Victorian Seed varieties

Hallo Jotiddy - welcome to GOY. As it happens, I am doing a horticultural correspondence course at the moment, and one of the questions for the first lesson was on an aspect of Victorian gardening - it might interest you. They used to plant in geometric patterns laid out on the ground,with edges of maybe box or lavender. It was called 'Carpet bedding', a bit like the modern public gardens or floral clocks you see these days, only more regularly patterned. They used foliage plants like Ajuga and Sedums close to the ground at first and took off the flowers, but later, they allowed flowers like Geraniums and added more exotic 'spot' plants from foreign parts, like Cannas, in the 'carpets'. As an ex-teacher I can just see you covering Maths and Art as well as History - and a bit of Geography! P.S. I'd love to see the results, if you do go down this route - I guess you could adapt the idea to match your budget by growing your own plants - old-fashioned Cottage garden flowers like Calendulas, Candytuft, Virginian Stock etc would have been around at that time. Seed catalogues would give you more ideas for low-growing annuals. Good luck with the project!

I always associate pinks with Victorian gardens, probably much earlier though.I am sure the children would appreciate the scent.

I found a website that might help you. As well as loads of information on Victorian gardening, it also contains a plant list (about halfway down the page)
http://www.victoriana.com/library/garden/hurd.html

Hope this helps and I reiterate Spritz by saying - would love to see the results and good luck

Hi, I love gardening with children, and, for a Victorian theme, look at the website for gardenorganic.org.uk ( formerly the Henry Doubleday Research Association - HDRA), who have a heritage seed library. When I was researching my family history, I found it very useful when trying to find out for which veg etc my ancestors may have won prizes for, as mentioned in local press of the time. Merry Xmas to you all!