Modern Pressed Flowers

Via dezeen, the timeless art of pressed flowers transformed into three dimensions by designer Ignacio Canales Aracil:

"The flowers are held together without any structure or glue, they stand and stick together as the straw in a hat after being dried and pressed all at once. The roughness of the process which requires lots of physical effort contrast with the delicacy and fragility of the finished sculpture."

Georgian Shrubberies and Google Ngrams

Shrubberies at Carlton House as engraved by Woollett, c. 1760

I work some in the eighteenth-century but tend to find it tiresome because this epoch more than any other gives rise to scholars who obsess over small details and like to argue about them.  One of these is--ahem--the origin of the "shrubbery".  Say it with me:  "shrubbery".  Now say it five times fast. shrubberyshrubberyshrubberyshrubberyshrubbery.  That's how it feels to be in a room with shrubbery scholars.  I KNOW! Like you, I thought shrubbery was invented by the Knights who say Ni!  Au contraire, mon frère.  You have much to learn.  

"Now think of the gaiety of a Shrubbery ! —unlike to the monastic melancholy of the old wood walks ; and herein you may plant all the neat trees I have before mentioned, with ponds at proper distances, for gold fish, and benches with Latin mottos—to puzzle the ladies; besides temples dedicated to the heathen gods!"   Just think of it!  Goldfish!  Heathen Temples!  Puzzling Ladies! Do read the whole of Horace Walpole's satire of the "Modern Taste" in gardening, c. 1780 here;  it's only a page long, with f's for s's adding to its delight. 

More enlightening is a description in "The complete fabulist" by G. Grey:  "In the quarters of a shrubbery, where deciduous plants and evergreens were intermingled with an air of negligence, it happened that a Rose grew not far from a Laurustinus." (also c. 1780; don't believe the Google books date as there is a known error on the book's frontispiece)

Or this of the shrubbery at the Leasowes, c. 1775:  "The scene now changes to an open lawn, where the path waves up to the house and shrubbery, laid out in taste, and agreeably bushed by clumps of evergreens and flowering shrubs; a small lawn in the midst, has a statue of Venus, well executed, and the pedestal gives us these beautiful lines..."

and a helpful summary is the description of the poet William Cowper's landscape at Weston (c. 1793):  "The shrubbery..was very generally admired, being a delightful little labyrinth, composed of flowering shrubs, and adorned with gravel walks, having convenient seats placed at appropriate distances."

So. Mixtures of evergreens and deciduous flowering shrubs arranged in a 'theatrical' style (by height, basically) adjacent to open lawn, winding walks, appropriately placed features to engage the eye, inspire the mind, and rest the body...that's basically it.  But the real reason I'm wading into the discussion of shrubberies--where believe me angels fear to tread--is to point out the usefulness of a new google tool for historians, garden or otherwise.

As if making the world's literature fully word-searchable for free wasn't enough, Google labs will now analyze the number of appearances of a word, or a combination of words, in literature over time, and call it an Ngram.  How much do we love Google?  According to today's New York Times, this opens up a a new field of linguistic and cultural investigation: culturomics.  Below is the appearance of the word 'shrubbery', which analysis I shall refer to forthwith as gardenhistoromics:  

 

You can see that the word 'shrubbery' is basically non-existent prior to 1750  (okay, there are five references listed 1700-1750 but I know all of them to be misdated; you do have to watch Google on the early dates),  with budding usage 1780ish (note the above references), and then really takes off in the early 1800s, which is basically when widely-published J.C. Loudon begins to not only codify the shrubbery as a garden feature, but to use the word as an alternate for 'shrub'.

That is the most obvious origin of the word, and so it is tempting to think it was just a simple linguistic analogue.  But here again the Ngram can help, because it can show two words at once.   I've confined the data in this set to between 1700-1800 so it isn't compressed by the huge spike in the nineteenth century.  It indicates a lack of correlation between the words, with 'shrub' (the plant, in red) clearly pre-dating 'shrubbery' (the garden feature, in blue), which in its time would have been New Word of the Year! like 'bromance' or 'webinar'.  Or 'culturomics'.  Note especially that 'shrub' usage actually drops BELOW 'shrubbery' usage between 1780-1790, the critical period for shrubberies and the approximate dates of the references I've quoted. Just 10 years.  What do we have here ladies and gentlemen?  A fad.

