Women's long and difficult path to their own cultivation

Women are now a dominant force in Sweden's professional gardening scene, with fresh-faced women in work pants and colorful spades becoming a common sight. Gardening profiles and influencers are predominantly female, and among authors of gardening books, male names are the exception. Most strikingly, company vans bearing the names of female-owned gardening businesses are increasingly visible.

This shift is not entirely surprising given the ancient associations between women, earth, and gardens. In agrarian societies, men worked the fields while women managed the household, including the kitchen garden for sustenance. "Many of women's responsibilities were physically demanding, and they held significant responsibility for household production. This was reflected in the perception of rural women as responsible, independent, and physically strong," write Boel Nordgren and Inger Olausson, authors of the 2023 book "Trädgårdsmästarinnor. Hundra års kamp för jämställd trädgårdsutbildning" (Garden Mistresses: A Hundred Years of Struggle for Equal Horticultural Education), the first of its kind.

However, a peculiar turn occurred. Women were suddenly deemed too frail for strenuous garden work and were barred from horticultural training programs. The first such program, established in 1791 at the Bergianska Garden, was exclusively for men and remained so for over a century. It wasn't until 1899 that a single gardening school for women opened at Espenäs, offering training in cultivation for both home use and small-scale sales, providing a path to independent life – if they remained unmarried.

Legal barriers persisted until 1863, when a law granted unmarried women over 25 legal majority and control over their assets, though this status was lost upon marriage. The journey to today's female dominance in the gardening industry was arduous. An exhibition on Sweden's female gardening pioneers at Sofiero Castle serves as a poignant reminder of how, as a young feminist, the author recognized the marginalization and even criminalization of midwives as their ancient profession became professionalized and male doctors sought control over the lucrative birth market.

Midwives were branded "ignorant," "illiterate," and even "dangerous to society." The parallels to the female gardening pioneers depicted in the exhibition's black-and-white photographs, with their neat hairstyles, high-necked blouses, and long skirts, are clear, even if the stakes were not as high. Reflecting on it, the midwife and the garden mistress might be considered the world's oldest female professions, far more so than the patriarchal trope of prostitutes.