Från mästare till konsulent. Länsträdgårdsmästarnas 40-åriga historia i Skaraborgs län

Abstract

As a reaction to the growing interest within agriculture in Sweden in the middle of the 18th century an organization called Hushållningssällskapet was founded in each county. When the population grew their land and gardens shrank. Hushållningssällskapet worked towards a vision that the people should be able to live of their own land. Hushållningssällskapen started to hire gardeners in order to reach their vision, so called county-gardeners. Skaraborg county hired county-gardeners between 1870 and 1910. One part of the county-gardeners job was travelling around the county by train or boat to visit and work in the inhabitant’s gardens. Their job was mainly focused on pomoculture and they supplied information on how to operate a profitable fruit garden. Except pruning, thinning, fruit sorting and planting or giving away free fruit trees they had many other duties. For example they held lectures, wrote articles in Hushållningssällskapets magazine, draw blue prints for gardens and parks, kept statistics on plants, analysed the garden culture in the county and operated nursery-gardens. The county-gardeners contract says that the job includes preforming “all sort of duties connected to gardening”. As the county-gardeners roll begun to slide into more teaching and supervising, it did take him further from his tools. When the last county-gardener quit 1910, Hushållningssällskapet in Skaraborg changed the title to garden consultant. This job focused on administration and solving bigger issues within the garden industry in the county from their office. The purpose of this project is to investigate the history of the county-gardeners in Skaraborg county with the objective to conclude if their work could have a value to garden conservation today.