Jane Loudon

JANE LOUDON

            I first “met” Jane C. Webb Loudon when I developed an interest in botanical art some time ago.  A local dealer offered some original prints of Mrs. Loudon’s botanical illustrations and I fell in love with them.  Those prints started me off on a small-time collecting hobby and now, even when the wind is cold and the earth is bare, I have blooming flowers on the walls.
            Jane Loudon is a footnote in literary and horticultural history now, which is a shame, because she deserves better.  She was born into a wealthy English family in 1807, at the end of the reign of King George III.  Her life, which lasted only until 1858, still extended through the Regency period and well into the Victorian era.  One of the most interesting things about Jane Loudon is that she became a working woman by necessity at the age of seventeen.  Her career was enhanced by her marriage to J.C. Loudon, continued after the birth of their daughter, Agnes, and flourished until her death. 

            In fact, Mrs. Loudon’s life reads almost like a Victorian novel.  Her wealthy father provided her with a good education, but eventually ran into what were quaintly called “financial difficulties.”  When he died, his only daughter realized she had to support herself.  She did that by publishing The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, a work of science fiction.  While not as popular as her contemporary, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Mummy received good reviews and earned a place in literary history as one of several pioneering science fiction works authored by women.

            Because The Mummy made reference to the improved farming implements of the twenty-second century, it was reviewed in The Gardener’s Magazine, a popular periodical edited by John Claudius Loudon.  The editor then arranged an introduction to the author, whom Loudon assumed was male.  When J.C. Loudon met Jane Webb, he apparently overcame his surprise at her gender and eventually fell in love with her.  The couple married in 1830.
            The burgeoning middle class of the Loudons’ time had an appetite for gardening and J.C. Loudon fed it through numerous books and magazines.  He was well-established and very popular by the time he married Jane, who was twenty-four years younger.  Though she knew little of gardening when she met Loudon, she learned quickly and became proficient, helping Loudon in the garden as well as with his large and encyclopedic literary endeavors.  Annoyed at the complexities of the garden manuals of her time, she wrote and illustrated Instructions in Gardening for Ladies, a practical guide to garden basics.  Its direct, anecdotal style caught on.  The book sold extremely well and was reprinted many times.  It led to a succession of other gardening books, all drawn from her own experience and enlivened by her watercolor illustrations.
            J.C. Loudon was never robust and died when his wife was only thirty-six, leaving her with a young daughter, Agnes, to support.  Mining the mother lode of her own life, Jane Loudon wrote prolifically, with an output that included memoirs and works of fiction in addition to horticultural writing.  She edited magazines as well.  Allegedly, her daughter’s expensive tastes kept her working hard into middle age.  Though she found fame relatively early, she never achieved real fortune and most accounts suggest that she was relatively poor at the time of her death at the age of fifty-one.
            The Victorian era was full of ladies who learned watercolor painting as part of a sketchy, but “suitable” education.  Some, like Jane Loudon, became very accomplished.  I am drawn to the Loudon prints because the flowers and plants are delicate and graceful.  The anatomical details are all there, but the pictures are inspiring rather than purely didactic.  In well-preserved prints, the colors of parrot tulips, crocuses and other flowers are bright and clear.  If her carefully written gardening instructions didn’t make her readers long to grow flowers, her illustrations surely must have done so.  They do it for me.
            Thanks to the Internet, at least some of Jane Loudon’s books live on, and a few are available for free.  You can also find ads for both authentic and reproduction prints of her illustrations.  A few restorative minutes with her renderings of daffodils and other spring flowers is enough to tide me over until the real things begin appearing in a month or so.