History of The Victorian Garden
Lady Frances Jane Glover-Anderson is our Founder, Lindsay Salthouse’s Victorian great grandmother who was born in 1850. Her diaries which recorded many Noble families’s skincare recipes, were only discovered in 1972 by her mother when dismantling her grandmother’s (Lady Frances’ own mother) estate after she died.
When Lindsay was young, her grandmother had talked about Lady Frances frequently, and explained she was a renowned herbalist in Scotland and England during the Victorian era. The two diaries described family life in the 1800’s when Victoria was Queen of England.
Frances was married to Stephen, Lindsay’s great grandfather, a partner in the East Indian Shipping Company and because of his job, Frances spent a lot of time alone at their ancestral home in Scotland, as his work resulted in extensive periods spent traveling in the East. With time, and blessed with many servants to help her, Frances planted her first formal herb garden for culinary and personal use at their home during the mid-1800’s.
More than 100 years later, and running South Africa’s first Organic Skincare Salon, Lindsay decided to start making her own products using these recipes in the her salon. Her parents suggested to her that she should look at her great grandmother’s diaries and try to recreate some of the Victorian creams which Lady Frances created for her friends and family from her own organic ingredients. In those days everything was grown organically, no spraying of pesticides, no poisons sprayed in the gardens, only essential oils were used to spray plants. And the base of creams and lotions she used was beeswax – in those days they had no Shea Butter or Jojoba Wax)…..and she kept her own apiaries, and so harvested honey, beeswax and propolis for use in the products. Plenty of herbs and floral waters were used.
Most traditional Victorian skincare recipes contained arsenic powder, as the greatest beauty asset was considered to be a white skin. Of course this is a poison, and it was the one ingredient which was not natural or organic. We removed these ingredients, and base our recipes on aromatherapy, only formulated with pure essential oils and cold pressure plant oils; resulting in our ingredients being more than 99% natural and organic.
The family story as related by founder Lindsay’s grandmother (Lady Frances’ daughter), was that some of these creams were commissioned by Queen Victoria who was a family friend of the Glover-Andersons – destined to be given as gifts to friends and the ladies at court.
The making of the creams & lotions was quite lengthy – it entailed the harvesting of the different ingredients — fresh herbs, flowers, and the distillation from these raw plants to produce organic essential oils as well as imported oils from the East (The great grandfather’s business). Products were then made by hand, using a double boiler and the ingredients – beeswax, essential oils, Rosewater, Honey and Propolis and fresh herbs (later removed from the mix before it set). In those days, no preservatives were used and preservation would have been provided by essential oils – known for their antibacterial and antiseptic, preservation properties.
Lindsay Salthouse, our founder and great granddaughter of Lady Frances Jane Glover-Anderson.