How Post-Revolutionary France Grew Obsessed With Gardens and Gadgets

Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura

French gardeners were willing to pay for all sorts of contraptions.

A middle-class woman tending her garden in 19th-century Paris had a lot working against her. Heavy, swirling skirts could catch on her ankles or, at the very least, drag in the dirt.

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Gloves might offer some protection from thorns, but they also made it easy to fumble pruning.

It certainly wouldn’t do to forgo the flowers. “Gardening had become all the craze for the middle class, bourgeois” residents, says Susan Alyson Stein, a curator of 19th-century European painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and organizer of the new exhibition, Public Parks, Private Gardens: Paris to Provence. In addition to canvases by Van Gogh, Matisse, and other painters enamored of flowers, the show tracks the social and political roots of the broader cultural obsession with gardening. “Maybe in the past, people didn’t think to spend whatever small amount of money they had to buy a flowerpot for the windowsill or set aside a piece of land to grow pretty flowers,” Stein says, but by the middle of the century, “that becomes more of the mindset.”

The DuBois Parasol Pruner was a useful gadget for gardeners who didn't want to get their skirts or hands dirty. — The DuBois Parasol Pruner was a useful gadget for gardeners who didn’t want to get their skirts or hands dirty.

So gardeners in billowing dresses and slippery gloves reached for contraptions such as the Dubois Parasol Pruner. Mechanically, it was straightforward. “I close my umbrella to pick flowers and fruit,” reads an 1886 advertisement. The umbrella’s handle was an elegant extension for one’s reach—a dainty, fin de siècle version of the claw you might use to nab a roll of toilet paper perched high on a grocery shelf. A little pair of shears, affixed to the top of a silk or satin sunshade, could be used to snip anything the gardener’s hands couldn’t quite get to. Without straying from the path, where her shoes and hems were relatively safe, she could build her bouquet.