“Gardens have provided solace, opportunity and inspiration for LGBTQ+ people”

To coincide with LGBTQ+ History Month, Dr Suzanne Moss looks at the lives of four pioneering queer gardeners whose inspiring work, revolutionary ideas and defiant attitudes are integral to the history of horticulture

The more we learn, the more we realise we don’t understand. For me, this statement is never more true than in garden history. If we study a little, we know the standard facts about famous faces. Capability Brown removed the plants, Humphry Repton put some back in, William Robinson made everything wild and David Douglas died in a bull pit searching for plants in Hawaii.

When I delved deeper I realised the limits of this view. Plants and gardens unite us. A passion for growing transcends class, colour, nationality, sex, wealth, sexuality and gender identity, and the true cast of historical horticulturists is fantastically diverse. Our challenge, as curious gardeners, is to interrogate the historical record to reveal the hidden histories that lie within. Here we’ll find that LGBTQ+ people are prominent in this story, where gardens have often provided solace, opportunity and inspiration.

“Perhaps it’s one of the great untold stories of horticulture, that gardens and plants have given focus and scope for the imagination of LGBTQ+ people through the ages,” says Wesley Kerr, broadcaster, historian and RHS Council member. “Their gardens have endured and are some of the most influential worldwide. That’s no accident.” Manoj Malde, RHS Ambassador and garden designer, concurs: “Beautiful art often stems from personal experiences in life, both good and bad. Creative fields are often a safe haven to express those life experiences.” But queer histories can be difficult to tell. Homosexuality among men was punishable by death until 1861. Homosexuality among women wasn’t a capital offence in Britain, but only because it was assumed that intimate relationships between women were not technically possible. This, together with the socially acceptable ‘romantic friendships’ between women made queer relationships accessible, so long as they were kept quiet in polite society. It also means that there’s a lack of evidence.

It’s one thing to commit to studying queer histories, and another to enact it. Some historical gardeners unapologetically lived as themselves. In addition to this, a perceived fear of causing offence has largely led to the omission of queer histories, but with between 3.2 and 7 per cent of the England and Wales population identifying as LGBTQ+, it’s high time we explore these stories. The further back we venture into history, the thinner the evidence becomes – but it’s there, and the stories are variously inspiring, uplifting but also heartbreaking. Here are four of them.

The Duchess of Portland (1715–1785) and Mary Delany (1700–1788)

In 1717, 17-year-old Mary Delany was married to Alexander Pendarves, a member of parliament who was 40 years older than her, and an alcoholic. After he died, leaving her nothing, she married clergyman Dr Patrick Delany in a relationship “based on companionship, not passion”, which allowed her to pursue her ambitions in art and gardening. And perhaps also in women.

Mary Delany was one of the 18th century’s fiercest critics of marriage and a stalwart socialite, artist and woman of letters. Irish artist Letitia Bushe introduced her to Lady Anne Bligh as somebody who, “would not be shocked to be introduced to a woman whose relationship with another woman might be seen by some as contravening ‘decorums’”, which is about as overt as it gets in 18th-century correspondence.

When Patrick died in 1768, Mary moved in with her friend and fellow widow Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland. The Duchess was a polymath whose collection of natural history was out-classed only by the British Museum.

Her interest in science included her expansive garden, glasshouse and pressed plant collection at her house in Bullstrode, Buckinghamshire. For the next 20 years the two women collected, struck out on botanising and shell-collecting trips, and recorded new plant species.

Eminent botanical artist Georg Ehret spent two years painting plants at the Duchess’ house at Whitehall, Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander was a regular visitor and Joseph Banks, founder of the Horticultural Society of London (later, the RHS), was a personal friend.

As the Duchess grew plants, Mary recorded them. Never content to be conventional, she did so by creating around 1,000 papercut images that captured the intricacy and vibrancy of the flora of Bullstrode from 1771.

Mary also built a grotto of shells – the Duchess’ favourite item to collect – and wrote: “To her I owe the spirit of pursuing it [her art] with diligence and pleasure. To her I owe more than I dare express, but my heart will ever feel with the utmost gratitude, the tenderest affection, the honour and delight I have enjoy’d in her most generous, steady, and delicate friendship, for above forty years.”

These two women lived in the cosmopolitan world of the 18th-century upper class, where close female friendships existed, as historian Lisa Moore puts it, on a “continuum from sexual intimacy to chaste mutual devotion”.

We will never know quite where Mary and the Duchess sat within this continuum, but we do know that together they formed a formidable team, which changed not only how the scientific community regarded women, but also the botanical landscape of the future.

Ellen Willmott (1858–1934)

In 1897 the RHS established the Victoria Medal of Honour award to recognise eminent horticulturists. Of the 60 individuals celebrated, only two were women. One was planting-artist Gertrude Jekyll and the other was Ellen Willmott, owner of the impressive gardens at Warley Place in Essex.

