A NEW blue plaque to honour Britain's first female professional gardener is due to be unveiled this week.

On Thursday, June 9, the blue plaque of Fanny Rollo Wilkinson (1855-1951), the first woman to have a career as a landscape gardener, will be revealed at Middlethorpe Hall, Bishopthorpe Road, at 2pm, by the new Sherriff of York, Suzie Mercer.

Fanny was inspired to take up a career in landscape gardening after having moved into Middlethorpe Hall, which is now a hotel and spa, with her family in 1878 after her father inherited it.

Duncan Marks, the civil society manager of the York Civic Trust said: "The Civic Trust has recognised several York-connected gardeners through its blue plaque scheme.

"It's a rich tradition for the city, Fanny Wilkinson takes her rightful place amongst these people on the merit of her work as a landscape gardener and her association with the city.

"She was a pioneer in her field, challenging social assumptions of her day that an upper middle class woman might take up gardening and gain a good reputation and recognition for it, but should never seek payment for it as a career.

"Her breaking of this 'glass ceiling' was part of her wider ideas of the equal role for women in society and the role the natural environment can offer in inspiring people, both rich and poor."

In 1884 she became honorary landscape gardener to the Metropolitan Public Gardens, and the Kyrle Society – an initiative which developed public gardens ‘for the benefit of the poor’ with Octavia Hill, who helped found the National Trust.

Throughout her career she laid out 75 public gardens over 20 years, a great number in London’s East End to benefit the poor, hiring previously unemployed men, and advocated for planting trees in town centres where the air was polluted by smoke.

She said in the Women's Penny Paper in 1890: "Often my customers prefer that their own men should work under me…The gardeners occasionally imagine they know better, and they are often stupid and pig-headed.

“I certainly do not let myself be underpaid as many women do. There are people who think because I am a woman I will ask less than a men.”

She socialised with other female social reformers, including suffragette Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett and the UK’s first woman doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.