17th Century Garden Design for Women

by Deborah Swift

William Lawson is credited with making gardening popular for women, with his book, A New Orchard and Garden which was printed together with the first horticultural book written solely for women, The Country Housewife's Garden. Beautifully illustrated with charming woodcuts, it tells the 17th century woman everything she needs to know to have a productive and visually attractive garden.

The concept of a "pretty" garden would have been an anathema to most women of the 17th century, as gardens were primarily about producing food and herbs, unless you were very wealthy, in which case the gardening was left to your servants. The 17-century  author of The English Housewife, Gervase Markham, claimed the “complete woman” had

“skill in physic, surgery, cookery, extraction of oils, banqueting stuff, ordering of great feasts, preserving of all sorts of wines…distillations, perfumes, ordering of wool, hemp and flax: making cloth and dying; the knowledge of dairies: office of malting; of oats…of brewing, baking, and all other things belonging to a household.” 

Guess that did not leave much time for planting pretty flowers!

Because kitchen gardens were about supplying the table, and as much ground as possible was covered with edible plants, every garden was different, planted according to the whims of the women of the household. William Lawson's book for the country housewife was designed to be read in conjunction with his New Orchard and Garden, thus giving women access to the idea of garden design, in print, for the very first time.

William Lawson lived from 1553 to1635 and was the vicar of Ormesby, a country parish in Yorkshire. No doubt his gardening passion led him to be so long-lived for an age where most people did not reach fifty. Gardening was a national passion in the 16th and 17th centuries, as more species came from abroad, and an interest in subjects concentrating on the useful qualities and medical virtues of plants became popular.

But the war against garden pests was just as hard then as now - he calls them  the 'whole Army of mischiefs' and says that 'Good things have most enemies' . The enemies in his Yorkshire Garden were apparently deer and moles.

Lawson's garden plan included long walkways, a maze, and even a bowling alley.The illustration below depicts the overall plan.

Its rectangular shape is split into six  sections  over three  terraces, with flights of stairs and paths to go from one to the other. Its design demonstrates the vogue in the 16th and 17th century for symmetry and patterns. In the top left square he planned to have topiary, signified by the man with the sword and a horse. A river runs at the top and bottom of the garden where he says 'you might sit in your mount and angle a peckled trout, sleighty eel or some other daintie fish'.



In The Lady's Slipper, Alice Ibbetson is an obsessive gardener - a pioneer if you like, testing out the knowledge handed down from her father who was a plantsman much like William Lawson. She finds relaxation in communing with nature. Her maid, Ella, featured in The Gilded Lily, would try to avoid garden work if at all possible. Her sights are set on becoming a fine lady, just like Alice Ibbetson, and leaving manual labour behind for good.

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Why I write historical fiction - Deborah Swift

A few years ago I would have been surprised to find I had produced a historical novel. So why write one?
Before I came to write The Lady's Slipper, most of my writing was contemporary. I read a lot of contemporary fiction, and was a member of a book group that read mostly literary fiction.So what won me over to writing historicals?

The answer is that it wasn't a case of me deciding on a period and then setting the novel there, it was more that my characters demanded certain conditions to flourish and tell their story. I started with a character who wanted to paint an orchid - I had seen the rare lady's-slipper orchid myself and wanted to write (initially) a poem about it. This desire was subverted into my character's desire to capture it in paint. From then on the character grew and developed. I thought for the flower to have impact I needed a time when ideas about botany and images of flowers were new and fresh. Perhaps a time before mass printing, a time when herbs and flowers were used for healing. This led me to the 17th century when herbalists such as Nicolas Culpeper were just making their mark on history and the science of botany was in its infancy.

The idea of the medicinal use of the lady's-slipper then sparked the character of Margaret the herbalist, whose views on "the web of the world" were a very different religion from the conformist view of the time, and would probably be pigeon-holed as 'pagan' today. I have always been interested in the different ways that faiths have shaped the world and this tied in nicely with the burgeoning Quaker movement, viewed in the 17th century as radical and dangerous. I couldn't resist having a Quaker character, so Richard Wheeler  - the soldier turned quaker - was born. In addition, the Quaker movement started close to my home, and visits to the still surviving 17th century historical sites fascinated me.

My creative writing class were always telling me that conflict drives a novel so I was also keen to exploit enmity between the Quakers and the ruling class, and to create an atmosphere of unease. The English Civil War where the King had been beheaded by his own people supplied the background disturbance I needed.So my first book's period grew from the desire to find a setting for my characters and not the other way round. The setting has a function to allow me to explore certain ideas and let them flourish to the maximum effect.

The book I am just finishing now and which is about to land on my agents and editors desk - tomorrow if I can get it done, is set in a different period, which has difficulties in that it involved a whole new area of research in a whole new country. As with the first two I was looking for a time and place where my characters and ideas would collide in the most satisfying way and that led me to turn of the 17th century in Seville, with its clash of Islamic and Iberian cultures, the threat of the Inquisition, and its reputation for swordsmanship and bravado.So I'm afraid my characters had to be taken away from their usual English comfort, the drizzle and the cold, and into the heat, dust and passion of Spain.

17th century Seville

My second book, The Gilded Lily (out later in the year) is set in England through necessity as it features Ella, one of the characters from The Lady's Slipper. It is a very different book though as it is set in Restoration London, a choice made so that I could exploit the desire for wealth and luxury which is a part of Ella's character. Ella is considered beautiful and her sister Sadie, plain, so I needed an environment where the attitudes to beauty would be able to feature heavily in the plot. How would the two girls fortunes differ because of their difference in appearance? The period of the Restoration is perfect because after the monarchy returned everyone was obsessed with fashion and glamour, and the theatricality and artificiality of this led me to be able to explore the idea of storytelling, how the girls re-invented themselves, and how we all shape our own stories.

In all my books I start with the characters and then find the way to give them maximum rein through the setting. I used to be a scenographer so I draw on my experience of how a theatre setting can interact with the action in my writing. I choose history because I can examine contemporary ideas as if in a mirror. I am sure many other writers do the same, and would be really interested to hear what the process is like for them. I find I enjoy the researching part of writing enormously, and the wonderful excuse it gives me to hang around museums, historic houses, art galleries and libraries. And I have had to catch up quickly with my reading of historicals. I've discovered some fantastic writers in the  genre, who have given me further insights into our rich heritage, and  so I cannot imagine that I will run out of ideas from the wealth of our history, and I guess that will keep me writing historical fiction for a while yet!

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