Confessions of a Lady Gardener
Being flashed at in a park is not so unusual. I was told, “if you’re desperate, you can go behind the shed”. It quickly became apparent that there were jobs deemed suitable for boys and not for girls.
By Featured Writer, J E Rudd.
It is surprising that there aren’t as many women in senior positions in horticulture as you might think. There are a lot of famous female gardeners, such as Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West. Gardening is not the most popular choice for girls leaving school, although the profession has welcomed them for the most part. In fact, Swanley Horticultural College in Kent, the first of its kind, had more female students than male by the mid 1890’s. Two of these students became the first female gardeners at Kew Gardens, famously photographed in the 1920’s, had to wear plus fours and caps to hide their femininity. The Greater London Council, with whom I did my own apprenticeship, first employed women in WWII when men were in short supply and proclaimed themselves an equal opportunities employer. In my group of 7 trainees back in 1980, there were two girls. Ten years later, entering the Kew Diploma, the girls outnumbered the boys 10:7, but I’m not sure how many stayed in horticulture or achieved seniority.
Starting as an apprentice and being at work at 7.30a.m., doing a physical job for 8 hours a day was a huge change from being at school – call it “Horticulture Shock” if you will. I was allocated to work in my local park, with a male apprentice half my size and mouthy. The park’s staff were nearly all grumpy old men (to me, they seemed ancient) except for The Propagator, who rarely emerged from her greenhouses apart from bedding out time. It quickly became apparent that there were jobs deemed suitable for boys and not for girls. When my 6-month report was filled out, the park manager ticked ‘average’ for mowing “because it’s not a girl’s job”. It was also evident that to get as good a grade as my feeble counterpart, I had to work harder. Expressions like “this’ll sort the men from the girls” were not uncommon, but half the time, the men would sit and watch. During training, the other female trainee and I (stationed at a different park) were always allocated together to do girly jobs, like pricking out or dead-heading, while the boys did something else, like pruning or spiking. Not only were the boys’ jobs more interesting, but there was an automatic assumption that we would have things in common just because we were both girls. Luckily, we did and are still friends 40 years on, but it might not have been so.
There’s an inherent contradiction, as there are apparently two sorts of lady gardeners. If as a female, you want to succeed in a predominantly male profession, you have to be able to do physically demanding, heavy work, enduring all sorts of weather conditions. You have to be one of the lads, putting up with sexist banter at tea breaks and farting. If you succeed too well at this, you will be labelled a ‘dyke’, and it is possibly true that an above-average number of senior female horticulturists may be gay, but not necessarily those who play the boys' games. I’m convinced I once got a job in a very PC local authority because I wore dungarees to the interview and they made assumptions to help them fulfil their equal opportunities quota. It helps if you are unattractive as well, because you couldn’t get a job as a private secretary or an air hostess or a beautician (key aspirations for my generation) if you were ugly. I chose fat, but I also got strong, physically and mentally, although the latter is sometimes debatable. Most women in horticulture do not stay to reach the top of the tree in arboriculture or be ahead in the field of groundsmanship, although many enter these aspects of the profession.
The other variety of lady gardener is the genteel sort, doing jobs like dead-heading the roses so that she won’t get her straw bonnet knocked off accidentally. Women are deemed to have more nimble fingers and be better at delicate work, so we get allocated greenhouse work or hand weeding of alpine beds. Often, women with an interest in horticulture get sidelined into floristry. The same attitude assumes that men who take up any of these kinds of work must be gay. It’s never mentioned that mechanics need dexterity because this is verboten! I’m not sure if the story I was told is true about a girl who wanted to be a brickie, but her hands were too small to pick up a brick. Breaking the glass ceiling in greenhouse work is not easy, and most specialists in bonsai or ikebana are not well known, male or female, so those who succeed in botanic gardens and the like end up in largely administrative roles and stop getting their hands dirty.
Another recourse is teaching, the preserve of those who can’t, or academia, including botanical illustration and taxonomy. None of these are high-profile professions, or grounded in the soil. The famous Victorian and Edwardian gardeners that we revere so much, the Vita’s, Gertrudes and Eileen’s, mostly had the big advantage of being rich, and probably most never lifted a spade. We can add Lady Salisbury and the Countess of Alnwick to that list, although their impact is more often not gardening per se, but more garden design. This is an area where women are allowed to succeed and can even be household names. It does, if done successfully, need to have an inherent understanding of how a garden functions and the conditions in which plants thrive, but many designers are successful without having this knowledge. One of the most prestigious gardens I worked in, designed by a female landscape architect, had a sunken lawn that needed mowing three times a week with a heavy cylinder mower and could only be accessed by stairs. It was surrounded by flower beds which rarely caught the sun because the highest walls were on the south side. The designer created a constant challenge for the gardeners, not actually having done it herself, but maybe skipped that part of the process.
Of late, women have also become well known as gardeners through the medium of television. There have been women gardeners on GQT forever, of course, properly trained horticulturists, but TV is a different medium, and appearance counts for a lot more than it does on the radio. Qualifications mean a lot less than an ‘engaging personality’ or a willingness to allow cleavage shots while inevitably bending over to do some planting. Besides, these programmes have a host of background researchers who really know how to do the job, so the presenter doesn’t have to be so knowledgeable. This is not to say that all women gardeners on the telly are unqualified, but the ones who become household names are perhaps better known for other points. There was a period in the noughties when if you told someone you were a gardener and you were female, you would be subject to ‘The Dimmock Effect’; getting the comment, “oh, you’re a Charlie, are you?” often followed by the comment “show us your tits” or similar. Although some people might view it as good that female gardeners gained national recognition, it reduced us all to the lowest common denominator and set back women gardeners 20 years. It’s hard to be valued for your professional achievements when people just want to see your bosom.
