William Keane

Who is William Keane?

William Keane was a 19th-century English gardener and garden writer, whose descriptions of important gardens in Surrey and Middlesex remain a source of historical reference.

Keane was the gardener at Orwell Park, Ipswich, and a contributor to the Journal of Horticulture. He wrote five gardening books, first published between 1849 and 1861.

His first work was The Beauties of Surrey, published in 1849, described as being a particular description of about one hundred and twenty seats of the nobility and gentry, in the County of Surrey, comprising all that is interesting in the departments of horticulture, floriculture, arboriculture, park and pleasure ground scenery, from visits made in the spring of 1849.

Keane called his book as a ‘labour of love’. He had spent the first part of 1849 visiting gardens at country houses in Surrey, and decided to write up the results for others to enjoy: Now that railroads, the annihilators of space and time, afford such facilities for visiting various and distant places in the country, it is assuredly an advantage to be provided with a description of the different Seats, to select that neighbourhood where the particular information that each person may choose to seek would be best found. If it were necessary it would be easy to describe the many useful purposes that such visits would secure, either for a knowledge of the improved system of plant cultivation, park and pleasure ground scenery, fruit or flower forcing, flower garden embellishment, fruit tree and vegetable garden management, the best horticultural structures, pinetums, in short, every improvement that would be interesting to gardeners in particular, or to the public in general.