However, Ellen didn’t turn up to collect her prize. She has a historical reputation for being spiky, brash and difficult. Apparently Eryngium giganteum (Miss Wilmott’s ghost) is so named because she carried seeds to scatter in gardens she felt lacking. She also carried a knuckle duster and took a revolver to RHS committee meetings. So perhaps it wasn’t a surprise that she didn’t turn up – or was it?

A fabulous archive of Miss Willmott’s life surfaced in the past decade, and has been documented by Sandra Lawrence in her 2022 book Miss Willmott’s Ghosts. Correspondence reveals a passionate affair between Ellen Willmott and Miss Georgiana ‘Gian’ Tufnell, lady-in-waiting to Princess Mary Adelaide.

Gian and Ellen met in 1894 and became very close, very quickly. “I love you so and you must know it in the same way that I know you love me. No time to tell you more, my dear heart, except that I want you very badly. I feel so lost without you,” Gian wrote on one of the occasions when they were parted. We have no idea what Ellen might have written back because Gian had all her letters burned.

When Princess Mary’s health deteriorated, the independently penniless Gian was in a tight spot and announced a surprise engagement to Lord George Mount Stephen. The wedding was arranged for 27 October 1897, the day after Miss Willmott was due to receive her medal of honour. Ellen fled to her property in France and missed both. Sandra Lawrence interprets this absence as her taking time to deal with her heartbreak, but because the relationship was secret, Ellen’s reputation for being rude and dismissive grew.

But that reputation wasn’t always misplaced. Ellen Willmott was a tricky character, but she lived at a time when women were alarming the patriarchy by doing unacceptable things such as having jobs and opinions. This sort of thing could be damaging to a lady’s reputation, but Ellen didn’t care. She picked herself up from heartbreak and set about making herself into one of the era’s most eminent horticulturists.

She created a spectacular garden at Warley Place, Essex, financed expeditions, bred prizewinning cultivars, judged at RHS Chelsea Flower Show, was one of the first female Fellows of the Linnean Society, sat on an advisory committee for Hampton Court Palace Gardens and corresponded with botanical institutions across the world. Ellen was instrumental in the establishment of RHS Garden Wisley as an RHS garden and became one of its first trustees. Her story is one of personal heartbreak and professional inspiration.

Secret meanings of flowers

Plants have been imbued with symbolism all through history and LGBTQ interpretations are no exception

Violets

Since the 6th century BC, violets have been an adopted symbol of love between women, sometimes referred to as ‘the lesbian flower’. Greek poet Sappho often referred to women wearing garlands of violets, and the association stuck. The symbol rose to popular consciousness when Édouard Bourdet’s play The Captive debuted on Broadway in 1926. An exchange of a bouquet of violets between two lesbian characters caused uproar and calls for censorship and the play closed. In the aftermath, supporters took to pinning violets to their lapels.

Carnations

In 1892 Oscar Wilde instructed several of his friends to wear green carnations to the opening night of Lady Windermere’s Fan. The flower became a symbol of gay love – a covert way of informing others in the know that you were a man who liked other men. It’s been suggested that the unusual green carnation was Wilde’s reference to how others regarded gay love as unnatural.

Pansies

Pansies are perhaps the plants most readily associated with queerness. The ‘pansy craze’ saw extravagant drag balls in the US and queer representation in film in Hollywood, but these were shut down by the police and censorship respectively. While it’s one of the most well-known derogatory terms for gay men, many queer people have reclaimed the term and are determined to use it for good. The Pansy Project, for example, run by artist Paul Harfleet, is using horticulture to highlight the struggles of the LGBTQ community by planting pansies at sites of homophobic abuse.

Others

The association isn’t just limited to flowers. An antiquated term for gay men is ‘evening botanists’, referring to a perceived penchant for frequenting parks at night. Another is ‘horticultural lad’, emerging at the same time as pansy, daisy and buttercup in the 1900s. The horticultural world’s associations with queerness date back more than 2,500 years.

Sir Cedric Morris (1889–1982)

In Suffolk, a wealth of sophisticated irises graced the beds of Benton End, the garden that painter Cedric Morris cultivated from the 1940s with his partner Arthur Lett-Haines, a painter and sculptor. Benton End was a liberal art school, which supported the careers of prominent artists including Maggi Hambling and Lucian Freud.
Morris had struggled to find his place in life, failing entrance exams for the army before trying his hand at ranching in Canada, singing at the Royal College of Music and training war horses during World War I. He finally took up the family business of art after the war, and at the same time he met Arthur.

Their relationship was reportedly tempestuous, but devoted. The two had various affairs and frequent rows, during which they’d communicate via notes left in the pocket of an old coat hanging by the kitchen door. Nevertheless, the relationship endured for 60 years and Benton End became a haven for queer artists who could pay a small fee, receive bed and board and learn in the studio from Cedric Morris himself.

Cedric and Arthur opened their garden to visitors and showed some of the 90 irises that Cedric had bred and named after his friends, lovers, cats and beloved pet macaw. Eminent plantswoman Beth Chatto named Cedric as one of the two people who had influenced her the most (the other was her husband) and she credited Benton End with opening her eyes to what a garden could be.