Clothing is another area where women gardeners are at a disadvantage. You can’t buy a left-handed chainsaw, and getting comfortable, serviceable work gear is almost as hard. Most workwear is designed for men, so hips on trousers are the wrong shape, or else if it’s a female garment, it won’t be as hardwearing. Take a look at any garden centre that sells women’s and men’s gloves if you don’t believe me. More than once, I had the difficult task of sourcing a pair of size 3 steel-toe cap boots for a trainee, which looked like a pair of doll’s shoes. A female colleague, an Irish lass in her mid-twenties, came to work in a mini-skirt once, insisting it was no different to wearing shorts. She had a huge audience every time she bent over, but maybe that was what she wanted. Men do not get cat calls or wolf whistles every time they are working, but it used to be normal for women. Worse things happen than that, too; being flashed at in a park is not so unusual, and even when a friend had a bloke wanking on a bench where she worked, the (male) bosses didn’t think it was sufficient cause to either get her to work elsewhere or send a colleague to work with her.
Bodily functions are not catered for in horticulture either. In the bigger parks, there were usually staff and public toilets, but when I worked for one local authority, I had a five minute walk to the Town Hall if I needed the loo. In later years, I did a chainsaw course in a woodland and was told, “toilet facilities are what they are.” I’m not averse to peeing behind a tree when the need arises, but it’s not much fun if you have to change your tampon or sanitary towel. When I had extended time off in my twenties because of severe irregular periods (later diagnosed as polycystic ovarian syndrome), the Park Manager, in his early 60’s and never married, advised me that “having a baby would sort it out”. It was just not acceptable to take time off for menopausal symptoms, no matter how little sleep you had got because of hot flushes. I took a day off at an agricultural college where I worked for this reason, and the HR lady told me, “No one has ever had time off for that before.” This is an institute where 70% of the staff and even the Principal were female.
More recently, on my first day at a new job I when I asked where the loo was, I was told “I’ll show you later; if you’re desperate, you can go behind the shed”. Incidentally, the site has a ladies' loo halfway round the golf course: three wooden panels encircling a gravel soakaway with a bin for tissues. I’d been working there for 18 months before I found this out, even though I had to work on the course every 3 weeks and empty the bins. Male colleagues are blissfully unaware that older women need to pee more often, and it is not pleasant to have to bare your backside and squat in sometimes freezing conditions.
Generally, in the last 40 years or so, things are better for women in most careers than they were. There are employment laws to ensure women get treated equally, but if only one in twenty applicants are female, then a woman will never have a 50:50 chance of getting the same job as a man. It doesn’t actually help the cause if most women qualify and then take an extended career break to have a baby, although most people see maternity leave as a right, there is no doubt that being out of the loop makes you less employable. A lot of female gardeners who have kids either don’t come back or put a halt on their career progression, choosing to stay as assistant gardeners or similar and not advance with age. Volunteering is popular with ladies of a certain age too, often those who never returned to work after having a family, but not necessarily those who studied horticulture. There are potentially as many unpaid women in horticulture as there are paid, which tends to devalue the profession and, in particular, how women in the industry are regarded. Society may have changed overall, but in horticulture, women are still seen as the ‘odd man out’ because the percentage of professional women horticulturists is probably only 20% of the workforce, and most women don’t last or progress.
Recently, a colleague passed on a compliment about the gardens from some visitors, tempered somewhat by the fact that they were amazed to find out that there was a woman Head Gardener. I have lost count of the times that people have assumed my male colleague was in charge, no matter what our ages were. There is no earthly reason why women gardeners shouldn’t be just as good at their jobs as their male counterparts. Women may even be better at some tasks which require a keen eye for detail, and certainly garden design, with the need for understanding colour co-ordination, form and texture, would be less rich without the input of women. Since mediaeval times, women would have tended the kitchen garden, providing fresh vegetables for their families while men herded cattle or ran a forge. Wise women or healers, possibly misconstrued as witches, would have been knowledgeable about the growing and use of herbs. Gleaners would have been predominantly female, and scything all day is a lot more demanding physically than using a strimmer. In modern times, there are numerous labour saving devices for almost every horticultural task, but it is perhaps because machinery is considered a predominantly male thing that women do not spend 8 hours a day on a ride-on mower. Yet women were encouraged, at least in my day, to spend an equal amount of time at a typewriter, using a vacuum cleaner or a sewing machine.
There is a massive skills shortage in horticulture. It seems to me that we could increase the amount of available workforce if we made it a more welcoming profession for young girls to enter. Schools don’t seem to include it as a serious part of the curriculum, and any girl aiming for such a profession would not be given much encouragement. It is hard to be the sole female in a workforce, and my experience bears out that other minorities suffer similar discrimination in gardening. I’ve encountered very few black or Asian professional gardeners (although plenty of allotment growers from these groups). I have to conclude that the predominant white male culture in horticulture is the real problem, particularly in sports, which are like old boys’ clubs, and changing the balance is difficult to achieve. I don’t know quite what the answer is, so for now I’m just going to think on it while I go and trim my bush.
