Earle, Mrs. C.W.

Pot-Pourri From A Surrey Garden / More Pot-Pourri From A Surrey Garden. With an appendix by Lady Constance Lytton.

Ninth Edition / Fourth Impression. Two Volumes together. London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1897-1900. 14.5 x 21.5cm. Volume I: (12), 381 pages / Volume II: 453 pages. Original hardcover with gilt lettering on spine. Some foxing to several pages, signs of shelf wear to spine. Bindings bumped, otherwise in very good condition with bookblocks firm.

Theresa Villiers (Mrs. C.W. Earle) was born in London in 1836. The eldest of three sisters, she was the niece of the Earl of Clarendon and her family was liberal and cultured. As a result she met many of the famous names in literary and artistic London. Later, however, she settled into a superficially conventional life when she married Charles Earle, an Indian army officer turned business man and became a ‘good wife’ looking after her family and gardening on “a small piece of flat ground surrounding an ordinary suburban house. There was also enough money to buy a small country house with a couple of acres at Cobham in Surrey. This was “Woodlands” where she designed and created a garden which was “a more congenial setting for her personality.”

The new garden soon began to attract attention from her friends and acquaintances and led to her being asked for horticultural advice. Encouraged by her niece Lady Constance Lytton, she began to write about her garden and her day-to-day life. To her gardening advice, she added her thoughts on furnishing, cooking and child-rearing and anything else that she thought would be of use to her ‘foreign friend’ and other potential readers. She based what she wrote on her “sort of gardening journal” which had kept for many years, including what she learned from specialist horticultural works by authors like the Loudons, William Curtis, Joseph Paxton, and her favourite, William Robinson.

She published her first book in 1897, at the age of 61. ‘Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden’ sold very well on its publication, despite having no illustrations at all, and ran through ten editions by the end of the century. Such was the positive response to her first book that in late 1898, she published the follow-up, “More Pot-Pourri From A Surrey Garden”, which took the same form as the first book. [Adapted from parksandgardensuk.com]

• Keywords: 19th Century · Botany · Diaries · English Gardens · Garden · Garden Collection – Ann Geneva · Garden Design – Collection · Gardening · Library & Collection Building · Social History
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 91032AB