Colour in the Garden: 'Malignant Magenta

The Garden History Society

Colour in the Garden: 'Malignant Magenta'Author(s): Susan W. LanmanSource: Garden History, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter, 2000), pp. 209-221Published by: The Garden History SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1587270 .

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SUSAN W. LANMAN

COLOUR IN THE GARDEN: 'MALIGNANT MAGENTA'

A single colour, 'malignant magenta', provides an opportunity to explore the relationship between industrial development and garden aesthetics. A brief history of the links between aniline dyes, arsenic-based insecticides, pollution and gardens in the nineteenth century help in the understanding of why magenta embodied 'industrial colour' for those concerned with the negative consequences of industrialization. The work of John Ruskin, William Morris and Gertrude Jekyll offers subtle and discerning perspectives on the social meaning of colour use. Their work influenced American women writing about gardens as well as those seeking meaningful work consistent with aesthetic integrity. Malignant magenta was more than just a question of 'colour in the garden'.

Gertrude Jekyll intensely disliked 'malignant magenta' in the garden, and many of her contemporaries and readers shared her aversion to the purplish-pink hue. The antipathy attached to magenta in the border may seem puzzling today, but it provides a useful example of how technological innovation in one area of design can influence and shape perspectives on garden aesthetics. During the nineteenth century, the development of aniline dyes for textiles influenced colour choices in horticulture.

The theories and aesthetic issues surrounding colour use in nineteenth-century gardens are well understood,1 but the iconographic meaning of colour is often obscure. Magenta's connection with technological innovation and industrialization made it repugnant to critics who embraced John Ruskin's view that aesthetics were inseparable from economic and social conditions. The negative social and environmental consequences of industrial growth and market expansion led reform-minded gardeners to disparage magenta-coloured flowers. The odious social and cultural connotations the colour acquired become clear once the complex links between aniline dyes, arsenic-based insecticides, pollution and gardens in the nineteenth century are understood.

The incisive critiques of Ruskin, William Morris and Jekyll help one understand how colour became emblematic of social choice. The invention of aniline dyes altered the use and availability of colour in textiles and led to the introduction of new practices in horticulture. Debates on labour rationalization, market expansion and the degradation of natural resources coalesced with questions of 'colour in the garden'. Briefly reviewing nineteenth-century developments in chemistry and industrial production will clarify the new Victorian palette and the reactions of those interested in garden design.

Susan W. Lanman is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Metropolitan State College of Denver, Campus Box 7, PO Box 173362, Denver, co 80217-3362, USA.



GARDEN HISTORY 28:2

ANILINE DYES

Dyeing with natural substances was an ancient art, but it was only from the fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries that much of the craft was revived in Europe. Organic materials provided the base for dyes before the I790s. Red, for example, came from the dried bodies of the cochineal insect or from the madder root (Rubia tinctorum L.). Fine textile dyeing was an exacting process practised by highly skilled craftsmen in guilds protected by royal charter,2 although quotidian textiles were domestically produced using local roots, bark and berries.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, new dyes arrived from abroad and interest in tin mordants developed, although attempts to apply chemistry to the production of practical dyes were limited. Mineral colours such as buff iron, antimony orange and Prussian blue were available by the late eighteenth century, and interest and experimentation with the chemistry of dyeing increased in the first half of the nineteenth century.3 Synthetic dyestuffs, however, originate from I856 when William Henry Perkin obtained an English patent for the first aniline dye, 'Perkin's purple' or mauve, which was produced from potassium bichromate and impure aniline. Initially the aniline came from benzene, but chemists quickly discovered that coal tar, a by-product of gas manufacturing, yielded benzol from which aniline could be extracted.

In 1859, Professor August Wilhelm Hofmann of the Royal College of Chemistry in London discovered magenta, an aniline red oxidized from aniline with stannic chloride. He used the deep purplish-pink dye as the base for creating both aniline blue in I860 and aniline black in 1863. These new water-soluble acid dyes produced brightly coloured, less expensive textiles for popular consumption not only in Britain, but also in America.4

Realistic floral designs mimicking nature printed in aniline colours quickly gained popularity, and less affluent consumers indulged in textile 'garden colour' in their domestic interiors. Solid or printed textiles dyed with magenta shifted colour when seen under gas lighting. Reflective glass multiplied the effect of artificial colour and light, and large mirrors and decorated glass panels frequently adorned interiors since technological innovations in manufacturing made many forms of glass more affordable for consumers. The new technologies increasingly mediated the perception of colour.

