Historical gardening periodicals are often recommended as source material for garden historians. But the huge volume of content in poorly indexed, hard-copy volumes can make the process of finding relevant information seem forbiddingly time-consuming.
This research project is an example of what can be achieved by a detailed study of horticultural newspapers and magazines. I hope it encourages others to persevere with these sources.
The gardening press
Some twenty, largely weekly, gardening and horticultural periodicals were surveyed for the years of the craze. This simply involved sitting in libraries and turning thousands of pages.
In 1908 these periodicals were usually each aimed at a specific segment of the overall market. There were magazines for amateur gardeners, for gardeners employed by private households and councils, for market gardeners, and for small holders, as well as those read across these segments, notably the Gardeners’ Chronicle.
What stood out from this research was not only the volume of relevant material waiting to be discovered but also the very different editorial approaches. For example, some titles – the Gardeners’ Chronicle among them – remained deliberately aloof from the more confrontational aspects of the French gardening debate. While others – the Journal of Horticulture and Farm & Garden in particular – carried detailed critiques and clearly saw themselves as a forum for marshalling opinion against those trying to profit from erroneous claims.
Most engaging was the coverage in the market gardening trade press, where the poisonous rivalry between three newspapers – the Fruit Grower, Fruiterer, Florist and Market Gardener; the Market Growers’ Gazette; and the Fruit, Flower and Vegetable Trades Journal – made for lively reading.
The lesson is to acknowledge the diversity of voices in the gardening press and not see any one periodical as proxy for gardening opinion generally.
Newspaper databases
This project also surveyed a wide range of national daily and Sunday newspapers, local newspapers, consumer magazines and political periodicals. Some of this was in hard copy, much on microfilm and a great deal via online databases such as the British Newspaper Archive and Daily Mail Historical Archive.
There is much to be said on the pros and cons of newspaper databases in historical research, and there is an extensive literature. [1] Their ability to retrieve relevant material in seconds from millions of newspaper pages makes them a powerful tool and one worth considering for any research project, even those where newspaper content might not seem important. This project would have been impossible without them.
[1] For example, Adrian Bingham, ‘The digitization of newspaper archives: Opportunities and challenges for historians.’ Twentieth Century British History, 21.2 (2010), pp.225-231; Bob Nicholson, ‘The Digital Turn: Exploring the methodological possibilities of digital newspaper archives.’, Media History 19.1 (2013), pp.59-73.