Gardening with a busy life - even in 1906

An issue which is commonly heard amongst people who garden is the desire to make their garden lower maintenance.  We all tend to lead very busy lives, and certainly don't want our gardening hobby to demand too much of our time.  I, for one, have thought about days gone by, when life was slower and people seemed to have more time for things like gardening.

Or, did they?  As I mentioned in my first blog post, an interest of mine is gardening history.  I was very surprised when a 1958 garden book talked about the need for low-care gardens because of modern life with both mother and father working.

More recently, I was browsing a 1906 book entitled, Houses and Gardens, by a well-known British architect, and artist and furniture designer, M. H. Baillie Scott.  Scott grew up in a farming family, and after becoming an architect eventually joined William Morris and John Ruskin in the Arts and Crafts movement.

It is clear that Scott is drawn to the simple, natural look in the landscape as well as interior of the house. But interestingly, he repeatedly talks about the need for a lower maintenance garden; particularly for those who don't have professional gardeners.  His solution? Less lawn, and a garden that follows Mother Nature:

"...the best type of garden would be one which maintained it's beauty with a minimum expenditure of labor"

"...the whole situation seems to point to the natural or wild garden, with those departures that may justify themselves by their usefullness or beauty, secured without undue cost of maintenance."

"A garden is expensive to maintain in proportion to it's artificiality and in the extent to which it includes mown lawns, bedded-out flowers, and clipped hedges."

"I do not wish to under value the beauty of a well-kept lawn; but it will be well if the smaller householder....should realise that [a lawn] implies a certain cost of maintenance, and that a garden can be formed, and not a bad garden, either, without any mown grass at all."

Interesting...and still good advice for us over one hundred years later.