It was during the troubled reign of Charles I that the very first bananas seen in Britain went on display.
The runaway success of Alicia Amherst’s History of Gardening in England (1895) surprised nobody more than its modest author. Plenty of horticultural manuals offered practical advice but Amherst and her contemporary Gertrude Jekyll helped put gardening into its wider social context. In this passage, she records the first appearance of a much-loved fruit but also gives us a glimpse of a courageous man.