MAUD GRIEVE (née Law)

The outbreak of WWI cut off Britain from the sources of many drugs, as described in Medicinal Plants in Wartime (2015). These were drugs derived from plants which either grew or were farmed in Germany or by its allies, or were traded via world markets based in Germany. Potential solutions included collecting plants from the British countryside, or farming them; the problem with the latter strategy was that few people possessed the requisite expertise.

At Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire, Maud Grieve had in 1908 established what was, at first, a training school for ‘jobbing gardeners’ but which later became known as ‘The Whins Medicinal and Commercial Herb School and Farm’¹.

There, in wartime and with the help of women such as Edith Wheelwright and some of the Belgian refugees who found sanctuary in Buckinghamshire, Maud trained would-be growers of medicinal herbs; growers who were encouraged by, among others, Edward Morrell Holmes (ex-lecturer in materia medica at the Pharmaceutical Society and then Curator of the Society’s museum).

In passing, David Prain has possible links with another person featured elsewhere on this site, Gabrielle Matthaei, or rather with Gabrielle’s husband, Albert Howard.

In 1904, Howard was appointed Economic Botanist at the new Indian Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa². The Institute’s first Director was Bernard Coventry, whose indigo works were known to the well-travelled Prain³. It seems unlikely that, as one of the most senior botanists in British India, Prain would not have been consulted about either Coventry’s appointment, or Howard’s. Prain’s studies of rust diseases (1896-7) formed the background to Howard’s own studies of the same diseases⁴.

To return to Maud, it seems clear that she had no formal botanical training - she was essentially self-taught. With the encouragement of her husband, who had a passion for collecting, the library at 'The Whins' was soon stocked with old herbals and, more generally, writings about materia medica and gardening.  To supplement her income Maud sold seeds and started writing a series of pamphlets about medicinal plants and their uses, their target audience ranging from ladies of the Women’s Farm and Gardening Union to students of pharmacy.

Maud’s contribution to the war effort was outstanding. She taught and inspired many who went on either to establish their own herb-growing gardens or to write about medicinal plants. Among the most distinguished was the Cheltenham Ladies College- and Oxford-educated Eleanour Sinclair Rhode. In 1919 she and Maud created the first herb garden at the Chelsea flower show, and three years later Rhode published, The Old English Herbals, 1922, (Longmans, Green & Co), a subject on which she had conducted post-graduate research at St Hilda’s College in Oxford. Eleanour combined a love of history – which she had studied at Oxford – with a love of plants, the latter possibly inspired by two innovative and inspiring biology teachers at Cheltenham, Charlotte Louise Laurie and Winifred Lily Boys-Smith⁴.

Maud was a founder member of the short-lived National Herb Growing Association (1914–17) and later president of The British Guild of Herb Growers (est. 1918.). Her business flourished as long as the war lasted. Sadly, after peace was restored, it steadily declined; first, because the trade in imported herbs recovered and, second, because economic depression gripped Britain. Maud was forced to close the farm in 1929, shortly after her husband’s death. She was, however, to find lasting fame through the many pamphlets and monographs she had written. That fame was realised thanks to someone with whom she did not always see eye-to-eye, Hilda Leyel, an entrepreneurial woman who recognised the potential in Maud’s writings. Claire de Carle, who has studied the letters exchanged between the two, concluded that Maud ‘…felt overshadowed by the dominant businesswoman who knew what she wanted and how to achieve it’.

A Modern Herbal, in two Volumes, edited by Leyel, was published in 1931 by Jonathan Cape. At 888 pages in length and with 96 plates, it was in Maud’s opinion the most complete herbal to be published since that of Culpeper in 1653. At the publisher’s suggestion, and in order to increase sales, notes on North American plants were included. The book was well reviewed (though not always its editing), sold within a year all 2000 copies printed, and was reprinted the next year. Only in 1947 was it listed as ‘out of print’, although modern, facsimile editions are still available.

In her book, Gardening Women. Their Stories From 1600 to the Present, 2010, Virago Press, Catherine Horwood traces the rise of the organic gardening movement; she finds connections between Maud Grieve and Lady Eve Balfour who was both a friend of Eleanour Sinclair Rhode and a most vociferous supporter of Sir Albert Howard’s doctrines of organic farming. 

Maud Grieve’s legacy was small in financial terms but in the way she influenced gardening, and herb growing in particular, it was immense.

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I thank Claire De Carle for allowing me to read her MA thesis, which was later published, see#1 below, and which forms the core of this account.

Sources

1.     De Carle, Claire. 2017.  Maud Grieve.  Now first let me tell you about the wonderful plant. (Available from claire@decarle.plus.com.)

2.     Howard, Louise E. 1953. Sir Albert Howard in India. London: Faber & Faber.

3.     ‘Bernard Coventry’. Wikipedia.

4.     Sen, Srabani. 2010. Scientific Enquiry in Agriculture in Colonial India: A Historical Perspective. Indian Journal of the History of Science, 45, 199-239. (see pp.223-235)

5.     Ayres, Peter. 2020. Women and the Natural Sciences in Edwardian Britain. In Search of Fellowship. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Now read Ada B Teetgen, or return to Medicinal Plants in Wartime