My childhood was spent in the house built in the 1870s by my great-grandfather Matthew Wyatt.
He was born in 1837, the year of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne, and he was a Victorian through and through.
The house was Victorian in every detail. Every stick of furniture, every piece of cutlery, the wallpaper, curtains, paintings and fire-irons were proudly and loudly Victorian.
The garden was completely Victorian, too, with its circular borders filled with bedding plants, large lawn framed by a perambulatory path, shrubbery, coke-fired greenhouse and vegetable garden.
Victorian gardens were for sitting outside, taking tea, walking and for enjoying leisure time in. Pictured is former royal residence Osborne House in East Cowes, Isle of Wight
There was a wooden wheelbarrow we still used, a great cast-iron roller and a pre-war mower that wouldn’t have been unfamiliar to the gardeners of the 1870s other than it was powered by a motor rather than drawn by a donkey.
A Victorian garden like this Hampshire villa was not for gardening in – there were gardeners to do that – but for sitting outside, taking tea, walking and perhaps playing tennis or croquet on the lawn.
In short, it was for leisure – something that was a Victorian invention for the middle classes.
The industrial revolution that had begun a century earlier meant Britain was becoming an increasingly urban society.
The new industries of iron, coal, cotton and manufacturing of every kind needed vast numbers of cheap labourers, mostly drawn from the countryside.
Opportunities for gardening in these new industrial towns were almost nil until in 1840 the first park was created, in Derby, specifically for workers to enjoy on their Sunday afternoons off.
Many more parks followed, often financed by local benefactors.
At the same time there was a growing middle class that did not want to live in the middle of these teeming industrial cities, and people were beginning to move to larger houses with gardens in newly created suburbs such as Wimbledon or Highgate in London.
With growing print technology, an increasingly literate public and the removal of tax on paper, new horticultural journals became hugely popular – and they included information plans and designs for small gardens.
For the first time, gardens became an essential part of every middle-class home.
Industrial technology had a huge influence on this. The development of cast iron, plate glass, cheap coal and the trains to deliver it meant that greenhouses were transformed.
Until the early 19th century, greenhouses were brick buildings with big windows made from a lot of small panes of glass.
In 1845 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert bought Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and she often retreated there after his death. Pictured is the Queen with her great-granchildren there
This meant that any glass-roofed structure needed as much solid material as glass, so had very limited light.
But the invention of plate glass and cast iron meant that enormous spans of glass could be built, and this resulted in buildings like Joseph Paxton’s 1840 Great Conservatory at Chatsworth, or Decimus Burton’s 1844 Palm House at Kew.
For more than 20 years until 1815, Britain was desperate to raise money to fight the Napoleonic wars and among many other things, glass was taxed and therefore expensive.
But in 1845, glass tax was removed. The result was that glass houses became affordable for the growing middle class, allowing them to grow the increasing range of exotic plants being introduced from all over the empire.
The first man who went to mow
Edwin Budding developed the cylinder lawnmower, pictured, in 1830
We think of an expanse of lush mown grass as being part of a long tradition of British gardening, but in fact until the 1830s a lawn was something only the very rich could afford.
Before this date all grass, from a hay meadow to the finest bowling green, was cut with a scythe.
This was skilled, and therefore expensive, work and needed doing at least weekly.
The great park landscapes of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton in the 18th century were largely maintained by grazing sheep or deer.
But in 1830 Edwin Beard Budding from Stroud in Gloucestershire developed the cylinder lawnmower from a machine used to trim woollen cloth by cutting the whiskery bits to an even length.
This meant the lawn was democratised and became viable for small gardens as well as the growing number of public parks.
So in a sense the lawnmower invented the ubiquitous suburban lawn, and not the other way round.
These early machines were either pushed or, for larger areas, pulled by a servant, a donkey or a pony.
Leather ‘shoes’ were tied over the animals’ hooves to stop them damaging the grass.
After the First World War the use of ball bearings for gearing and a new breed of mechanics to make and maintain them, meant that the motor mower became common – albeit very expensive.
Until the 1840s, most new plants arrived as seeds that had to be propagated and grown on before they could be planted out, which could take many years.
But the invention in the 1840s of the Wardian case, a kind of suitcase-sized greenhouse, meant living plants could be reliably shipped from all over the world.
This transformed the way our gardens looked.
Victorian bedding arose from the ability to raise brightly coloured plants from the tropics cheaply in heated glasshouses.
These were then planted by the hundreds of thousands in geometric beds for a blaze of summer colour.
This all created a sense of the garden as a playground, rather than an expression of wealth and power.