gardenage

English

Etymology

garden +‎ -age

Noun

gardenage (uncountable)

1. (dated) The set of activities pertaining to gardening, including design, planting, cultivating species, etc.; horticulture.
   • 1853, Agnes Strickland, ‎Elisabeth Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, page 209:

     "The gardenage" that had airs in it "freer than those that were more stiff," was, at the close of the seventeenth century, completely on a par with the Dutch architecture perpetrated by Mary and her spouse.

   • 1900 June 2, E. Law, “Gardenage at Hampton Court”, in Country Life, volume 7, number 178, page 710:

     One of the most charming examples of old English gardenage at Hampton Court is the sunk garden called the Pond Garden.

   • 1909, Thomas H. Mawson, “Garden Design-Comparative, Historical, and Ethical”, in Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, volume 34, page 368:

     The hanging gardens of Babylon were the greatest expression of the pride of man in the domain of gardenage ever known, one of the wonders of the world truly; the Garden of Eden was the truest expression of pure veneficence to the world in a material sense.

   • 1952, Geoffrey Grigson, Gardenage: Or, The Plants of Ninhursaga, page 101:

     A new civilization had struggled up from the long centuries of barbaric gardenage in which the food plants had been developed, not only the potatoes and maize, but our French beans and scarlet runners, our pumpkins and our tobacco and the tomatoes we used to call Apples of Peru.