TECHNOLOGY IN THE GARDEN

In addition to introducing a new palate of bright colours to the general public, the production of aniline dyes also led to unintended consequences for gardeners. Just as the manufacturing of gas for lighting produced the by-product of coal tar used in the production of aniline dye, the manufacturing of magenta-based aniline dyes resulted in a new by-product, an arsenic compound called 'London purple', which was an insecticide.

London purple was an arsenite of lime of variable composition containing between thirty and fifty percent arsenic content. Its arsenic was highly soluble and unless carefully used it caused foliage injury. A closely allied product, 'Paris green', was sometimes preferred because although it contained about fifty percent arsenic, only a small percentage was in a water-soluble form (Figure i).5

London purple was a popular field insecticide in America as early as the I87os and initially it was preferred to Paris green for its cheaper cost and greater coverage (Figure z). It also retained its colour when mixed so it was easier to assess its coverage during application.6 In the I88os, about i lb of London purple was mixed with between z5o and 300 gallons of water and applied until it dripped from the crop (Figure 3). Fruit trees

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Figure I. In his Gardening for Pleasure (I898), 375, American

___c--~~~--~ ~nurseryman Peter Henderson many as five sprayings.7 Some e s recommended the 'garden

engine' for spraying solutions of

...... -~---,~- ~Paris green and London purple up to 40 feet.

generally received two-to-three applications per season, although some growers used as many as five sprayings.7 Some experts recommended as much as i lb of London purple mixed with Ioo-I50 gallons of water.8

While London purple was a popular and widely used insecticide in America, the British were generally more reluctant to adopt arsenic compounds. In I891, Hem-

mingway's London Purple Company provided samples of London purple and Paris green while displaying spraying equipment at the Horticultural Exhibition at Crystal Palace in Sydenham. A journalist commenting on the company's display noted, 'After advocating these measures, and calling attention to what other countries have done in the matter of insecticides and apparatus for their distribution, it is some satisfaction at last to see the subject practically attended to at home. John Bull is very slow to move'.9

Gardeners were certainly aware of the deadly nature of London purple since many articles appeared about accidentally poisoned staff and bees destroyed around fruit trees

sprayed in full bloom.10 The press in Britain also raised concerns about the safety of fruit extensively sprayed with arsenic.11

Yet commercial growers, at least in America, quickly adopted London purple because of its cheapness and effectiveness in producing both greater yields and higher profits. Safety and the welfare of the community were decidedly less important than the exigencies of the market. The barrage of chemicals complemented the new 'industrial garden' that was dependent on innovations in glass and heating technology.

Rapid advances in glass manufacturing spurred by the reduction of the excise tax in 1845 and the popularity of the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 resulted in massive construction of glasshouses for private estates and market gardeners. For example, at Halton, the Alfred de Rothschild estate in Buckinghamshire built in 1882-83, fifty glasshouses in the kitchen garden sheltered some forty thousand bedding out plants as well as twenty thousand more pots of specialty flowers.12

But even the Rothschilds could not compete with the acres of glass maintained by large market gardeners. P. Ladd of Swanley in Kent had iz acres under glass and could produce one hundred thousand pots of heaths, forty thousand calla lilies and thirty thousand fuchsias in season.13 Thomas Rochford's Turnford Hall Nursery in Essex was

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GARDEN HISTORY 28:2

Figure 2. A gardener using an American spray apparatus including the aquapult pump and the 'Cyclone' nozzle. The apparatus provided a moderately fine spray of 'considerable force' according to the Gardeners' Chronicle (22 February 1887), Io8, which recommended it to British

:- s-.... ~gardeners.

even larger with zz acres under glass. Rochford employed two hundred workers and the nursery was serviced by a special railway siding connected with the Great Eastern Railway. Trains delivered the 4000 tons of coke used annually to fuel the glasshouse furnaces and conveyed tons of produce and pot plants to market.14 These market gardens were in reality factories that developed horticultural products for specific markets. The new floral products made it possible to create lavish gardens requiring vast numbers of plants in full bloom.

