Much of the craze was played out in the pages of national and local newspapers, gardening periodicals and consumer magazines. What the Daily Mail began was soon taken up elsewhere.
A typical early headline “Gold-Mine Gardening for Ladies” topped an article in The Penny Illustrated Paper of 20 April 1908 describing a new form of vegetable cultivation practised at the Thatcham Fruit and Flower Farm near Newbury. The “French system” was a “veritable goldmine” and one Frenchman, it was claimed, had taken as much as £500 worth of produce off an acre plot in just one year. Photographs displayed the curiosities of a garden covered by glass bell-jars, lettuces and flowers growing intermingled in a small, wooden frame, and the sight of English lady gardeners, rakes in hand, alongside their “French gardener”.[1]
The sternest criticism of the Daily Mail’s claims often lay in the columns of gardening magazines, particularly those published for professional horticulturalists. Later in the craze, the Journal of Horticulture identified the Thatcham garden as the place “from which the cult spread”, Gardening Illustrated lamented the “twaddle” that had been written about it, while the Fruit Grower, Fruiterer, Florist and Market Gardener worked itself into a fury denouncing the “French garden craze”, equating it with “other worked-up booms” that had been “the ruin of many who believed the half-told truths which have proved to be a lie and more”.[2]
The arguments can be traced through the press until the outbreak of war in 1914.
[1] ‘Gold-Mine Gardening for Ladies’, Penny Illustrated Paper, 20 April 1908, p.236
[2] ‘French Gardening’, Journal of Horticulture, 28 January 1909, p.71; ‘French Gardening’, Gardening Illustrated, 11 December 1909, p.709; ‘Small Holdings’, The Fruit Grower, 26 November 1908, p.441