An Economic History of the English Garden

by Roderick Floud

An Economic History of the English Garden draws on never-seen primary sources to explore how much gardens cost to make and to maintain; how many gardeners tend to particular gardens; the prices of plants sold by nurseries, or imported from far-flung corners of the world; where the plants come from, what tools and techniques were used to create them and how they were invented. The author compares one garden with another in terms of the burden that it has put on the family that has owned it over the centuries. He unearths where their money came from and why they spent it on a garden. The result is a far deeper understanding of one of England's dearest - and indeed costliest - industries.

Genres: History, British Literature, Nonfiction, Gardening, Economics

288 pages, Hardcover

First published November 7, 2019

Reviews

[K.J. Charles]

You might be thinking "wow, niche" but in fact the author makes an excellent case for the economy of gardens being massively undercounted, in terms of spending, labour, and resources (land, water, manpower, travel) taken up. Loads of good examples and interesting case histories with some jawdropping skill and labour on display: the efficiency of Georgian hothouses was beyond belief.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as a follow up to a day school I did on Capability Brown, and found it really interesting to learn about just how much was spent on gardens and garden design especially from the 18th C onwards, and how garden related inventions fed into the Industrial and Agricultural revolutions. It was also fascinating to see how new planning schemes in the 20thC e.g. the expansion of the suburbs meant that gardening for pleasure was available to ordinary people as well as the rich.

[Christopher Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finding an enterprising author has produced a full-scale study of a major historical subject from a hitherto neglected angle is a rare pleasure. Discovering this book is one of those ‘why on earth didn’t anyone think of doing this before?’ literary experiences. It seems astonishing that such a glaring gap in the enormous literature on garden history could be found. Yet Roderick Floud has not just nimbly elbowed his way through a crowd of other writers in the field jostling for our attention: he has driven a gang mower to the front.

There are a host of books devoted to the English garden’s rich past ranging (to quote just a few examples) from descriptions of how individual grand gardens have evolved over the centuries, to more general shifts in garden fashion design, stories of intrepid plant-hunters seeking new treasures for gardens at home in remote and often dangerous corners of the world or the changing visions of the garden captured by generations of artists.

This makes it even more surprising that ‘Garden historians almost entirely ignore money’ – despite the fact that, as Floud points out: ‘spending money on gardens has been one of the greatest, and certainly most conspicuous, forms of expenditure on luxuries in England since the seventeenth century or earlier’. Such massive expenditure on gardens has created a major industry of nurseries, garden centres and landscaping contractors (with a combined current annual turnover of £11 billion), that provides hundreds of thousands of jobs and generates significant ripple effects upon the wider domestic economy and overseas trade. The funds lavished on gardens also stimulated huge scientific advances in plant breeding, together with driving technological progress in water engineering and central heating and encouraging the far more extensive use of glass and metal in building.

A comprehensive survey of its subject, this work will equip readers with a solid knowledge of how the English garden industry developed and the course it followed in the past four centuries, as well as identifying the factors that shaped these. However, this is also a book that is a delight just to dip into – although painted on a broad canvas it contains a vast array of interesting and often striking details, along with highly perceptive (and sometimes humorous) comments by the author.
I opened two pages at random: one of them describes the gruesome mantraps that were included in earlier gardeners’ ‘anti-pest’ armouries, while another sketches an experiment Floud carried out in his own garden by recording what he spent on it in the course of a year. There is also plenty of ‘human interest’ whether in terms of the spectacular financial rewards and acclaim obtained by leading garden designers or, at the other end of the scale, the harsh working conditions endured by most garden staff (exacerbated by the iron discipline imposed both in and outside working hours and the grim barrack-like ‘bothy’ they had to live in).

The subject is treated with the full academic rigour to be expected from an author with Floud’s foremost scholastic distinction, but no prior knowledge is needed to enjoy this book. His masterly exposition is impressively clear and comprehensible and expressed in refreshingly vigorous, unaffected and readable prose. It is also well illustrated with the emphasis on supporting the story being told rather than offer pretty horticultural images.

Specialists in garden, social and economic history will naturally be grateful for such an informative text (and one that should inspire many future explorations leading off the path Floud has blazed). But it will be enjoyed by a much wider set of audiences, particularly garden-lovers. They will find it adds welcome new intellectual and cultural dimensions to the sensual and aesthetic pleasures they already savour so greatly in the garden.

[Barry Dobson · Rating 1 out of 5]

As a gardener and lover of numbers I expected to enjoy this. Sadly no. The author has an interesting and probably useful was of converting historical monetary sums into 'current day'. He them applies this endlessly to a fairly dull history of English gardens to point out how much they cost in current day terms. After a few chapters I gave up.

I do hope somebody enjoys it because the arithmetic must have taken quite a while.