Occupation Research: Farmer vs Gardener

One of my favourite aspects of researching family history is discovering the various occupations or jobs that my ancestors had. 

Of course several of my ancestors were shown to be farmers or farm labourers on records. Farmers would have probably worked their own land. Farm labourers would have worked someone else’s land. But I also had a couple of ancestors listed as gardeners. Gardener doesn’t even show up in some lists of historical occupations, and some historians believe that gardener was simply an alternative term for farm labourer used in some regions. But upon further research, gardener appears to be something different. 

While farmer or farm labourer was used to identify those who worked cultivating food, gardener referred to those who worked with non-food plants. While most people did not have gardens as we imagine them today, there were gardens — private, public and commercial. A private garden would be what you would find on an estate or on the property of a large house. A public garden would be one that existed in a park. In those cases, a gardener might be more like a groundskeeper.

But a commercial garden might be used to grow flowers sold at markets. Cut flowers were popular throughout history and were used inside homes, hotels, and public buildings as well as for decor at weddings and other events. You can judge how much flowers were in use by the number of 'still life' paintings done throughout the centuries. Below is a vase of flowers painted in 1599 by Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625) titled Bouquet.

I don't know for sure that my ancestors who were listed as gardeners were not farmers, but the possibility exists that they worked with flowers either in a garden or in a commercial cultivation facility.