Victorian Gardener Shirley Hibberd

Everybody grows cabbage, and everybody eats it; but my lady never hears the word, for all cabbages are “greens” in polite society. But plain people call things by their proper names, and I, for one, rejoice in cabbage, even if I dine with a retired tailor. Now a cabbage is a thing that most people think they can grow well, and generally speaking, good cabbages are very abundant; but cottagers, not looking upon it as a precarious or particularly choice crop, too often get careless, and where they take one ton of cabbages, a little extra pains would enable them to take two.

 

(from ‘Profitable Gardening’ by Shirley Hibbert pub. 1878 - my copy calls him Hibbert, Interesting Wikipedia article on Shirley Hibberd also Internet Archive has a lot of his very influential books on gardening. proto-ecology etc)

 

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Profitable Gardening That might have been written by V.S. Pritchett. It’s that same sort of vigorous prose with two short sentences balanced by one long. The bed is layed out and then double dug. 

 

 For this crop, a newly-trenched deep loam is just the thing, and, if never trenched before in the memory of man, it will produce wonderful cabbages, as I know from experience, on an old worn-out soil, where cabbages had become a failure, but which, at the second spit, had never been touched with spade or fork, when trenched two and a-half, or three feet deep, and the lower hazelly stuff brought to the top, the cabbages took to it, and grew like wildfire. 

 

‘Trenching’ is also known as double digging or sometimes ‘bastard trenching’. A spit is the length of a spade face. 

 There’s a short story peering out of the brambles in the first two sentences. Let me dibble a little: 

 

Rennick the tailor was never called anything else. Even his wife used say ‘Rennick is up the town buying thread’. Rennick loved his bacon and cabbage which he ate in the middle of the day and when sitting crosslegged on a table set near the window would keep a roll of worn calico near him occcasionally ripping lengths of it. ‘For the mechanics’. I was in the room getting measured for my school blazer. It had saffron edging on blue, no crest. There was an optional cap in the Edwardian style which demanded launching into a tree.

 Now read on.