Alicia Amherst (1865 – 1941)

Alicia Amherst, painted by her youngest daughter Maude Cecil, holding a yellow form of Gloriosa which she discovered. Private Collection.

Alicia Amherst, a contemporary and friend of Ellen Willmott, has rightly been credited with being the founder of Garden History; and yet she is largely unknown to modern audiences. 

She wrote several books including Children’s Gardens, London Parks and Gardens, Children and Gardens, Wild Flowers of the Great Dominions of the British Empire, Some Canadian Wildflowers…, and Historic Gardens of England (for some of which she had also painted botanical illustrations). But it was her first book A History of Gardening in England, published in 1895, that is considered her magnum opus.

This book was very different to others that had been published: it was not a practical gardening handbook, nor was it an exposition on a style of gardening or designing. It was a serious academic study of gardening from the medieval era to the end of the nineteenth century, researching and explaining the history of both flower and kitchen gardens and landscape gardening.

The History of Gardening… was written by Alicia ‘to serve as a handbook by which to classify gardens and fix the dates to which they belong’ and contained a very extensive Bibliography and Index classified both chronologically and alphabetically, which is still extremely useful today plus the inclusion of two parliamentary surveys of 1649 (for Wimbledon and Theobalds).  Alicia carried out research in the British Library, the Public Record Office and the archives of Trinity College Cambridge, where she discovered and analysed The Feate of Gardening by Mayster Ion Gardener (c1440, possibly earlier) which she considered to be ‘the first practical treatise on gardening’.

Sue Minter in her biography of Alicia describes how The History of Gardening… was reviewed to slightly damming praise in The Quarterly Review by, Alicia believed, Gertrude Jekyll who ‘recommended that Alicia pay less attention to the early period and more to the nineteenth century which had “long outshone all that has gone before” in developments of the science of horticulture, botany, hybridisation and the collection of plants. She also wished that Alicia had been able to be more partisan over the loss of so many formal gardens to Capability Brown – implicitly undermining two of Alicia’s greatest contributions, the study of medieval history and her objectivity’. Despite that, reviews were generally positive, and the book was a huge success, with a 2nd edition being printed only a few weeks after the first.

Alicia also campaigned to save The Chelsea Physick Garden when the founding Society of Apothecaries could no longer afford to run it and the Cadogan Estate planned to build on the land; and she remained on the Management Council until the year of her death. (Her archives are held at the garden.)  She was also highly political, being involved in horticultural training for women,  women’s Suffrage (which she was against), charitable work for The British Women’s Emigration Association (with Gertrude Bell), and was on the Advisory Committee for planting Hampstead Garden Suburb, as well as being the horticultural correspondent for The Times, and a plant hunter for Kew Botanical Garden.

And yet even today Alicia’s work is not being given the credit it deserves, with for example a recently published book on early modern garden history not acknowledging the debt owed directly or indirectly to her pioneering academic study. 

Could it be because she used several different names throughout her career? The botanist and librarian Professor William Stearn wrote in Garden History that: ‘gardeners complain about the difficulties made for them by botanists through changes in nomenclature of plants, as she did, but never spare any sympathy for the perplexed librarians and cataloguers who find eventually that the Hon. Alicia Amherst, the Hon. Mrs. Evelyn Cecil, the Lady Rockley of Lytchett Heath and the Dowager Baroness Rockley were one and the same author’.

After the publication of The History of Gardening… Alicia was given the Freedom of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners, the first woman to receive that honour; and the Freedom of the City of London. She was also awarded an MBE and later CBE.  Her achievements were numerous, but her meticulous academic research on a subject which had not been established deserves far greater recognition and gratitude from all of those who follow in her footsteps.