Fanny Rollo Wilkinson

Fanny Wilkinson was born in 1855. She was educated abroad and by the end of 1883 had completed an 18-month course at the Crystal Palace School of Landscape Gardening and Practical Horticulture. Acceptance on the course had proved challenging, but nonetheless Wilkinson was elected honorary landscape gardener to the Metropolitan Public Gardens in 1884. In 1887 she laid out the new public park at Vauxhall in London.

After a couple of years her honorary position became professional, and she made it clear that she expected to be paid the same rate as a man. She was later involved in designing Goldsmith's Square in Hackney, Meath Gardens in Bethnal Green and Myatt's Field in Camberwell. She was a founder member of the Women's Agricultural and Horticultural International Union (1899). In 1904 she became the first female principal of Swanley Horticultural College, a role which she retained until 1916. She spent her retirement breeding goats and died at the age of 95 in 1951.