32 Facts About Shirley Hibberd

James Shirley Hibberd was one of the most popular and successful gardening writers of the Victorian era.

Shirley Hibberd was a best-selling editor of three gardening magazines, including Amateur Gardening, the only 19th-century gardening magazine still being published today.

Shirley Hibberd wrote over a dozen books on gardening and several more on natural history and related subjects.

Shirley Hibberd promoted town gardening, aquariums, bee-keeping, vegetarianism, water recycling, environmental conservation and the prevention of cruelty to animals and birds, all before they were taken up as 'causes' in the twentieth century.

Shirley Hibberd was born in Mile End Old Town, now part of Stepney, in east London, England.

Shirley Hibberd's parentage is obscure but it is believed that his father died when he was about 14 and he then started work as a bookbinder or bookseller.

Shirley Hibberd's earliest known writing dates to about 1849, when he was active in the Vegetarian Society and edited their magazine, the Vegetarian Advocate.

Shirley Hibberd even gave a series of talks on the Crimean War at Wyld's Great Globe in Leicester Square.

Shirley Hibberd soon discovered the difficulties of gardening in inner city London where the atmosphere was laden with soot, and fog and smog was prevalent throughout the winter.

Shirley Hibberd encouraged correspondence and discussion, answered queries and encouraged local amateurs to write for him.

Shirley Hibberd began to publish a series of books on every aspect of gardening and reported on his own experiments in trying out different varieties of plants.

Shirley Hibberd became particularly interested in the problem of potato blight which had caused the Irish famine, developing his own method of growing potatoes on tiles to combat the disease.

Shirley Hibberd produced two series of books with coloured plates, New and Rare Beautiful-Leaved Plants and Familiar Garden Flowers, a book about wild flowers, Field Flowers and was the first person to make a study of ivy with his monograph, The Ivy.

Shirley Hibberd always believed that man should live in harmony with the natural world.

Shirley Hibberd exhibited his 'town honey' at horticultural shows and promoted the idea of keeping bees on balconies and even inside people's houses, where they could come and go through windows.

Shirley Hibberd was adamant that cruelty to animals should cease, protected garden birds and caged birds, and developed a method of growing watercress in troughs, to avoid diseases from plants grown in polluted water.

Shirley Hibberd denigrated the 'spoliation' of wild flowers and in particular native ferns, which had become a collecting obsession, known as pteridomania in the 1860s and 70s.

Shirley Hibberd looked at the science behind the way the plants grew and promoted the idea of growing wild flowers in the cases, rather than the usual ferns and foliage plants.

Shirley Hibberd wrote a moving account of their life after 1870, when they took on a new garden, fraught with difficulty, which he believed contributed to her death.

Shirley Hibberd himself died five years later at the age of 65, and his daughter was adopted by his nephew, Charles Montague Mitchell.

Shirley Hibberd subsequently trained as a nurse at the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, in east London.

Shirley Hibberd died at 1 Priory Road, Kew, on 16 November 1890 and was buried six days later in Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington.

Shirley Hibberd never flinched from argument if he felt justified in his own position.

Shirley Hibberd had helped Robinson in the 1860s by publishing articles by him in the Floral World and giving good reviews of Robinson's early books.

Shirley Hibberd then reported on an asparagus competition organised by Robinson that was a failure.

Shirley Hibberd ended the quarrel with a quotation from Shakespeare's King John implying that Robinson was of so little account that a drop of water would drown him.

Shirley Hibberd is rarely given the credit he deserves as a pioneer in amateur gardening.

Shirley Hibberd's gardens, being town gardens in inner London, have all disappeared through being built over.

Unlike the books of Jekyll and Robinson, Shirley Hibberd's books are all out of print, although two were re-issued as facsimiles in the 1980s.

Shirley Hibberd constantly condemned the use of bedding plants by amateurs as he felt they were unsuitable for small gardens whose owners would not have the facilities for growing them in glasshouses or the finances to buy them in sufficient quantities, and nor would they be able to maintain such displays adequately.

Shirley Hibberd stated that the most important part of a flower garden was the display of herbaceous perennial plants and shrubs.

Shirley Hibberd taught amateurs all the skills of growing fruit and vegetables, secrets so closely guarded by professionals that they refused to write about them for general readers.