The new bedding-out schemes required plants with vibrancy and uniformity of appearance, which were raised in the vast glass structures laced with steam pipes fuelled with enormous quantities of coal mined from the denuded countryside. The pot-grown flowers in the huge glasshouses received regular applications of chemicals to combat the disease, insect and fungal problems inherent in monoculture. When the plants reached maturity, gardeners turned them out of their pots into rigid geometric arrangements like soldiers on parade. Garden-making could be reduced to assembling interchangeable parts into the desired configuration. The diagrams for carpet-bedding schemes available in late nineteenth-century garden books and periodicals served to popularize and homogenize garden design.

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The use of lavish bedding out was particularly associated with the estates of the nouveau rich, such as the Rothschilds. At Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, for example, Ferdinand de Rothschild's garden staff changed more than twenty thousand bedding plants two or three times in the course of a single summer.l5

Extensive bedding out was also a popular feature in urban parks. Exuberant floral schemes in bright colours compensated for the lack of substantial trees and shrubs, which succumbed to urban pollution with dreary regularity. Plants raised in the artificial environment of the glasshouses remained relatively healthy under glass and could survive the urban pollution for the few months in which they were expected to perform.16 The

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GARDEN HISTORY 28:2

vibrant hues of the bedded out plants were hugely popular with the urban masses that appreciated an explosion of colour in the bleak, smog-riddled atmosphere of the cities. Magenta flowers offered a burst of colour in grey urban spaces.

While vibrant colours were commonly linked with the brightly or gaudily (depending on one's perspective) regimented bedding-out schemes of the new plutocrats and urban spaces, native plants and cottage garden flowers echoed earlier modes of production that were quickly eroding in the late nineteenth century. Tinned foods, patent medicines, industrial dyes and mass produced spirits were rapidly replacing foods, medicines, dyes, herbal wines and other domestically manufactured products dependent on abundant cottage gardens and plants gathered from the surrounding countryside. These associations conditioned the responses of perspicacious critics concerned with the human costs of industrialization and market expansion.

THE CRITICS

Given this brief overview of the changing horticultural practices of the nineteenth century, it is worth considering Jekyll's pronouncement in I899 on malignant magenta: 'Crimson is a word to beware of; it covers such a wide extent of ground, and is used so carelessly in

plant-catalogues, that one cannot know whether it stands for a rich blood colour or for malignant magenta. For the latter class of colour the term amaranth, so generally used in French plant-lists, is extremely useful, both as a definition and as a warning.'17

In I9oI, the American writer Alice Morse Earle remarked at length on Jekyll's comments and on the intense reactions that specific colours elicited from people:

It has been the custom of late to sneer at crimson in the garden, especially if its vivid colour gets a dash of purple and becomes what Miss Jekyll calls 'malignant magenta'. It is really more vulgar than malignant, and has come to be in textile products a stamp and symbol of vulgarity, though the forceful brilliancy of our modern aniline dyes.18

With an understanding of technical developments in the English dye industry in the nineteenth century, the important point Earle was articulating, either consciously or unconsciously, is apparent.

If the commercial production of malignant magenta carried a host of distasteful associations for those concerned with the noxious consequences of its production, some objected to its use couching their arguments in aesthetic terms. Jekyll was a member of Ruskin's social circle and she began calling on him socially in 1865. She read and also heavily annotated his major works. In 1857 Ruskin issued a catalogue on the Turner Bequest and then arranged to make a portion of the collection available to students at the National Gallery in London. Jekyll copied numerous J. M. W. Turner paintings in the i86os and I87os as part of her art training and was thoroughly familiar with his colour palette. She regularly incorporated Turner's use of colour into her own design work.19 Jekyll's preference for a 'rich blood colour' over 'malignant magenta' is better understood with a grasp of Ruskin's social criticism and his analysis of the nature and meaning of colour.

