Haws and the golden age of horticulture
Have Haws cans be used through the past 140 or more years to nurture some of our most important plants and gardens? It’s highly likely
Courtesy British Library
John Haws founded his company in 1886, during an era regarded by many as the high point of gardening. New plants were being introduced from collecting expeditions around the world while advances in design, technology and manufacturing made their successful cultivation possible. A booming middle class, as well as increased garden ownership in new suburban villas, ensured there was plenty of demand for new plants… and new gardening equipment.
It's exciting to think that from the time of introduction in 1886, John Haws’ new watering cans will have played a role in raising so many plants known and loved today. Not only in the watering of (still-existing) specimens back when they were young seedlings, but also in the development of new varieties and selections long cherished by gardeners.
Courtesy British Library
The 19th century had already proved a remarkable, exciting time in the world of plants and gardens. Increasing exploration of remote parts of the globe resulted in a flood of new plant discoveries, while better transportation techniques (such as the Wardian case – a mini greenhouse-like structure used to transport plants on ships) allowed many of these to be introduced to the west, particularly the UK, as seeds or living plants.
Plant nurseries sprung up to raise, propagate and make available these new species to wealthy collectors, some such as the famous Veitch Nurseries in London and Devon, sponsoring plant hunters to undertake further expeditions and exploration. Elsewhere, growers began to make advances in plant breeding, creating new cultivated varieties (‘cultivars’) of fruit, vegetables and many dazzling ornamentals from roses, lilacs and peonies to daffodils and sweet peas.
At the same time, the industrial revolution was also in full bloom, allowing huge advances in the development of machinery and the advent of mass production. By the end of the century, glasshouses and conservatories were all the rage – and relatively affordable to many – allowing gardeners to grow tender plants or raise plants from seed and cuttings. New labour-saving garden tools such as lawnmowers made it possible for more people to keep a garden. Labour was still relatively cheap, so British great estates could afford to keep large teams of skilled garden staff able to maintain pleasure grounds and walled gardens to the highest level; rare, exotic orchids flourishing in new, efficient coal-heated greenhouses alongside crops of perfectly-formed peaches, melons and even pineapples.
Courtesy British Library
These decades, of course, also saw huge social change, with a growing wealthy middle class moving to large houses in the suburbs around major cities, a trend that continued well into the Edwardian period and ended only with the First World War. Gardening was now the fashionable thing to do.
Into this new world stepped John Haws, fresh from his time in the British Colonial Service in Mauritius in the 1880s, ready to start up a new company with a patented product perfectly suited to the needs of so many professional and amateur gardeners as well as nursery owners. He was able to employ plenty of staff and train many of them in production techniques at his London factory, while the watering cans themselves were sold from a small shop onsite.
His new cans were not cheap, but were quality items offering a better, more precise way of watering likely to boost success in raising new plants – and so, eventually, they started to gain recognition from experienced, discerning gardeners.
Were plants that graced world-famous gardens such as the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Chatsworth in Derbyshire or William Robinson’s Gravetye in Sussex and later, after the First World War, at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent or Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire raised and watered using Haws watering cans? Did dazzling magnolias and rhododendrons at Bodnant in Wales, yew hedges of the Hampton Court Palace maze or the soaring Canary Island palms of Tresco Abbey Gardens on the Isles of Scilly start life under the rose of a Haws can?
It is extremely likely. And it’s a legacy that continues: for example how many of those novel plants exhibited every year at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show since 1913 will have been fed and watered by a Haws watering can? Many, many hundreds, in all likelihood.
Image courtesy of The Bristish Library