
For the human mind 6,000 years is quite a lot of breakfasts. It is also a period of time in which a vast acreage of horticultural happenings has been sown. So how do we place within this one book something that makes it possible to peek within the seed rows and experience some worthwhile harvest? The story of a cameraman and a train may help to illustrate our dilemma.
An everyday-looking man is being strapped to the front of a steam engine. This steam engine will travel, nonstop, into the English south coast town of Brighton after a one hour express trip from London. In Brighton this by now weather beaten "prisoner" will be set free. With great care, he will pack away his 35 mm movie camera and manually wound film, with pauses only to change reels of the previous sixty minutes. Scenery and events recorded as flashed images through which the train sped was the end product envisioned and achieved.
The year is 1952 and the adventure proved to be a success. The British Broadcasting Company televised the result on April 22nd, 1953, the same year as Queen Elizabeth's coronation. The film entertained many viewers in the early years of television as an interesting short feature. The camera was undercranked, in other words, wound slowly at two frames per second, the normal speed for film being twenty four frames per second. The resulting exposures were speeded up when projected; thus the trip took just four minutes of screen time instead of the actual sixty on the rails. The train appears to be rattling along at an average of 765 mph with a top speed of 840 mph, consuming the countryside at a prodigious rate.
The train's contracted format style is used in this book, thus allowing six thousand years of fascinating garden history to be viewed at a staggering speed in just a few pages, with only a small amount of reader effort. Such is the convenience of the modern world. In addition, we will have recurring glimpses of some items to provide a security blanket of repetition. The rose, boxwood, weeping willow, England's Hever Castle, and Chatsworth, plus the exciting trials of the plant hunters: these will help to carry us along our path.
Inserts are scattered throughout that are not necessarily horticultural and are included to give further illustration, through chronology, of where we are along our garden path.
When the mind of the average person tries to grasp the concept of 4000 BCE, a feeling of inadequacy may rear its head as can happen when discussions of light years and black holes are broached. A similar feeling of confusion assailed me on coming to live in North America in my late twenties as I grappled with my new home's history. When, for instance, did the Civil War really occur? A much needed lifeline was thrown to me by way of the Burke Davis book, The Long Surrender. It tells of Jefferson Davis, the defeated president of the Confederacy, who was jailed for a while at the end of the conflict. His jailer was a Union soldier named Nelson Miles who died in 1925 a time at which my own father was already in his twenties. A war that had seemed to me to have taken place in a time vacuum was now a tangible event that sat comfortably in my life's events file.
Similarly, as a teacher of horticulture, I often find that students have little idea of the actual height of the taller trees. Overestimation is the norm, usually by quite a percentage. This may be considered another example of the difficulty of grasping time and space when it is not within the usual parameters of daily experience.
So how do we find ourselves 6,000 years in the past, perched at the end of a wildly winding path in a place vastly different from our own? Firstly, it seems any history really starts to be of interest when particular people are recognized and local stories can be told to illustrate events. Ice ages and the early tectonic plate movement of continents were cataclysmic events but not ones providing those short anecdotes that may be shared with friends over a few drinks. Secondly, most people all over the horticultural world have an impressive commonality of experience and reaction to "gardening" events. So even though we find ourselves so far away in years, the common thread we pull on to guide us back to the present holds so many sympathetic happenings, it gives us confidence that our journey will be safe and sure. For aren't we all, in some way, diggers in the dirt?
Having decided that the garden path starts at 4000 BCE, let's just look over our shoulders for a moment across some distant unknown wildness back to 8000 BCE. Here we find, in the area of Jericho just six miles north of the Dead Sea in Palestine, evidence of the first recorded cultivation of the soil, a task probably made with a digging stick and possibly a simple plough-like implement pulled by an ox. In 6000 BCE more cultivation is recorded on the Iran/Iraq border, in Mesopotamia, and in Crete. Cypress and Egypt also invested in further land scratching in the fifth millennium BCE.
This may be classed as early agriculture where the need for food was about sustaining the community; probably almost all inhabitants were employed in working for the survival of the group. Agriculture was seen to be nudging the hunter gatherers' shoulder, but as yet, had evidenced no apparent horticultural leanings.
