A happy post this morning; another gem from the bounty of Youtube.
The Victorian Kitchen Garden is a 1987 program from the BBC and Sveriges Television 2. It’s a gardening program but it’s also a social history program, because it looks at the kitchen garden of a manor house as the unifying thread between all classes in rural Victorian society. The lord owned the land and the produce– he got the best that the hot-houses and orchards provided– but he was also responsible for feeding his house staff, garden corps, rural laborers and even tenants from what his garden produced. The gardeners grew what their lord ate, what they ate, what their peers ate and what everyone below them ate. Everyone had responsibilities to everyone else, and the more you enjoyed, the more responsibilities you had. This reciprocation is often neglected in modern views of less ‘democratic’ eras.
You could ask what any of this has to do with writing or current affairs. It has a lot to do with both. Writers are disproportionately gardeners, at least in my experience, because both endeavors require reflection. You can’t be a good writer without wondering “Where are we all going?” and I promise you this: if we’re lucky, the future is going to look a lot like The Victorian Kitchen Garden. And that’s a good thing, because the VKG way of life is sustainable and accountable– at least more sustainable and accountable than what we’ve got now. A quote from the ‘star’ of the series, one of the last men trained in the Victorian gardening tradition, Harry Dodson:
The relationship between the head gardener and his master was a blend of professional respect and deference, as Harry recalls in an incident when he was a general foreman:
“I was beginning to understand after I’d been there a day or two that, uh, his lordship was coming home from the forces and, uh, I probably wouldn’t recognize him as a gentleman if I saw him about the gardens, but the tell-tale mark was that he was a very tall gentleman, slightly thinner than me and that he would be two or three inches above me in stature. I thought I’d got that plain and simple.
The head gardener was a stickler. At eight o’clock the glasshouses had to be locked, and the yard into the glasshouses and the bothey (?) yard had to be locked also.
This particular night I was locking up, and uh, on entering the fig-house, there was a– well I could call him a gentleman– the man was sat on the fig wall and he looked anything but a gentleman and uh, I said ‘Good Evening,’ to him and I said, ‘Did you want Mr. Foster?’ He said, ‘No, no,’ so I said, ‘Okay’. I went on and I finished closing the rest of the glass and I knew that that man could not stop there, so I went back and asked him again if he’d seen Mr. Foster. He said ‘No’, and I said, ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’ He pulled himself up to full attention and said: ‘I’m Lord Harcourt, and who are you?’
I went down to about so (lowers hand) and I could feel the color drain from my face! (Laughter.)
But he was a true aristocrat. He immediately put his hand out and he said, ‘I’m pleased to meet you. Dodson, you couldn’t possibly know who I am.’ He couldn’t have known who I was either, but we became very good friends and it was a pleasure to know him.”
How many readers can say: “I work for a man like that”?
This program follows Victorian gardening techniques through the course of a year. There are a lot of great ideas for trapping heat and growing vegetables out-of-season in a temperate climate. These are simple, inexpensive techniques that everybody can use in some way; techniques that probably took many generations to collect and perfect. The Victorian Kitchen Garden is an exemplary bit of public television and the entire season’s up on Youtube. Happy Spring!
