{"id":2839,"date":"2019-09-03T08:17:07","date_gmt":"2019-09-03T16:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=2839"},"modified":"2019-09-03T08:17:07","modified_gmt":"2019-09-03T16:17:07","slug":"a-gardener-by-any-other-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/a-gardener-by-any-other-name\/","title":{"rendered":"A Gardener By Any Other Name"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Alicia<\/a>Sometimes I think it would be useful to have an alias, or maybe even several.\u00a0 A false name allows you to try on other lives and opinions without scaring the people who know you best.\u00a0 The practice has certainly become increasingly popular.\u00a0 People on social media do it all the time.<\/p>\n

Alicia Amherst, who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had several.\u00a0 Born into the English upper class in 1865, she was a gardener, garden designer, writer, historian, botanical illustrator and plant collector.\u00a0 Not as well known now as contemporaries like Gertrude Jekyll, she was extremely popular in her own time.\u00a0 One of the problems for historians is her aliases or noms de plume.\u00a0 Over the course of her lifetime, she published under four different names.<\/p>\n

Probably her greatest success was The History of Gardening in England<\/em>, published in 1895 under the name Alicia M.T. Amherst.\u00a0 This was a compact, but thorough look at the long history of horticulture in her native country.\u00a0 The book was an immediate hit, going into a second printing only one month after it was issued.\u00a0 It was also well reviewed.\u00a0\u00a0 In fact, one 1896 review, in the journal Quarterly Review<\/em>, praised the author in a narrative so verbose that it threatened to become book-length all by itself.<\/p>\n

The success of The History of Gardening in England <\/em>started Amherst on her garden writing career and clearly kept her busy with scholarly research and writing.\u00a0 Somewhat unusually for her time, she did not marry until 1898, when she was 33.\u00a0 Her marriage to Evelyn Cecil gave her another name under which to write, Mrs. Evelyn Cecil.\u00a0 This was a bit old-fashioned, because by Amherst\u2019s time many women writers and artists identified themselves by first and last names, rather than as \u201cMrs. John Doe\u201d.\u00a0 Still, as late as 1921, a revolutionary pink-cupped daffodil was christened \u2018Mrs. R.O. Backhouse\u2019.\u00a0 To this day it takes a bit of research to find the first and middle names of its namesake, a pioneering daffodil breeder.<\/p>\n

Marriage and motherhood did not dampen Amherst\u2019s output.\u00a0 As Mrs. Evelyn Cecil, she branched out into children\u2019s gardening books, including Children and Gardens.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>When not researching and writing books and articles, Alicia Amherst cultivated her own garden, choosing unusual species.\u00a0 This interest in plants began in childhood when her mother gave her a forty-foot garden bed to tend.\u00a0 Clearly that gift made a lasting impression.\u00a0 Later on she undertook botanizing expeditions for the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, traveling to southern Africa, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.\u00a0 These travels led to more books, including Wildflowers of the Great Dominions of the British Empire.\u00a0 <\/em>Published in 1935, the author\u2019s name is listed as Lady Rockley.\u00a0 The change happened in 1934 when Amherst\u2019s husband was elevated to the English peerage and became Baron Rockley of Lytchett.\u00a0 Her fourth name change occurred when Baron Rockley died, and she wrote under the name, Dowager Baroness Rockley.\u00a0 She held on to that name and published under it until her death in 1941.<\/p>\n

Like many well-born women of her time, Amherst began sketching early on.\u00a0 By the time she was an adult, she was quite accomplished, creating botanical drawings as well as the illustrations for a book by her politician husband.<\/p>\n

Her life was a busy one.\u00a0 In addition to all her other activities, she found time to advocate for the admission of women to horticultural training schools.\u00a0 When the Chelsea Physic Garden, a historic London botanical institution dating back to the seventeenth century, was in danger of closing, she worked to save it and served on the committee that oversaw it.\u00a0 Her various names live on at Chelsea, which houses her archives.<\/p>\n

She was also honored in her lifetime, receiving an Order of the British Empire or OBE from King George V in 1918.\u00a0 She was the first woman to become a member of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners, an organization that began as a trade guild in 1345, gained a royal charter in 1605, and survives to this day, describing itself as a group of \u201c\u2026professionals and amateurs who are actively involved in the craft. \u00a0All are united by a common bond of horticulture and gardens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although it was slow in coming, Alicia Amherst was also the subject of a scholarly biography, The Well-Connected Gardener: A Biography of Alicia Amherst, Founder of Garden History\u201d, <\/em>published in 2003 by English author Sue Minter.<\/p>\n

But getting back to the multiple name issue–Alicia Amherst\u2019s birth name lives on, not only in her early publications, but in a graceful plant, Hebe \u2018Alicia Amherst\u2019.\u00a0 Hebe is a genus of evergreen shrubs, native to New Zealand, one of the places where Amherst botanized.\u00a0 It is not cold hardy, but boasts ovate green leaves and dark purple flowerheads that bloom in summer.\u00a0 It is a fitting perennial tribute to a trailblazing horticulturist.\"Alicia<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes I think it would be useful to have an alias, or maybe even several.\u00a0 A false name allows you to try on other lives and opinions without scaring the people who know you best.\u00a0 The practice has certainly become increasingly popular.\u00a0 People on social media do it all the time. Alicia Amherst, who lived … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[2162,2165,238,1766,2166,2164,2163,1896],"class_list":["post-2839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-alicia-amherst","tag-dowager-lady-rockley","tag-garden-history","tag-garden-writers","tag-hebe-alicia-amherst","tag-lady-rockley","tag-mrs-evelyn-cecil","tag-women-gardeners"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2839"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2842,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2839\/revisions\/2842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}