In Modern Painters (five volumes, 1843-60, Epilogue I888), Ruskin asserted that the medieval mind saw colour as the most sacred element of all visible things and noted the precision with which artists in the period observed and recorded colour. This led him to claim that the tendency to darken hues and make them appear sad and grey was a manifestation of the nineteenth-century desire to deny the sacred element of colour. He noted, 'On the whole, these are much sadder ages [the nineteenth century] than the earlier

214




ones; not sadder in a noble and deep way, but in a dim, wearied way, - the way of ennui, and jaded intellect, and uncomfortableness of soul and body'.20

Ruskin saw scarlet as far more desirable than crimson and was particularly concerned with the purity and meaning of the hue: 'Scarlet is the powerful colour, and is on the whole the most perfect representation of abstract colour which exists; blue being in a certain degree associated with shade, yellow with light, and scarlet, as absolute colour, standing alone'. He used scripture to argue that scarlet was the sacred colour of sanctification.21

The importance and purity that Ruskin attached to scarlet is crucial in the understanding of his analysis of the atmosphere, clouds and pollution. He observed that when the sun's rays struck clouds, the clouds could be scarlet, and he held that the genius of Turner was seen in the painter's depiction of clouds as scarlet and purple, and in painting scarlet shadows created by a warm, pure, intense light. Ruskin noted, 'Observe, further, that it is this colour [scarlet or pure red] which the sunbeams take in passing through the earth's atmosphere. The rose of dawn and sunset is the hue of the rays passing close over the earth. It is also concentrated in the blood of man'.22 While scarlet was the sanctifying element of visible beauty, it was also a colour that could be profaned. A coarse love of colour might appear in clothing with harsh, insistent or obtrusive colours. But far worse than a coarse love of colour was its falsification: 'One falsehood in colour in one place, implies a thousand in the neighbourhood. Hence there are peculiar penalties attached to falsehood in colour, and particular rewards granted to veracity'.23

Ruskin made a passing point that took on far more significance in his later writings. He noted that he never saw crimson or scarlet smoke.24 Many years later in The Storm- Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884), which began as two lectures delivered at the London Institute on 4 and II February 1884, Ruskin again raised the point that only a transparent as well as pure cloud could produce an intense golden or ruby colour, or, to use his turn of phrase, 'a scarlet for whose brightness there are no words'. Ruskin went on to observe that beginning in 1871 the sky was often covered with a grey cloud or a 'dry black veil'. He continued in the lectures to give a haunting description of the pollution that became ever more pervasive during the late nineteenth century in Britain. 'But mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men's souls.'25

Ruskin described the salient points of late nineteenth-century pollution in detail and particularly noted its effect on light: 'And now I come to the most important sign of the plague-wind and the plague-cloud: that in bringing on their peculiar darkness, they blanch the sun instead of reddening it.'26

And how is all this linked with malignant magenta? Simply that the pure, intense, burning scarlet of the sun could no longer be seen under the polluted skies. Factory- produced magenta had usurped the sun's place both literally and figuratively. Turner's vivid and truthful scarlet faced oblivion just as surely as the condemned slaves he had painted in scarlet light in his masterwork, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhon Coming On (I840).

Ruskin's contentions were dismissed as symptoms of the dementia that claimed him in later life, but today the accuracy of his observations is recognized, observations substantiated by the meteorological records from the period. Total sunshine was sixty percent below average in London for the I88os, and the sulphur dioxide levels in the air

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GARDEN HISTORY 28:2

from coal consumption were about 150 milligrams per cubic meter, almost twice present day levels.27 The plague-cloud was certainly no figment of Ruskin's imagination.

Ruskin's acute observation and intuitive grasp of change gave his writing a poignancy and resonance that attracted perspicacious and inquiring minds. Whether writing on pollution, political economy, social inequity or veracity in the depiction of an image, he caught up the crux of the matter as he laid it clearly and deliberately before his audience.

Of the nineteenth-century followers of Ruskin, surely few revelled in his ideas and aesthetic insights as much as William Morris. He first read Ruskin at Oxford and

supposedly would chant the lines from Modern Painters concerning the slave ship and Turner's skies to his fellow students. The Stones of Venice (three volumes, 1851-53) made an even more significant impression on Morris who could hardly have missed the lines on the gift of colour: 'The fact is, that, of all God's gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holist, the most divine, the most solemn.... All good colour is to some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purist and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.'28

