Shirley Hibberd
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James Shirley Hibberd (1825 – 16 November 1890) was one of the most popular and successful gardening writers of the
Early life
Shirley Hibberd was born in
After his marriage in 1850 to Sarah Voyer, Hibberd moved into a small house in Pentonville, north London, and began to take an interest in gardening, which seems to have been a natural progression from his childhood interest in wild flowers, birds and insects. He soon discovered the difficulties of gardening in inner city London where the atmosphere was laden with soot, and fog and smog was prevalent throughout the winter. The other problem was that there was very little information available for amateur gardeners, especially those living in towns and cities. The professional gardeners, who dominated the gardening press, refused to believe that city gardening was either possible or desirable. This was Hibberd's opportunity to make a name for himself, and he began to teach himself gardening, discovering what plants could survive in London and how amateurs could learn things for themselves.
Publications
Hibberd's first gardening book was The Town Garden (1855), which described his own garden in Pentonville and advised novices how to start gardening. The same year he had already published Brambles and Bay Leaves, a book of essays on science and natural history, largely based on articles he had previously written for magazines or on lectures he had given. These were followed by three books on
By 1858 Hibberd had moved to Lordship Terrace,
Environmental work
Shirley Hibberd always believed that man should live in harmony with the natural world. As an observational bee-keeper he realised the importance of
Personal life
Shirley Hibberd's first marriage to Sarah Elizabeth Voyer (1823–1880) was childless, and she spent much of her life as an invalid. He refers in his writing to a 'tragedy' that befell them in the early part of their marriage, possibly relating to a lost pregnancy, which might also have been connected with a heart defect suffered by his wife, who died of heart disease at the age of 56. He wrote a moving account of their life after 1870, when they took on a new garden, fraught with difficulty, which he believed contributed to her death. Four years later, however, he married his cook, Ellen Mantle, who was 28, while he was 59. They moved to a large house in Kew, south-west London, where Ellen gave birth to a daughter, but she died a few days after giving birth. The daughter, also called Ellen, survived. Hibberd himself died five years later at the age of 65, and his daughter was adopted by his nephew, Charles Montague Mitchell. She subsequently trained as a nurse at the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, in east London.
Conflicts
Shirley Hibberd never flinched from argument if he felt justified in his own position. During the 1860s he used the pages of the Gardener's Magazine to criticise the workings of the Royal Horticultural Society because he believed it was badly run and was not giving a fair chance to working class amateur gardeners. Later, however, when the society had been reformed, he worked closely with them, and the main reason he moved to Kew was to help re-organise the neglected RHS garden at Chiswick. During the 1870s and 80s he had a series of arguments with the gardener and writer
Legacy
Shirley Hibberd is rarely given the credit he deserves as a pioneer in amateur gardening. Other well-known Victorian gardeners, such as Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson, have gardens still remaining that have been restored. Hibberd's gardens, being town gardens in inner London, have all disappeared through being built over. The only garden connected with him that does remain is Islington Green, a small park he laid out in 1865. Unlike the books of Jekyll and Robinson, Hibberd's books are all out of print, although two were re-issued as facsimiles in the 1980s. It is sometimes thought that he promoted what is considered as typical Victorian formal gardening, based on half-hardy 'bedding plants' and that his books are therefore old-fashioned and irrelevant today. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Hibberd constantly condemned the use of bedding plants by amateurs as he felt they were unsuitable for small gardens whose owners would not have the facilities for growing them in glasshouses or the finances to buy them in sufficient quantities, and nor would they be able to maintain such displays adequately. He stated that the most important part of a flower garden was the display of herbaceous perennial plants and shrubs. He also taught amateurs all the skills of growing fruit and vegetables, secrets so closely guarded by professionals that they refused to write about them for general readers. Hibberd's true legacy is his promotion of amateur gardening as a self-contained market where plants, equipment, tools, books, magazines and every other consumer product connected with gardening were made cheaply available to anyone who wanted to use them, and the practice and love of gardening effectively brought together people of different classes as equals.
Selected publications
- Familiar Garden Flowers (1879)
References
- Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. .
Bibliography
- Anne Wilkinson (2012), pub.: Cortex Design. Shirley Hibberd, The Father of Amateur Gardening: His Life and Works 1825–1890. ISBN 978-0-956-809605