Introducing Mrs Earle

Two women growing in one garden, a hundred years apart.

As the name suggests, Woodland Cottage lies on the edge of an area populated by veteran oak trees, silver birch, sweet chestnuts, bracken and brambles. People who visit us tend to agree that the house has a warm, inviting feel. Built around 1860, at that time it was a red-brick lodge with a pretty pitched roof and a central chimney breast that divided the only two rooms. In the early 1920s it was extended in the arts-and-crafts style to create a quirky home with a welcoming porch and French doors that open onto a garden of rhododendrons and roses. Sometimes, when I’m home alone, I like to imagine I am Snow White living in a gingerbread house. I fling open a pair of the wonky diamond-leaded windows and lean out to sing to an audience of adorable woodland creatures, until I remember I am on a deadline to write website copy for a client, and reluctantly go back to my desk.

We moved to Woodland Cottage eleven years ago, and bought it from a friendly older couple who were selling up after forty years. The two children they had raised here had grown and flown the nest, as children do. They were looking forward to living somewhere draught-proof with fewer leaks, but I could tell from the sheen in the husband’s eyes that he was finding it hard to let go of this seat of family memories. My two boys were four and three years old at the time, and David and I hoped this old house that creaked with character would become our forever home, filled to the brim with happy memories. Right away, the house gave me a strong sense that it would guide us through. Now, over a decade later, I look back and see that Woodland Cottage is indeed magical, because it has taken me back in time, where I have made a special friend.

The day we moved in, we found an old clipping from a local newspaper pinned to the corkboard in the kitchen. It was about a Victorian horticulturist and writer called Mrs C W Earle (1836 - 1925) who had owned a country estate called Woodlands. I learnt that Woodland Cottage had been the humble gardener’s lodge for her estate, and our garden had once been a small part of her much grander garden. This has long since been carved up, we are now surrounded by a patchwork of post-war suburban houses.

Mrs Earle rose to prominence in 1897, when she published Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden, a charming month-by-month journal packed with informative but down-to-earth advice about plants and gardening. She also included recipes, poems, and tips on fashionable flower arranging, along with thoughts on how to raise robust children. In some ways she could be considered a Victorian influencer, her book bearing more than a passing resemblance to Substack with its inspirational, snackable mix of short and long form content. The book was incredibly popular, and she went on to publish more volumes, with other acclaimed gardeners of the day, including Gertrude Jekyll, crediting her in their work.

January 2nd

I am not going to write a gardening book, or a cookery book, or a book on furnishing or education. Plenty of these have been published lately. I merely wish to talk to you on paper about several subjects as they occur to me throughout one year; and if such desultory notes prove to be of any use to you or others, so much the better.

Mrs C W Earle
Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden

When I got hold of my own copy of Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden, I immediately fell in love with Mrs Earle’s voice. She was warm, no-nonsense, and liberally minded for her social position and her time; a vegetarian and a supporter of the suffragette movement. I found an old black and white photo of her sitting under a large fir tree in her garden. Looking at all the tall trees I can see from my window I still try to work out which one it might have been. We are living in this garden one hundred years apart, but I get such a strong sense of connection to Mrs Earle through her writing that the years between us seem to melt away. I can’t help thinking had we met today, we would have had so much to talk about.

My interest in Mrs Earle took me by surprise. Up until this point in my life, I’m slightly ashamed to say history had never really interested me. It wasn’t a subject that spoke to me at school, all those monarchs and battles and plagues felt meaningless, dates just floating around in isolation. I suppose like many young people, anything that had happened before my lifetime felt like it hadn’t really happened in real life. It was as if I only believed in my own existence. Now, thanks to this garden and Mrs Earle, I have a different perspective. Of course learning to garden is very humbling. And sometimes when I’m gardening I find small chips of patterned china in the soil and line them up along a window ledge. I wonder if they date from 1880 or 1980? Woodland Cottage is not passing through my lifetime, rather, I am passing through the lifetime of Woodland Cottage. And I think it has even more to teach me, if I pay attention while I’m here.

Mrs Earle was sixty before she published Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden. Next year, it will be one hundred winters since she died. I can’t help feeling our lives are somehow connected as mothers, gardeners, writers and women who built very different lives in the same place, a century apart. With my roots now firmly grounded in the soil at Woodland Cottage, and the seasons continuing to cycle, I feel I owe it to Mrs Earle to keep writing, and keep growing.