 
If you're saying things like, "but how is this affected by the increase in number of books published", then you have the mind of a scientist and you'll be happy to know that Google normalizes by the number of books published per year.  But also the data from the graph can be downloaded as csv files and corrected for any number of variables.  This is so cool.  

UPDATE:  Alert reader Adam has pointed out that this can also be affected by OCR errors, especially because of the whole 'is it an f or an s' issue in page scans of old literature.  I did make the assumption that such errors would affect 'fhrubs' and 'fhrubberies' equally; to do otherwise would require examining the individual files. 

Atomic Gardens

In March 1959 an unusual group of scientists, government officials, and lesser worthies assembled for a dinner party in the dining hall of the Royal Commonwealth Society, London. Unbeknownst to them, one of the courses was a strange strain of American peanuts: ‘NC 4x’, ‘North Carolina 4th generation X-rayed’ peanuts, produced from seeds that had been exposed to 18,500 roentgen units of x-rays in order to induce mutations. The irradiated peanuts were unusually large--big as almonds, according to those in attendance, outshowing the British groundnuts served alongside--and had reached the dining table through the generosity of their inventor Walter C. Gregory of North Carolina State College, who sent them as a gift to Mrs. Muriel Howorth, Eastbourne, enthusiast for all things atomic.

Disappointed with the reaction of her guests, who were less than appreciative of the great scientific achievement present at table, Muriel afterwards “began inspecting [the] uncooked nuts wondering what to do with them all…I had the idea to…pop an irradiated peanut in the sandy loam to see how this mutant grew.” The “Muriel Howorth” peanut (for she had already named it after herself) germinated in four days and was soon two feet high. She called the newspapers.

Almost immediately there were interviews and television appearances, AP reporters in the driveway and sightseers peering into the glasshouse to get a look at the plant. Its portrait was commissioned and put on display at the Walker Galleries in London. Garden writer Beverley Nichols came to call:

"Yesterday I held in my hands the most sensational plant in Britain.

It is the only one of its kind. Nothing of its sort has ever been seen in the country before.

To me it had all the romance of something from outer space.

It is the first ‘atomic’ peanut.

It is a lush, green plant and gives you a strange, almost alarming sense of thrusting power and lusty health.

It holds a glittering promise in its green leaves, the promise of victory over famine."

Muriel was a great former of societies (about 12, near as I can tell, over her lifetime..she was invariably President), and she immediately constituted the Atomic Gardening Society and published a manual, Atomic Gardening:

"I now felt that by some stroke of luck which is difficult to ascribe to chance, I had been given the opportunity—so much longed for—to bring science right into the homes of the people. I organized an ATOMIC GARDENING SOCIETY to co-ordinate and safeguard the interests of ATOMIC MUTATION EXPERIMENTERS who would work as one body to help scientists produce more food more quickly for more people, and progress horticultural mutation."

The Atomic Gardens grew out of post-WWII efforts to use the colossal energy of the atom for peaceful pursuits in medicine, biology, and agriculture.  'Gamma Gardens’ at national laboratories in the US as well as continental Europe and the USSR bombarded plants with radiation in hopes of producing mutated varieties of larger peanuts, disease resistant wheat, more sugary sugar maples, and African violets with three heads and a singular atomic entrepreneur named C.J. Speas irradiated seeds on his Tennessee farm and sold them to schoolchildren and housewives, among them Mrs. Muriel Howorth.

Atomic Gardens are my current research project, and will soon result in a publication as well as a presentation to take place on February 28, 2011 at the rescheduled (after last year’s volcanic ash debacle) study day on the Landscape of the 1950s. They are just recent enough that there are those still alive who may remember what was at least enough of a cultural moment to to form the plot device for Paul Zindel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.  

If you know anyone that participated, that was involved in laboratory research, or grew the seeds, or was a ‘Mutation Experimenter’, please get in touch…the history of one of gardening’s weirdest moments needs to be captured before it’s too late! (And if you want to hear more, sign up for the 1950s study day at the University of Bristol...)