Morris assimilated Ruskin's ideas intellectually and kinetically. As a craftsman, the

exquisite use of colour characterized Morris's work. His illuminated books, tapestry, stained glass and textiles were impregnated with pure and intense colours. In I88I, Morris established his famous 7-acre dye works and production facilities at Merton Abbey on the River Wandle in Surrey and personally revived old dyes to print his complex patterned fabrics. Once again Ruskin's views on purity of colour informed the direction of his work. Morris put enormous effort into achieving good reds in his textiles. He and Thomas Wardel, the master dyer, worked with madder and lac-dye obtained from tree bark and cochineal. Morris achieved his most important red with the insect dye kermes, and he used a technique derived from the Middle Ages to process it. His dyeing methods involved

multiple processes with numerous washings in soap and bran baths - a final washing and a natural drying that required about a week. Morris charged less for the textiles than the labour involved might have warranted, but this was in keeping with his philosophy of

making good design available as widely as possible and of keeping the workers steadily employed.29

Pleasant working conditions prevailed at the dye works: Morris personally trained

dye house staff and they received above-average wages. Dyers were paid by piecework, while the foreman and dye mixer received weekly wages befitting their higher skills and status. The site contained a large meadow, an orchard and a substantial vegetable garden, which some of the workers cultivated for their own benefit.30 The working conditions were in sharp contrast with the noisy, dirty and dangerous textile mills involved in mass commercial production with their belching smokestacks.

While at Merton Abbey, Morris printed many of his flower designs including 'Borage', 'Wreathnet', 'Bird and Anemone', 'Evenload', 'Strawberry Thief' and 'Rose'.31 His textiles survive as vivid gardens from his imagination. While Morris was generally inclined to confine the creation of his gardens to books, wallpapers and textiles, another formidable designer and author from the period happily produced hers in planted earth.

Like Morris, Gertrude Jekyll was a driven and highly productive person with

multiple talents. She began her career by studying art at South Kensington and eventually became an accomplished artist and craftswoman. Ruskin considered her painting to be both interesting and wonderful. Her needlework patterns shared the fluidity of movement

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characteristic of Morris, but it was as a garden designer that she did some of her most creative and original work.

In the early years of her writing career, Jekyll focused on the conservation of natural and cultural resources. Her Old West Surrey (I904) recorded information about the physical environment as well as the traditional customs and practices of the Surrey countryside as it was being obliterated by industrialization and urbanization. Her considerable success as a writer made her a conduit for the popularization of ideas about preservation, aesthetics and gardening, and she focused on the importance of vernacular patterns and on the value of traditional labour practices. Jekyll's work was clearly within the Arts and Crafts movement.32

Jekyll regarded colour as an integral component of good design. One of her clearest statements concerning the use of pure red and its adjacent hues is in her Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden (I908), but she also wrote other works in which colour was discussed.33 Her books and articles were popular and influential on both sides of the Atlantic.34 Her work also provides a useful device for the understanding of popular perceptions about magenta. Her statements are worth reviewing in detail because they reveal an acute sensitivity to subtle differences in colour that were of keen interest to her readers.

Jekyll was fond of pelargoniums, or what are commonly known as geraniums, especially those of 'purest scarlet', 'tints of salmon' and 'tender warm pinks', while also acknowledging that 'harsh, unpleasant reds and pinks' existed. 'My eye has had too much tender tutoring to endure the popular Henry Jacoby - a colour that, for all its violence, has a harsh dullness that I find displeasing'.35

Ever one to love the plant, but abhor the unsuitable colour, Jekyll actually went so far as to incorporate the notorious amaranthus in her own garden:

Another plant that we find of much use as an undergrowth among the flowers is a dwarf form of the old Love-lies-bleeding (Amaranthus) that I have only been able to obtain from Messrs. Vilmorin of Paris, their Amaranthus Sanguineus nanus. Its height is not much over a foot; the foliage inclines to a reddish tint and the flower, instead of being magenta, as in our more familiar plant, is of a quiet dusky red, that forms an admirably harmonious setting to flowers of a warm rich colouring.36

Jekyll appreciated and skilfully described subtle nuances in colour, and the new industrial magenta did not escape her perceptive eye or scathing pen. She was also an artist who used plant materials as pigments and the garden as her canvas. Her work was in no way connected with the bulbous curves and ornate floral sprays set in foliate scrollwork so popular in the French wallpaper patterns. She used no piercing shades created with cheap synthetic pigments in either her needlework or her borders. Her gardens were set in the open air and their colour changed with the passage of the sun. In essence, the perception of colour is due to the sun's electromagnetic energy in the form of wavelengths being perceived by colour-sensitive cells (cones) in the retina of the eye. The light of early morning and late day appears warm or golden while the intense white light of noon bleaches colour. Red, which is the first colour to disappear at dusk, was particularly vulnerable to the low light levels engendered by pollution. Jekyll did not want her reds adulterated with blue tints that shifted the truthfulness of their presentation. After all, according to Ruskin, the most valued and divine aspect of sight was colour. For a woman who suffered from severe myopia for all her life, his words must have had a particular resonance.

