Victorian pictures of English gardens that look as if they were taken yesterday

Until the mid-20th century, domestic plots were at a premium in the urban North of England, where the fashion had been for small back yards to punctuate the rows of terraces.

But away from the industrial towns and cities, these pictures show a thriving horticultural tradition – one passed down from the craft gardeners who tended the formal landscapes of England’s country estates.

Some of the images are almost timeless. But for the costumes and the wooden wheelbarrow, the picture of a couple tending to their cottage garden could have been taken last week. In fact, it was captured in 1867, making it one of the earliest of its kind.

Other gardening techniques, now almost alien to us, were imported from across the Channel, and two shots from 1908 demonstrate gardeners in Berkshire using a French method of cultivating fruit and vegetables by covering them with glass, bell-shaped cloches to ensure an early harvest. A gardener from France poses in one picture with the English ladies to whom he was demonstrating the technique.

A picture from two years later shows girls in their pinafores and hats working on their plots with the incentive of prize for the best efforts, to be distributed by Margot Asquith, the socialite wife of the Prime Minister.

In the following decade, the notion of victory gardens was propagated by the governments of Canada and the US, but it was not until the Second World War that gardens and plots in Britain were requisitioned for vegetable growing.