ENGLAND'S MAGNIFICENT GARDENS

A knighted English scholar presents a multicentury history of the economics of creating England’s famed gardens, a hugely expensive enterprise both private and public.

In a straightforward, sometimes dry narrative divided into thematic chapters such as “Gardens of the State,” “Designers,” “The Nursery Trade,” and “The Working Gardener,” Floud, who studied economic history at Oxford, always keeps an eye on the financial elements involved in the creation and maintenance of England’s gardens. Even when he discusses the great gardeners—e.g., Lancelot “Capability” Brown (circa 1715-1783)—the author focuses on their business methods, earnings, and costs, an approach that may deter readers seeking simpler pleasures. However, by tracking sums and economy of scale, Floud provides a useful outline of the evolving British economy as a whole. He examines the growth of the “creative industries” alongside manufacturing as well as the rise of a middle class able to afford such luxuries as well-tended gardens, once only the domain of the aristocracy. The author also tracks the technology and sheer physical labor involved in these ambitious projects: draining vast tracts of land, moving tons of dirt, building canals and cascades, and constructing greenhouses (especially popular during the Victorian era). The prevailing fashions have seesawed back and forth from a desire to import seeds and plants to a commitment to isolating native species, which are few. Floud points out that there are only 48 species of “endemic English plants.” Most plants in decorative English gardens have been imported, blown by wind across the Channel, or poached from the New World. Unfortunately, the greatest gardens are usually the product of economic inequality—e.g., Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, which “is the beautiful product of an extremely unequal society.” Finally, Floud looks at the rise of suburban gardens and the “kitchen gardens,” originally designed to supply aristocrats with food year-round.

A no-nonsense study of a “hobby” that has galvanized and transformed England’s economy—and the country itself.