Maria Jacson (1755 - 1829)

Maria Jacson’s early life was in many ways typical of that experienced by unmarried ladies of the time. She and her sister Frances lived with their parents in various Rectories and when their mother died they looked after their ailing father. After he died they were forced to leave the Rectory and for a time lived with their elder brother but were moved on by his second wife. Luckily for them their mother’s distant relative, Lord St Helens, offered them a house for life at Somersal Herbert in Derbyshire.

Plate from The Florist’s Manual, 1816, showing the organic shaped beds which were popular with the Gardenesque movement

Maria engaged in botanical studies from an early age, but it was only in her 40s that she was compelled by her younger brother’s squandering of family wealth to seek an income from writing.  Her first three books established her as one of the first women science writers.  Erasmus Darwin praised ‘a new treatise introductory to botany called Botanic Dialogues for the use of schools, well adapted to this purpose, written by M. E. Jacson, a lady well skilled in botany’. However, it was her ‘Florist’s Manual’ published anonymously in 1816 and in three subsequent editions that was the most influential.  It is an early example of a book specifically for women in which her aim was to ‘induce, even a few, of my sister florists to exercise their intellect, or relieve their ennui ...’

Jacson’s advice on the shaping of flower beds pre-dates J.C. Louden who promoted the ‘gardenesque’ and her ideas on colour mingling and seasonal flowering succession anticipated those of Gertrude Jekyll almost a century later: ‘the niceties of planting shaped beds interspersed with turf consists in arranging the different parts to form a connected glow of colours’.  She argued that ‘single beds, containing one species only, form a blank before that species produces its flowers, and a mass of decaying leaves when the glow of their petals is no more’, but this viewpoint became unfashionable as the carpet bedding craze swept in. Despite the recognition of her talents by both Darwin and Louden Maria Jacson remains virtually unknown today but was an important influence on the gardening women of her day.