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Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/03/2016
7:30 pm

Location
Kilmington Village Hall

Categories


Francis Burroughs’s father had been apprenticed as a garden boy at the age of 11, before WW1, when the duties of a gardener had changed little from Victorian days. He started work on a large Norfolk estate, walking two and a half miles at dawn for a 6.30 am start, returning at dusk. From his earnings of four shillings a week he was obliged to pay the head gardener for his apprenticeship. He started as a ‘pot-boy’. In the days of carpet bedding, when thousands of plants were grown and potted on, washing pots was a full-time employment. Gardening was a labour intensive industry. As an illustration, Francis explained the routine for mowing lawns which was done with horse-drawn machines and required a team of around 15 men to mow 15 acres of grass. There was a distinct hierarchy in the garden staff from Head Gardener down to pot-boys. Produce from the garden was expected to feed the family and guests all year round, including exotics such as glasshouse grapes. As regards flowers for the house, the head gardener was responsible not only for growing them but also for creating the elaborate table decorations expected in grand houses.

The only way to gain promotion in this structured hierarchy was to change jobs. Francis’s father moved to Sussex, to Gravetye Manor, under the direction of its owner, William Robinson. In both world wars he was employed in food production, and was exempt from military service. After WW1, he moved to Launceston in the West Country, as head gardener to a Colonel Dixon, himself a hands-on gardener who established the local horticultural society at which Francis’s father used to win the silver challenge cup. After a spell of running his own nursery in Yeovil, he moved to one that concentrated on growing tomatoes and salad crops. All through his talk, Francis circulated photographs of his father and gardens; of carpet bedding, dinner tables, glasshouses and rows of magnificent lettuces. He had shared with us a snapshot of a gardener’s life a hundred years ago and had brought it alive with his personal reminiscences.