Women Who Shaped Garden History
The post-war decades brought enormous changes to the landscape professions and to gardening culture. Women entered landscape architecture in larger numbers, pioneered organic gardening methods, and developed new approaches to garden writing rooted in close observation and regional knowledge.
World War II had a leveling effect in many fields: women had proven their ability to do agricultural and horticultural work during the war, and some of the barriers to professional advancement were lowered (though far from removed). At the same time, the post-war building boom created a need for landscape architects to work on new towns, housing estates, power stations, and reservoirs, opening opportunities for designers who might not have found work in the pre-war era of private estates.
Sylvia Crowe (1901–1997) was one of the most important landscape architects of the post-war period in Britain. She worked on new town landscapes, reservoir surrounds, and power station settings, bringing ecological sensitivity and aesthetic awareness to projects that might otherwise have been purely functional. Her books, particularly Garden Design (1958) and The Landscape of Power (1958), influenced a generation.
Brenda Colvin (1897–1981), a co-founder and president of the Institute of Landscape Architects, was an early advocate for ecological principles in landscape design. Her book Land and Landscape (1947) argued that landscape planning should be based on an understanding of natural systems, a radical idea at the time.
In the United States, Ruth Stout (1884–1980) spent decades promoting a radically simple approach to gardening: cover the soil with a thick layer of hay mulch and never dig, weed, or water again. Her book Gardening Without Work (1961) and her colorful personality made her a folk hero among organic gardeners. She was practicing principles that would later be validated by soil science and embraced by the no-dig movement.
Elizabeth Lawrence (1904–1985) wrote about gardens in the American South with a level of observation and literary quality that elevated garden writing into a literary art. Her books, including A Southern Garden (1942) and The Little Bulbs (1957), are still in print and still admired.
Margery Fish (1892–1969) in England championed the cottage garden tradition at a time when modernist design was in vogue. At East Lambrook Manor, she created a garden that celebrated traditional plants and informal planting, and her books — including We Made a Garden (1956) — are regarded as classics of the genre.