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GARDEN HISTORY 28:2

Ruskin, Morris and Jekyll are British figures who contemplated the social and aesthetic consequences of the industrial revolution, and who found themselves appalled with the results. Their strong opinions on aesthetics were a reaction to a rapidly changing world - and one not necessarily changing for the better. Pollution, destruction of cultural resources, massive urban sprawl and the de-skilling of labour as well as the negative consequences of market exigencies confronted them on a daily basis. Nor was it at all clear to them, at that point, that the working masses were achieving gains in their quality of life.

America, on the other hand, experienced an economic boom in the post-Civil War period, and the country's social and aesthetic critics were often more ambivalent in their criticism. Yet Alice Morse Earle's reaction to malignant magenta was certainly not positive. In fact, in addition to labelling the colour as vulgar, she continued:

This color shows that time as well as place affects our color notions, for magenta is believed to be the honored royal purple of the ancients. Fifty years ago no one complained of magenta. It was deemed a cheerful color, and was set out boldly and complacently by the side of pink or scarlet, or wall flower colors. Now I dislike it so that really the printed word, seen often as I glance back through this page, makes the black and white look cheap. If I could turn all magenta flowers pink or purple, I should never think further about garden harmony, all other colors would adjust themselves.37

Some American writers simply preferred to avoid mention of the colour altogether. Louise Yeomans King in The Well-Considered Garden (I915), which featured a Preface by Jekyll and extensive quotes from Ruskin, never alluded to the 'unmentionable' colour, although she discussed salmon, vivid and delicate pinks, purple, scarlet, crimson, and violet-purple in great detail. Since King cited Jekyll's remarks on the necessity of precisely describing colour and the importance of avoiding 'slip-slop' descriptions of plants and bulbs, and then went on to advocate rigorously accurate colour charts, one is left with the definite impression that the omission was deliberate.38

Other American women with an appreciation of Ruskin, Morris and the Arts & Crafts ideals confronted the issue of aniline dyes and their associations more directly. In I898, both Ellen and Margaret Miller and Margaret Whiting founded the Deerfield Society of Blue and White Needlework, an association of needlewomen that profited economically by preserving and reviving earlier floral needlework designs from the Connecticut Valley. By the I89os many rural New England farms were either abandoned or marginally productive. The group is important because its economic position was precarious and it was not part of the reform elite dealing with social problems on an abstract level. The Deerfield women transformed Ruskin's ideas into a strategy for the economic survival of their households.

The originators of the group, Ellen Miller and Margaret Whiting, studied art at the New York Academy of Design and then wrote and illustrated Wild Flowers of the Northeastern States (I895). The third founder, Margaret Miller, studied for a couple of years at Cooper Union in New York and subsequently also published and illustrated My Saturday Bird Class (I893). In addition to their art training, the women were well read, reform-minded and entirely businesslike in their operation of the Society. They recognized that their members sorely needed the money their needlework generated.

As Margaret Whiting noted:

Presently the idea came that it might be possible to adapt Ruskin's theory to Deerfield and establish a village industry which should be at once unique and in entire sympathy with the

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environment. As it happened, it was one of the earliest associated groups of craftworkers brought together in a single enterprise in our country'.39

Whiting also explained the goals of the group: From the beginning the society had a distinct aim and was governed by a considered plan: To avoid the doubtful value of advertising beyond the intrinsic worth of its output; to demand and get a return which should make the effort profitable; to produce the best possible work and keep it up to that standard'.4

In spite of the Society's name, the women stitched the exquisite floral designs using multiple colours. While initially working with purchased aniline threads, they soon discovered that the colour was not sunfast. Margaret and Ellen Miller subsequently experimented with natural dyestuffs to obtain better colours using madder to achieve red, crimson and rose tones as well as fustic for the pinks.

