This article is a revised excerpt from my Master’s thesis and focuses on Jane Loudon, a Victorian writer and cultural mediator who published several educational books on the topics of gardening and botany in the 1840s. Her works were mostly aimed at middle-class women who did not have the opportunity to study natural sciences at school and who were usually deterred from physically dealing with gardening practices. Within Loudon’s production, Instructions in Gardening for Ladies (1840) is especially worth mentioning, since it both provided technical information and morally encouraged women to look after their gardens in a creative and responsible way, thus starting to deconstruct the Victorian notion of feminine ‘delicacy’ and the gender assumptions linked to the separate spheres ideology.…
