Elstow Garden Villages
Elstow
Elstow is a village and civil parish in the English county of Bedfordshire. John Bunyan, was born in the hamlet of Harrowden which, although not in the parish of Elstow, stands just a mile east of the actual village.
Countess Judith, niece of William the Conqueror founded a nunnery in Elstow in the year 1078. The Elstow nuns came from wealthy families and each came with an endowment of money and/or lands. So, by 1538 Elstow Abbey was valued as being the eighth richest Benedictine nunnery in England. On 26 August 1539, the Abbess was forced to surrender the Abbey, the manor of Elstow and all the Abbey's other lands and estates throughout England, to King Henry VIII, as part of his Dissolution of the Monasteries. So significant was the Abbey at Elstow that, even after the dissollution, the building was being considered for elevation to cathedral status, but this never transpired.
The Saunderson Tractor and Implement Co. was founded in Elstow in 1890: it was one of the biggest tractor makers by the time of the First World War. From an undisclosed date the firm continued as the Bedford Plough and Engineering Co.
Gardening
Gardening is the practice of growing plants. Ornamental plants are normally grown for their flowers, foliage, overall appearance, or for their dyes. Useful plants are grown for consumption (vegetables, fruits, herbs, and leaf vegetables) or for medicinal use. A gardener is someone who practices gardening.
Gardening ranges in scale from fruit orchards, to long boulevard plantings with one or more different types of shrubs, trees and herbaceous plants, to residential yards including lawns and foundation plantings, to large or small containers grown inside or outside. Gardening may be very specialized, with only one type of plant grown, or involve a large number of different plants in mixed plantings. It involves an active participation in the growing of plants, and tends to be labor intensive, which differentiates it from farming or forestry.
Village
A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet, Though often located in rural areas, the term urban village is also applied to certain urban neighbourhoods, such as the West Village in Manhattan, New York City and the Saifi Village in Beirut, Lebanon, as well as Hampstead Village in the London conurbation. Villages are normally permanent, with fixed dwellings; however, transient villages can occur. Further, the dwellings of a village are fairly close to one another, not scattered broadly over the landscape ('dispersed settlement')
Historically, villages were the usual form of community for societies that practise subsistence agriculture, and also for some non-agricultural societies. In Great Britain, a hamlet earned the right to be called a village when it built a church. In many cultures, towns and cities were few, with only a small proportion of the population living in them. The Industrial Revolution attracted people in larger numbers to work in mills and factories; the concentration of people caused many villages to grow into towns and cities. This also enabled specialization of labor and crafts, and development of many trades. The trend of urbanisation continues, though not always in connection with industrialisation. Villages have been eclipsed in importance as units of human society and settlement.