Shirley Hibberd: The People’s Gardener of the Victorian Age

November 16, 1890

On this day, Shirley Hibberd, the English journalist and garden writer, died.

He is remembered as one of the most successful and beloved gardening writers of the Victorian era — a man whose passion for plants reached into homes and hearts far beyond the walls of great estates.

Shirley edited three enormously popular gardening magazines, including Amateur Gardening, which remarkably is still published today.

He was a champion of amateur gardeners at a time when high society sneered at them, and his words encouraged countless ordinary people to take joy in cultivating beauty at their windows, in their backyards, and on their allotments.

For decades, Shirley’s life story faded into obscurity until garden historian Anne Wilkinson devoted fifteen painstaking years to recovering it.

The result is a biography that reveals not just his gardening triumphs, but also the sorrows and struggles that shaped him. Between 1877 and 1885, Shirley’s story reads like a tapestry of both growth and grief:

• 1877: The Amateur's Kitchen Garden was published.
• 1878: His Home Culture of the Watercress earned him a gold medal from the RHS.
• 1879: He published Water for Nothing Every House its own Water Supply; also began issuing Familiar Garden Flowers.
• 1880: Shirley and his wife Sarah moved to Brownswood Park, Highbury. Later that year, Sarah died of heart disease and was buried in Abney Park Cemetery.
• 1881: A feud erupted between Shirley and fellow garden writer William Robinson over an asparagus competition. Shirley was invited to edit Amateur Gardening, a new low-cost paper. That same year, he remarried to Ellen Mantle, his cook.
• 1884: The family moved to Priory Road, Kew. Shirley worked with the RHS on renovating their Chiswick garden and served on both the Floral and Garden Committees.
• 1885: His daughter Ellen was born, but tragedy struck again with the death of his wife, Ellen, who was buried beside Sarah at Abney Park. That year, he published The Golden Gate and Silver Steps and organized a Pear Conference.

Through it all, Shirley kept writing, teaching, and tending — turning grief into ink and soil.

His curiosity was boundless: from aquariums and beekeeping to water supply and town gardening, no corner of natural life escaped his enthusiasm.

In many ways, Shirley Hibberd was ahead of his time, advocating conservation and celebrating the everyday gardener when others reserved horticulture for the privileged few.

In one of his most memorable reflections, Shirley wrote of the joy flowers bring into a household:

“...the social qualities of flowers [are so many] that it would be a difficult ... to enumerate them.

... [Upon] entering a room, [we always feel welcome when] we find a display of flowers on the table.

Where there are flowers about, the hostess appears glad, the children pleased, the very dog and cat are grateful...

the whole scene and [all souls seem] more hearty, homely, and beautiful, [in the presence of] the bewitching roses, and orchids and lilies and mignonette!”

Perhaps that is Shirley Hibberd’s greatest legacy: the reminder that flowers are not only beautiful, but social — lifting the spirits of all who gather around them. In this way, Shirley was not simply a garden writer.

He was the people’s gardener, teaching that beauty belonged not only in great halls and conservatories, but also on humble tables and in modest backyards, where roses, lilies, and mignonette make every soul more “hearty, homely, and beautiful.”