Currently on show at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is the small exhibition The Living Collection - The People behind the Plants. I saw it today and was taken with these photographs of gardeners on the RBGE site at Inverleith between 1910 and 1920. Note the collars and ties - how formal compared to their modern counterparts' sweatshirts and fleeces.
Given the approximate date of the pictures, I wonder how many of the young men we see here went off to war in 1914, and how many did not return to this most peaceful of places.
I loved the photos of the gardners from a hundred years ago. I don't think my grandfather was in any of these particular photos, but he certainly could have been. My grandfather immigrated from Lanark, Scotland to the US in 1913. His older brother had immigrated before him and was working as a supervising gardner at the John Dere estate in Miami. My grandfather worked for a while there, and then the US Army was granting elgibile young men who had immigrated US citizenship if they joined the Army. So my grandfather and his brother joined up. The planting of the big estates in Florida stopped as so many men went into the Army. Also, it was hard to have plants shipped because of the war. My grandfather and great uncle lived through the war. My grandfather later went to Cuba and managed some of the Hershey Sugar Planations and later on the Harvard Botantial Gardens in Cuba.
These photos sure made me think of my grandfather and his brother!
Posted by: Hester | 28 December 2011 at 07:20 PM
Wonderful, Hester! Thankyou so much for giving us your family's story - reading what you've written really does make me wonder even more about the young men pictured, where they went and what became of them.
Posted by: Cornflower | 28 December 2011 at 09:22 PM