Now let us move quickly forward to 4000 BCE stopping only to note that boxwood was found in a remnant of a camp fire near Brighton dated at about 4500 BCE. Yes, it is the same Brighton, just a few years before that train arrived at that south coast station from London.
Sumerians-the pioneers.
Again we stand at our arbitrary starting line of 4000 BCE, that being six thousand years up the garden path. If it can be agreed that the idea of garden paths suggest settled groups of people who are organizing plantings, then we have a clue to the earliest horticultural development. Nomadic groups and hunter gatherer societies that did not concern themselves with the cultivation of soil and crops also certainly did not become involved with ornamental plants, flowers, and herbs. These peoples are more likely to have been gathering in passing rather than seed sowing in anticipation.
So we should look for the organized settling of a region where friable soil and available water is on hand and the climate is, at least in part, conducive to the raising of plants. Thus here we find, moving in from the north, the first heroes of our garden stroll. The Sumerians arrived in Mesopotamia, and it may almost have been love at first sight. The word Mesopotamia means "the land between two rivers", in this case between two large rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, in the area that is now part of southern Iraq.
The two rivers provided rich alluvial soil, ample moisture for part of the year, and access to irrigation water during the dry season. Wheat, barley, sesame, mango, bananas, lemons, limes, and oranges all were grown, suggesting a nutritionally healthy group of people. In addition, wine was made from flowers. Life, for the most part, was becoming just a little settled, and in some ways, easier.
It was during this period of the Sumerian culture that the Neolithic era was said to have ended, in about 3500 BCE, and although there were probably no festivities to mark its passing, bronze was becoming the new material of note; thus the Bronze Age was here. About the time I started to shave regularly, the words Neolithic and Bronze age meant to me a time so distant as to be part of the Stone Age, whenever that was. This time relationship may also prove baffling to others, so as we move along our path, I will continue by offering occasional rungs for our chronological ladder.
As bronze had come to Mesopotamia without great fanfare, so did the rose. It was now 3000 BCE and the growing of roses is first recorded, though the reason may have been medicinal, this plant being used as a diuretic or laxative. Blossoms for the annual village garden show or to win the heart of a fair lady were possibly not in huge demand at this time. Over the ages so many plants must have been experimented with to ascertain any healing powers they might possibly have provided, including the rose. In the process, one may wonder, how many people gave up their lives by ingesting odd plant parts, just for the need to know?
The Sumerians mostly built simple houses of the local materials, wood and mud. These structures had to be quite small, for the materials did not allow super sized construction as will be seen a little later in Egypt. From many of the earlier smaller communities, towns were being developed and lifestyles were becoming more settled. For the first time in recorded history, we see intensive growing of plants with a surplus harvest that was stored away for future use. This created new challenges that have been with us ever since the majority of us stopped being hunter gatherers. Pests and diseases became a noticeable feature. Certain pests suddenly found a whole row or even a field of their favorite food, so they ate and ate then bred and bred and their populations became greater and greater. Here is a scenario familiar to today's cultivators. Rats found the stored crops that made them happy and well fed, and their populations also expanded. Now we have quite happy Sumerians, and very happy pests including remarkably full rats.
Additionally these food surpluses were allowing free time for a new group of people to develop as administrators, artists, and designers. Having these people not directly involved in the day-to-day production or gathering of food was a new phenomenon. This arguably provided a modicum of spare time to grow plants for no other reason than they had attractive blossoms and fruit. We have taken the first few miles along our path and already found cultivators of plants not necessarily for survival, and we may be aware of the newly created orchards of figs, olives and dates.
Let's briefly visit a goddess and a gardener. In Sumerian times, the legendary Goddess Inanna was quite a dominant figure who believed in the full expression of the senses in both love and war. The story is told of her being interested in a fine, talented gardener called Shukallituda who sowed, cultivated, and watered his crops well. One day a storm raged, blowing away his garden, destroying his crops, and blinding him with flying sand. Inanna took pity on Shukallituda and showed him how to replant, but this time with fences and shade trees to protect his plants from the worst of the winds and heat. These basic concepts of plant cultivation are still vital in present-day gardens.
