Still Places #4 : Women in the Garden

All Text & Images: Dom Galloway | GardenSpace (unless otherwise noted)

For much of human history, women’s lives were bound by household duties, constrained by social expectation, and limited in the scope of public expression. Yet within those boundaries, gardens opened a space of freedom. To cultivate ground, to arrange plants, to design and shape—these acts offered women autonomy, authorship, and creative voice in a world that often denied them all three.

In Indigenous cultures, such as those of Aboriginal Australia, women held profound knowledge of land and plant life. They gathered, cultivated, and cared for country, carrying authority through their stewardship of food sources and nurturing landscapes. Even within strongly patriarchal societies, this role grounded them in a form of foundational power—an unbroken intimacy with place and its sustaining capacity.

Flannery Garden, Yass NSW

A similar pattern emerged in the medieval convents of Europe. Behind cloister walls, nuns tended physic gardens where herbs were grown for medicine, flowers for worship, and vegetables for sustenance. Here, women became healers, pharmacists, and agriculturalists—roles rarely available beyond convent life. These enclosed gardens were sites of devotion, but also of knowledge and agency, where women shaped landscapes and, in turn, shaped communities.

During the Renaissance, noblewomen in Italy oversaw courtyard gardens and commissioned ornamental terraces that displayed their families’ prestige while revealing their own artistic sensibilities. These cultivated spaces became settings for music, poetry, and conversation—arenas where influence could be expressed subtly but surely. In eighteenth-century England, women such as Lady Mary Coke designed landscapes that rivalled those of their celebrated male peers. By the nineteenth century, Jane Loudon’s pioneering books on horticulture brought gardening knowledge into reach for women of all classes, encouraging them to take up the spade and claim the garden as their own.

Across history countless women have quietly shaped gardens as sites of both necessity and expression. In village plots, they grew food and herbs, selecting and saving seeds that would sustain families for generations. In cottage gardens, flowers were arranged with as much artistry as in palace grounds. These domestic spaces, though often overlooked, reveal the garden as one of the few cultural domains where women’s creativity could flourish openly.

The twentieth century saw an even greater transformation. As social restrictions loosened, women began entering horticulture and landscape architecture professionally, expanding their influence into public parks, ecological reserves, and city landscapes. Figures such as Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West in England, Beatrix Farrand and Ellen Biddle Shipman in America, and Edna Walling in Australia demonstrated that women could shape landscapes on an international stage. Their work established legacies that still inform garden design today, inspiring contemporary leaders of ecological and community garden movements around the world.

"The love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies." - Gertrude Jekyll

Yet perhaps the most enduring connection between women and gardens is also the most intimate. For many, the garden remains a deeply personal realm—a retreat from caregiving, a space where time can be reclaimed, and a practice of creation that is neither judged nor constrained. To plant a seed, to shape a bed, to nurture growth: these are quiet gestures of self-assertion, affirming that the care given outwardly to the garden is also nourishment inwardly to the self.

In our own time, when women often continue to carry disproportionate burdens of labour, family, and expectation, the garden endures as a refuge of freedom. It is a place to shape beauty, to enter into a rhythm with larger cycles, to rediscover time that is one’s own. A canvas for vision, an archive of patience, a sanctuary of rest.

Through history, women in gardens have cultivated more than plants. They have cultivated knowledge, resilience, creativity, and identity. They have shown that a small patch of ground can be a site of independence, that tending the earth can be an act of authorship, and that growth, in all its forms, is both a personal and communal inheritance.

In the end, the story of women in gardens is not merely one of decoration or utility. It is the story of how a cultivated space—open paddocks, walled courtyards, cottage plots, suburban backyards—could hold within it the seeds of autonomy. And like the gardens themselves, those seeds continue to grow.

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