Derek Jarman (1942–1994)

Forty years later, in 1987, Derek Jarman, filmmaker and artist, spotted a former fisherman’s cottage on the shingle shore at Dungeness, Kent. He purchased it, painted the exterior walls black and the windows yellow and set about creating a postmodern garden like no other.

Derek was one of the most prominent artists, directors and gay rights activists of his generation, and was diagnosed with HIV in 1986. He viewed the garden at Prospect Cottage as an escape, but cultivated with a pervading uncertainty of the time he would be able to spend there. “Gardening on borrowed time” are the words scribbled next to a planting plan in one of his sketchbooks.

Nevertheless, from 1987 until his death in 1994 from an AIDS-related illness, Derek created a spectacular landscape where art and horticulture intersect. He allowed plants to seed where they wished and encouraged their proliferation among the driftwood and found objects.

In June 1990 Beth Chatto was enjoying a day out at the beach at Dungeness with Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter Gardens, East Sussex, when they stumbled upon Prospect Cottage and were lured into the landscape by “as fine a plant of Santolina as you’d never expect to see in such an arid place”. Derek was no stranger to Beth and was delighted to receive the expert plantspeople. He later sent a plant list to her and she wrote to him, “we all paint very different canvases, but I had been encouraged by that brief glimpse of his palette, to make a gravel garden”.

The inhospitable shingle desert of Dungeness became a vibrant oasis under Derek Jarman’s curation. It’s poignantly representative of his identity as a gay man living with HIV during a time when the stigma around the disease was prevalent. Christopher Woodward, Director of the Garden Museum describes it as, perhaps, “a place from which he could derive the energy to take on an unjust world”.

Derek Jarman’s garden was a defiant statement of resilience in the face of adversity and leaves an enduring legacy, bridging the spheres of art, activism and horticulture.

A note about the word ‘queer’

‘Queer’ is used as an umbrella term because identities such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender did not exist for much of the time period discussed, and the individuals referred to might not have identified themselves in this way. Some LGBTQ people would have found a community and been able to construct a sense of their own identity in relation to others. Many would only have known that they felt different from their peers. While for most this would have been isolating and confusing, it gave others the chance to live as they wished in plain sight.

As we venture further back in time, we can only infer the possibility alongside other potential realities. There are plenty of reasons other than queerness that people in the 18th and 19th centuries created close interpersonal bonds.

Equally, meaningful relationships might, or might not, have included a sexual element. As long as we employ historical rigour and objectivity, our analysis will always be respectful. The term ‘queer’, in its reclaimed sense, is a generally accepted modern academic catch-all for a broad spectrum of relationships in the past.

Once we start to look, queer horticulturists are everywhere. We haven’t touched on Vita Sackville-West of Sissinghurst, or florist Constance Spry who was a frequent visitor to Benton End. Or landscape architect William Kent, horticulturists Reginald Farrer and Beatrix Havergal, National Trust founder Octavia Hill and gardener Christopher Lloyd, among others.

Away from the prying eyes of society, a couple might find privacy and comfort, as Mary Delany and the Duchess of Portland did, or create a safe community such as the art school at Benton End. The business of gardening is also a creative one, and an air of determination is common. Ellen Willmott gardened, travelled unescorted, smoked, took exercise and was unmarried. Eyebrows were raised and pens put to paper. Defiance of gender norms takes courage and the remarkable people who did that are conspicuous in historical records.

Emily Hazel, Director of Horticulture at Birmingham Botanical Gardens, says, “The job can help women to express their gender differently and avoid gender ideals”. Perhaps the physical nature of gardening allowed queer horticulturists to understand themselves in a helpful way that deviated from societal gender norms.

Happily, the LGBTQ+ community is strong in the contemporary gardening sector. Michael Perry, owner of Mr Plant Geek, says that “as a young man coming to terms with my sexuality, I appreciated the comfort that plants brought. Otherwise I would have felt very alone.” He’s glad that LGBTQ+ people now have better networks
and support. Many organisations have excellent support structures, such as Rainbow Roots, the RHS’ LGBTQ+ network, which includes both LGBTQ+ people and allies. But there is still work to do. Garden designer Darran Jaques has struggled to find his own queer horticultural heroes because they’re rarely represented.

This page is an adaptation of an article published in the February 2024 edition of The Garden magazine, free to RHS members every month when you join the RHS.

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“Gardens have provided solace, opportunity and inspiration for LGBTQ+ people”

Dr Suzanne Moss, RHS Director of Learning and Engagement

In an historic first for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Manoj Malde, who designed the vibrant and colourful RHS and Eastern Eye Garden of Unity, married his partner Clive Gillmor, on the garden on Monday 22nd May 2023

The Duchess of Portland (1715–1785) and Mary Delany (1700–1788)

A botanical painting of a rose by Georg Ehret, who spent two years painting plants grown by the Duchess of Portland at her house in Whitehall

Ellen Willmott (1858–1934)

Portrait of Ellen Willmott

Photograph of The Orchard Garden in June from Ellen Willmott's Warley garden in spring and summer 2nd edition