While organized to promote good design and craftsmanship within the framework of a labour organization that adequately compensated the individual for her skills, the Society had another important goal - that of conservation. In addition to recovering and recording the designs of disintegrating early eighteenth-century needlework, the group recorded and adapted the designs for textile documents composed of flax and dyes that would endure for future generations while co-existing sympathetically with the environment.

In many ways it is easy to dismiss the responses of Ruskin, Morris and Jekyll as well as Earle and the Deerfield women as reactionary or inconsequential given the increases in material welfare and consumption that marked the twentieth century. To do so, however, is deliberately to avoid the important social questions they addressed. If technological innovation is coupled with insufficient attention to human and environmental needs, then the costs may be significant.

Coalmines and railroads are readily linked with industrialization in the popular imagination, but only careful examination of technological developments in fabric dyeing and garden design makes apparent the connection between coal tar and aniline and arsenite of lime, both literally and figuratively. Gardens in urban parks were manifesta- tions of industrialization just as much as the railroads that facilitated the pollution of their trees and shrubs.

The design and cultivation of gardens is intimately integrated with the values and social choices of the larger society. Gardens cannot exist apart from the people who create them. The word 'malignant' implies evil and injury with a tendency to infiltrate an organism to produce deterioration and death. The nuanced responses of designers and patrons who chose to ban magenta from their borders are understandable once the detailed meaning of 'malignant magenta' is teased out, and one is reminded of the rich social and cultural complexities embedded in gardens.

Ruskin, Morris and Jekyll confronted issues of aesthetic integrity, political economy and environmental destruction as well as concerns about the ethical disposition of human and cultural resources as they grappled with the question of colour in the garden - again both figuratively and literally. Ruskin and Morris, as well as the Deerfield women on the other side of the Atlantic, sought to create alternative models for production and economic configurations compatible with environmental integrity. The activities of the women are important because they demonstrate that the ideas of Ruskin and Morris were not confined to a small English elite. Farm wives in Deerfield could earn badly needed

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GARDEN HISTORY 28:2

income by returning to older craft forms and modes of production. Reform ideas and

aspirations could permeate all levels of society. The garden and the depiction of its elements in textiles invariably exposed the

tensions between the uses made of technological innovation and the desire for social, environmental, and aesthetic cohesion and integrity. Garden writers and designers understood, consciously or unconsciously, aspersions cast on vibrant magenta flowers

'running amok' in beds and borders. The selective use or avoidance of magenta by garden- makers reveals the aesthetic perspective informing their garden designs as well as their

apprehension about technological and social change.

REFERENCES

1 Brent Elliott, Victorian Gardens (London: B. T. Batsford, 1986), I23-8, 148-5z, 205-9.

2 Stuart Robinson, A History of Dyed Textiles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 30.

3 Leonard Trengove, 'Chemistry at the Royal Society of London in the eighteenth century - iv', Annals of Science, xxvi (1970), 331-53; Agusti Nieto-Galan, 'Calico printing and chemical knowledge in Lancashire in the early nineteenth century: the life and "colours" of John Mercer', Annals of Science, LIV (1997), I-z8.

4 Robinson, History of Dyed Textiles, 33; Joyce Storey, The Thames and Hudson Manual of Dyes and Fabrics (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978), 73. Thomas Love's dye manual featured an Appendix, 'General Instructions for the Use of Aniline Colors', as well as the Philadelphia and Chicago addresses of Messrs Andreykovicz & Dunk, importers and manufacturing chemists of aniline dyes; Thomas Love, The Art of Dyeing, Cleaning, Scouring and Finishing, on the Most Approved English and French Methods, znd American edn (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1869), 324-35.

5 L. D. Bailey, The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture, 3rd edn (New York: Macmillan, I919), II, 1042.

6 C. V. Riley, 'Insects', Gardeners' Chronicle (o2 June 1885), 786.

7 L. H. Bailey, 'Spraying fruit trees', Gardeners' Chronicle (20 July 1889), 72.

8 Professor Cook, 'Precautions in spraying poisons', American Gardener, x (January 1889), 22.

9 'The Horticultural Exhibition', Gardeners' Chronicle (7 March 1891), 309.