As the Sumerians were grappling with the cultivation of the rose, they were also developing the earliest known script that relied on letters rather than pictograms. This new script, the first extant example being from 3300 BCE, allowed the Sumerians to record crops grown, who stored what, and where. The lettering system was later known as cuneiform from the Latin word for wedge shaped, which indeed was the shape of these newly developed symbols, reminiscent of a diverse collection of toilet plungers. Script was created with a stylus used to mark wet clay tablets that were then allowed to bake hard in the sun, or to be baked in an oven. Today there are many thousands of these tablets available for study by academics, and they give good records of life during this far distant time. One of the earlier known examples of a clay tablet from 3000 BCE lists physicians' prescriptions; Cassia, a yellow flowered plant still grown today, thyme, figs, milk, salt, and saltpeter were enumerated. From these few ingredients were created astringents, antiseptics, salves, and laxatives, the last named seeming rather unnecessary given the number of fruits being grown and presumably consumed at the time.
The question could be asked. How did anyone know how to translate this unique, original script? Sumerian seems derived from no other known language group. The answer is simple. With so much was written down, these early people soon had to develop cuneiform dictionaries and vocabularies to allow the general use of their written language within their communities.
It should be recognized that another enormous advantage of the reasonably stable Sumerian society, as compared with the earlier nomadic systems, is that durable records were created and handed down to following generations, a fact so fortuitous for later historians.
So here we have our Sumerian heroes: developing rudimentary horticulture including growing food crops and roses; developing cuneiform script to help in recording and trading; conceiving the idea of the sixty minute system of time to assist in bringing order to their day; and developing an understanding of the advantages of distribution of water via comparatively complex irrigation systems. Continual maintenance requirements of these irrigation systems, which were fed by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, proved a major engineering achievement. Generally it worked well, thus greatly assisting the growing of good crops in an area of consistent summer droughts. The mere fact of having this controlled water source made the cultivation of food more reliable year by year; the prospect of moving on to new lands, leaving these systems behind, was not an attractive proposition.
As noted earlier, the Sumerian population grew and many larger regional settlements and towns developed. By creating these larger population centers, they were better able to stave off the marauding peoples from surrounding hills, deserts, and even neighboring towns. Around 3500 BCE the first mention of a town is noted with courtyards and adjoining garden spaces filled with fruits, vegetables, and the necessary trees for shade and comfort. In the grander gardens of the royalty the presence of gardeners is evident, often in large numbers, their task to train and harvest the fruits often given as offerings to the gods. These gardeners may not have been rewarded to the same degree as the gods so one may picture the occasional fig or pear vanishing.
The land between the Tigris and the Euphrates produced well; crops and other goods were traded; and the region was the envy of other surrounding, poorer, mostly nomadic, peoples. It was the forces of skirmish that grew into the harassment of conflict, and then the finality of war that ended this earliest agricultural, and to a lesser degree horticultural, society. The Assyrians had moved in from the north, in a big way.
Our garden path is capable of whisking us off on major diversions at a moment's notice, and so now we find ourselves in China. Let me introduce you to a legendary giant figure, Emperor Shen Nung, the Red Emperor. Please try not to look so surprised; yes, his head is the size of a bull's, which seems quite incongruous as it sits atop the body of a man. Mind you he seems to have needed all the head space available to him, for he had already invented the cart and the Chinese plough, tamed oxen and yoked horses. Shen Nung was quite the medicine man and botanist, for he enumerated 365 plants, including cannabis. His plant lists enumerate their uses for the treatment of many human ailments. As one may expect from exceptional legends, he decided to try out a number of these new herbs on himself, subsequently noting the results. All his gathered information was put down in the Pen T'sao Ching or herbal, along with suggested uses for many more plants. Herbals, to be discussed again later, were books descriptive of plants and their potential medicinal properties. For sustenance during Shen Nung's great endeavors he hit upon the idea of drinking green tea. It is suggested this revolutionary concept came to him while walking in the open air sipping hot water. Suddenly a violent wind arose, blowing some storm tossed leaves from a nearby tea plant into his cup of water. He must have considered it, tasted it, and decided it to be acceptable.
(Continues...)
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