Lady Gardeners (1898)

The first lady gardeners came to Kew in 1895, entering into what was then regarded as an exclusively male profession. Alice Hutchings and a Miss Gulvin were the first, followed by Gertrude Cope and Eleanor Morland, pictured here.

The Director, William Thiselton-Dyer, had been persuaded to take two female Swanley Horticultural College graduates on as ‘Improvers’ in the Gardens, but on condition they dressed as men! He was determined that they should avoid arousing the passions of their male colleagues.

They wore shirt and tie under a heavy brown tweed suit consisting of jacket, waistcoat (complete with watch chain) and a peaked cap which they ‘found it difficult to wear becomingly’.

Of course corsets and voluminous dresses with hooped skirts would not have been very practical for digging, let alone wielding scythes and hay-forks, but the fact that their garb – save the bloomers – was that of a typical male labourer, gave conservative society much reason to titillate, saying ’who needs blooms when you’ve bloomers at Kew’:

’They gardened in bloomers the newspapers said,
So to Kew without waiting all Londoners sped;
From the tops of the buses they had a fine view,
of the ladies in bloomers who gardened at Kew.’

Punch, 1896

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