10 'Poisoning by a "Weed-killer"', Gardeners' Chronicle (27 June 1891), 790; 'Death from weed- killer', Gardeners' Chronicle (4 July 1891), i6; 'Poisoning by weed-killer', Gardeners' Chronicle (z8 November 1891), 646; review of 'Bees in Relation to Fruit, by J. H. Panton', American Gardening, xiv (February 1893), z25; 'Notes', Garden and Forest (22 April 1896).

1 J. B. Thomas, 'Arsenic in American apples', Gardeners' Chronicle (I6January 1892), 84; T. [L.] H. Bailey, 'Are American apples poisonous?', Gardeners' Chronicle (2 April 1892), 439; B. T.

Galloway, 'Poisons on American fruits', Gardeners' Chronicle (i6 July 1892), 64; 'Poisonous apples', Gardeners' Chronicle (3 March 1894), 270.

12 Miriam Rothschild, Kate Garton and Lionel de Rothschild, The Rothschild Gardens (New York: Harry N. Abrams, I997), I3I-2.

13 'Market gardening under glass', Gardeners' Chronicle (8 April 1893), 415-16.

14 'Market gardening under glass', Gardeners' Chronicle (17 June 1893), 714-I5.

15 Rothschild et al., Rothschild Gardens, 38. 16 Hazel Conway, People's Parks: The Design and

Development of Victorian Parks in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), I80-2.

17 Gertrude Jekyll, Wood and Garden (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1899; repr. Salem: Ayer, 1983), 224.

18 Alice M. Earle, Old Time Gardens (New York: Macmillan, I9oI; repr., Detroit: Singing Tree, 1968), 244.

19 Richard Bisgrove, The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll (Boston: Little Brown, 1992), 7, Io-II; idem, 'Gertrude Jekyll: a gardener ahead of her time', in Gertrude Jekyll: Essays on the Life of A Working Amateur, edited by Michael Tooley and Primrose Arnander (Witton-le-Wear: Michaelmas, I995), I49.

20 E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds), The Library Edition of the Complete Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903-12), vol. v: Modern Painters, in (1904), 32I.

21 Ibid., vi: Modern Painters, iv (I904), 69, 70. 22

Ibid., viii: Modern Painters, v (1905), 414 (original emphasis). 3 Ibid., 418-I9.

24 Ibid., I6o. 25 Ibid., xxxiv: The Storm-Cloud of the

Nineteenth Century (1908), 32-3. 26 Ibid., 38-9 (original emphasis). 27

Wolfgang Kemp, The Desire of My Eyes: The Life and Work of John Ruskin, translated by Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), 424-6.

28 Cook and Wedderburn, Complete Works of John Ruskin, x: The Stones of Venice, II (I904), 146; Peter Faulkner, Against the Age: An Introduction to

220




William Morris (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980), 5.

29 Linda Parry, William Morris Textiles (New York: Viking, 1983), 44-52.

30 Ibid., 43-4. 31 Ibid., 150-6. 32 Mavis Batey, 'Gertrude Jekyll and the Arts &

Crafts movement', in Gertrude Jekyll: Essays on the Life of a Working Amateur, edited by Michael Tooley and Primrose Arnander (Witton-le-Wear: Michaelmas, I995), 64-70.

33 For an extensive bibliography, see Margaret Hastings and Michael Tooley, 'Bibliography', in Tooley and Arnander, Gertrude Jekyll, I85-97.

34 Judith B. Tankard, 'Of books and archives: an American perspective on Gertrude Jekyll's legacy',

Journal of the New England Garden History Society, vI (Fall 1998), 42-5I.

35 Gertrude Jekyll, Color Schemes for the Flower Garden [1908], revd edn with an Introduction by Graham S. Thomas (Salem: Ayer, 1983), 83. 36 Ibid.

37 Earle, Old Time Gardens, 245. 38 Mrs Francis [Louise Y.] King, The Well-

Considered Garden, with a Preface by Gertrude Jekyll (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, I9I5), ix, x, 3, 13, 79-80,224-8.

39 Margery Burnham Howe, Deerfield Embroidery (Deerfield: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, 1976), 20.

40 Ibid., z5.

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Colour in the Garden: 'Malignant Magenta