History
The main part of the gardens is a walled rock garden which was laid out by the botanist Robert Wood Williamson on a south-facing slope. Williamson sold the gardens and rockery along with his house, called The Croft, to Alderman Fletcher Moss, in 1912.
Fletcher Moss, born in July 1843, was a philanthropist who led many public works in Manchester; in 1915 he persuaded the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie to fund the construction of a public library in Didsbury. He lived in the Old Parsonage by St James's Church, Stenner Lane, having taken over residence from the vicar, a Rev W J Kidd, who left the property complaining it was haunted. In 1919 he gifted the gardens to the people of Manchester, declaring he had “determined to offer all that part of my property extending from the Fletcher Moss Playing Fields to Stenner Lane, to the corporation if I could retain the use of it for my life”.
Fletcher Moss spent most of his time looking at old buildings, strangely, he wrote books and novels.
Robert Williamson's old house, the Croft, was the location of the first meeting of the organisation later to become known as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. In 1889, Emily Williamson née Bateson (Robert’s wife) formed a group called the ‘Plummage League’ to protest against the breeding of birds for plumage to be used in women's hats, a highly fashionable practice at the time. The group gained popularity and eventually amalgamated with the ‘Fur and Feather League’ in Croydon, and formed the RSPB. Garden
Read more about this topic: Fletcher Moss Botanical Garden
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The custard is setting; meanwhile
I not only have my own history to worry about
But am forced to fret over insufficient details related to large
Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point
Of being, with or without my help, if any were forthcoming.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)