Jane Wells Webb Loudon 

‘ Miss Webb was modest and short with a shy twinkle in her eye.’ This is a quote from The Claudians: gardens, landscapes, reason and faith: John Claudius Loudon and Claudius Buchanan, Tom Turner (Kindle, 2024).

Unveiling the Life of Jane Wells Webb Loudon

Bea Howe published a fictionalised biography in 1961 with the title Lady with Green Fingers: the Life of Jane Loudon. Howe states in the Preface that ‘It would have been difficult to write my biography of Jane Loudon without the aid of the diary kept by her only child, Agnes, between the years 1849 to 1863. I would like to thank her great-grandson, Mr Hugh Robert Markham Spofforth*, for lending it to me and for producing other family data. I am much indebted, to, to his sister, Mrs Rex Spofforth, for the only likeness found of Jane Loudon, a miniature, together with the charming picture of Markham Spofforth, Agnes Loudon’s husband. I have constructed the first years of Jane Loudon’s life, when she was a girl living at Kitwell House, outside Birmingham, from autobiographical material which is embedded, so discreetly, in her books.’ The word ‘constructed’ informs us that Howe’s book is, like The Claudians, fictionalised.

Jane Loudon lived at Kitwell House near Birmingham, which Howe visited before it became the site of a secondary school. She wrote that ‘I have seen that splendid view beheld by Jane when a girl. Gently the green fields of Worcestershire roll away from Kitwell House until they fade into the dim, blue, misty outlines of the distant Clent Hills. In London, Jane made friends and lived, probably in a room in a lodging house in North Street.

Howe gives an imagined image of Jane on the day she met her future husband: ‘One evening in February, 1830, John Claudius Loudon met the young author of The Mummy, face to face, in a London drawing-room. In the soft glow of flattering lamplight, he saw a demure girl of twenty-three looking up at him from the low chair in which she was seated. She was small and delicately made, with silk brown hair worn in ringlets. It was the day of the wasp waist and wide skirts worn over several petticoats topped by a low-necked bodice that features the new balloon sleeves. Mist Jane Webb wore a plum silk dress of this kind quadrilled with cyclamen - plum being a fashionable shade that winter.’ Howe believed Jane was born on 19th August 1807. It is much more likely that she was born in 1800 so that her age would have been 30 when she met her future husband.

Jane Loudon’s Influence on Victorian Gardening and Literature

Jane Wells Webb Loudon was not only a prolific author but also a significant figure in Victorian gardening. After her marriage to John Claudius Loudon, a well-known landscape designer, Jane transitioned from writing Gothic novels to pioneering horticultural literature aimed at the growing middle class. Her most notable work, The Ladies’ Companion to the Flower Garden, became an essential guide for women who wished to cultivate their own gardens. Jane’s books were among the first to make gardening accessible to a wider audience, particularly women, marking her as a trailblazer in both literature and horticulture. Her works bridged the gap between these two fields, contributing to the broader cultural appreciation of gardening during the Victorian era.

See also: Gardenvisit.com appreciation of John Claudius Loudon.