An Economic History of the English Garden
£1.90
‘Roderick Floud’s ground-breaking study of the history, money, places and personalities involved in British gardens over the past 350 years gives fascinating insight into why gardening is part of this country’s soul.’ Michael Heseltine, Deputy Prime Minister (1996-1997)
‘Thousands of books have been written about the history of British gardens but Roderick Floud, one of Britain’s most distinguished economic historians, asks new and important questions: how much did gardens cost to build and maintain, and where did the money come from? Superbly researched, it is full of information which will surprise both economists and gardeners. The book is fun as well as edifying: Floud shows us gardens grand and humble, and introduces us gardeners, plantsmen and technologies in wonderful varieties.’ Jane Humphries, Centennial Professor, London School of Economics
At least since the seventeenth century, most of the English population have been unable to stop making, improving and dreaming of gardens. Yet in all the thousands of books about them, this is the first to address seriously the question of how much gardens and gardening have cost, and to work out the place of gardens in the economic, as well as the horticultural, life of the nation. It is a new kind of gardening history.
Beginning with the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Roderick Floud describes the role of the monarchy and central and local government in creating gardens, as well as that of the (generally aristocratic or plutocratic) builders of the great gardens of Stuart, Georgian and Victorian England. He considers the designers of these gardens as both artists and businessmen – often earning enormous sums by modern standards, matched by the nurserymen and plant collectors who supplied their plants. He uncovers the lives and rewards of working gardeners, the domestic gardens that came with the growth of suburbs and the impact of gardening on technical developments from man-made lakes to central heating.
AN ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH GARDEN shows the extraordinary commitment of money as well as time that the English have made to gardens and gardening over three and a half centuries. It reveals the connections of our gardens to the re-establishment of the English monarchy, the national debt, transport during the Industrial Revolution, the new industries of steam, glass and iron, and the built environment that is now all around us. It is a fresh perspective on the history of England and will open the eyes of gardeners – and garden visitors – to an unexpected dimension of what they do.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Penguin (7 Nov. 2019) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| File size | 31283 KB |
| Text-to-Speech | Enabled |
| Screen Reader | Supported |
| Enhanced typesetting | Enabled |
| X-Ray | Not Enabled |
| Word Wise | Enabled |
| Sticky notes | On Kindle Scribe |
| Print length | 401 pages |
by Helen Musson
Brilliant!
by Mark Jeffery
An original aspect of this subject
by Lally
A fascinating account of the development of the English garden, but the equivalences in money often seem way, way out to me.
I love Jane Austen’s novels, and JA spends a lot of time telling us what her characters are worth in financial terms. Mr Darcy has £10K a year, which Mr Floud equates to almost £7M in today’s money. Well, maybe. But Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park has a fortune of £20K, which would make her worth £14M by Mr Floud’s reckoning. This can’t be right, can it?
by M. Mainelli
Most enjoyable and insightful. I really liked the way the author brought to bear long-term economic approaches to the subject. He’s careful to say where we are ignorant, and manages to convey the idea that, economically, we are quite ignorant but gardening has been massively overlooked as an economic activity and shaper of our built environments.
by Bghd
As the vigorous and sometimes emotive arguments over whether garden centres should be regarded as “essential businesses” in the context of Covid lockdown rules illustrate, gardening is both a source of pleasure and diversion to millions in Britain and a big business. Floud (obviously himself a keen gardener as well as a very distinguished economic historian) sets out to demonstrate that gardens have been at the heart of the economy in England since at least the mid seventeenth century. Perhaps the key intellectual tool he uses to this end is a novel way of calculating the actual present day costs of past gardening projects- the results look plausible for big projects and even for salaries but to an admittedly non-specialist eye seem a shade high when it comes to the cost of, say, individual plants.
Equipped with this metric, he demonstrates the eye-wateringly high sums that the English elites were wiling to spend on ever more impressive gardens, especially in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A quasi-profession of garden designers grew up to service this activity, as did a thriving nursery trade with substantial companies operating increasingly on a national basis. Gardening employed thousands of (mostly male) workers; at least at the top end of the labour market it allowed individuals from quite humble origins to make a very comfortable and respected living. Garden needs also drove technical innovation in the days of the Industrial Revolution; techniques used for artificial lakes fed into canal building, ferns and fruit trees benefited from central heating years before the aristocrats who owned the gardens installed it in their houses, greenhouse technology pointed the way to prefabrication. There are some surprises on the way- vegetable gardens were as much a factor of show and display for the elite as a source of food, for instance.
Perhaps predictably there is something of a bias towards the large establishments of the very wealthy. The gardens of the middle and lower classes, especially in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, get rather sketchy coverage (there’s a bit about how the land use recommendations applied to,say, council housing developments and in wider planning contexts which grew up in the twentieth century assumed gardens as a norm, but very little about what was planted in those gardens and how this mass market affected the nursery businesses covered elsewhere). Nor is there much about, for instance, the democratisation of garden design (to the extent that even quite small towns now have several businesses specialising in that area). One feels that there is a lot more to say about developments in the post 1945 period than the jeremiads about the fate of local council parks and gardens departments and name checking gardening programmes on TV which dominate Floud’s coverage of this period.
Still, Floud does manage to demonstrate that gardens and gardening are economic forces which need to be factored into British economic history
by P. SKEATES
Good read for any gardener with plenty of interesting facts on the costs of constructing and maintaining some of the best and most well known gardens in England. It covers the garden designers and their costs very well, highlighting the huge number of man hours needed to make these visions appear, as well as the plant costs themselves. It does however go off onto other areas of less interest outside the scope of the title, were economics are not highlighted in any way at all, and it becomes a bit indulgent on the part of the author
by Una C
Really enjoying this book – incredibly well researched and packed with loads of information about the cost of gardens and plants through the 17th-19th century, and the people who made them and paid for them.
by Sean W
The author clearly did his research but to me it was often like reading spread sheets or annual accounts. Not an enjoyable read but surely of interest to researchers and historians.