The Gardening Forums of Yesteryear

[chickenchargrill]

I live very close to an old park, the oldest park in England. Donated to the people of the city by Joseph Strutt and designed/planted by JC Loudon. It has a range of trees from lime and elder to cucumber trees. For a while, I've been trying to find out if there was some sort of list of the trees there, the council do indeed have a tree trail, but this features only 26 of the species.

I finally set myself the challenge of searching for Loudon's original catalogue. I'm sure it's out there somewhere, but no luck. Instead I found the list within a copy of a gardening magazine from 1840, including map, which I'm just about to print out and hopefully follow it to see which are still there from the original landscaping. Obviously, not all the trees are still there, they got rid of 100 trees in the past couple of years after securing lottery funding to restore the park.

I have to say, not only yay to Google for making all these old books and magazines digital, but it's not quite as laborious a read as I expected. In fact, it reminds me a lot of forums in places.

Here's a snippet about how to store your carrots -

[grahamhobbs]

Fantastic to see that snipet, 150 years old, but I've never read that in any books I've ever read and I've read loads.
What was the magazine you found it in?

[chickenchargrill]

The Gardener's magazine and register of rural & domestic improvement, Volume 6

There are quite a few gardening related oldies on Google books.

[MKG]

That would, I think, be the Arboretum - and a very nice place, too.

That Strutt family haunts me. I used to live in a Strutt cottage in Milford (a Strutt village), another one in Belper (a Strutt town) ... got to where I am now only to find a painting on the wall by a member of the Strutt family and, during the course of my local history research, discovered that the Strutts had a house here and that Strutt's men repaired the church tower (don't ask me how that one came about ).

Jedediah has a lot to answer for

Mike

[chickenchargrill]

He did get around a bit

Yes, the Arboretum is a lovely place and I'm really pleased they restored the boar etc. Just a shame about the area around it

[Millymollymandy]

Love the posting CC (what do we abbreviate your username to?) - bravo to you for looking into some local history - must be really fascinating - and I love the snippet. If they couldn't agree then, how on earth are we ever going to now?