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This is a thoroughly shoddy and snobbish book. These quotations from the introduction will give you a sense of it:
The problem with snobbishness is that, although it makes a history of gardening easier to write, it doesn't acknowledge the osmosis that goes on between social classes. Throughout history, the upper classes often ape lower-class fashions, suitably embellished and refined. When the upper-classes go self-consciously rustic, they respond not only to the idea of the lower-class garden but to the gardens themselves. See, for instance, last decade's fad for the "cottage garden", and for the plants that were favored in those gardens in an imagined pre-industrial age.
When gardening, the middle and lower classes work on a different scale; they aren't imitating grand estates because they haven't got the space. As a result, the choices, both in plants and in planting, made by small-scale gardeners are very different from the choices made on the grand scale, and respond to different constraints. A small-scale gardener can lovingly tend a single plant, and focus on it, in a way that only the very wealthiest can afford to pay gardeners to do. There's a long history of home gardeners carrying forward and improving individual varieties of plants -- for instance, this book entirely ignores the Lancashire mill-hands' preeminence in auriculas and the Paisley weavers' laced pinks.* During the periodic upper-class crazes for "old-fashioned plants", the plants become available because they have been preserved and cherished in the gardens (and cemeteries!) of the poor and middle classes.
If you see this book second-hand, it may be worth buying (at a sufficiently low price) for the excellent color plates. Otherwise, you can do better.
* The first citation I found for this was from The Bedside Book of the Garden by D.G. Hessayon , which looks like a much more interesting book.
- Garden history has been abducted by the art historians. This book is an attempt to get it back for the social historian. Too much garden history has been concerned with when gardens were made, what they looked like, who made them and how they changed. More interesting by far is what the makers expected from the gardens, and how they and their successors evaluated their investment in gardening and the return it brought them.
- There is more to social history than drawing attention to the great gulf which divides the rich from the poor and then whingeing about it. This book is concerned with the middle and upper classes ... They are more interesting because others aspire to be like them.
- Why do hundreds of middle-class Englishwomen have a white garden and a potager and a collection of old-fashioned roses? Because these features are smart -- or may have been smart about ten years ago -- not because their owners think they are beautiful or useful, but because they make them feel good -- better than the neighbours. Gardens are symbols of social and economic status.
- The arbiters of garden taste and the innovators of garden fashion are the well-to-do and the creative craftsmen, nurserymen and designers who supply them. The poor are often portrayed as conservative because they have tastes and values which were more fashionable a generation or so earlier.
- It has been claimed that an interest in gardening cuts across all classes and creates points of contact between people with social differences. [long quotation from Alfred Austin] In practice, one finds that such people have rather different tastes from one's own; it is fashion which binds people together and divides them from others. [it. mine]
The problem with snobbishness is that, although it makes a history of gardening easier to write, it doesn't acknowledge the osmosis that goes on between social classes. Throughout history, the upper classes often ape lower-class fashions, suitably embellished and refined. When the upper-classes go self-consciously rustic, they respond not only to the idea of the lower-class garden but to the gardens themselves. See, for instance, last decade's fad for the "cottage garden", and for the plants that were favored in those gardens in an imagined pre-industrial age.
When gardening, the middle and lower classes work on a different scale; they aren't imitating grand estates because they haven't got the space. As a result, the choices, both in plants and in planting, made by small-scale gardeners are very different from the choices made on the grand scale, and respond to different constraints. A small-scale gardener can lovingly tend a single plant, and focus on it, in a way that only the very wealthiest can afford to pay gardeners to do. There's a long history of home gardeners carrying forward and improving individual varieties of plants -- for instance, this book entirely ignores the Lancashire mill-hands' preeminence in auriculas and the Paisley weavers' laced pinks.* During the periodic upper-class crazes for "old-fashioned plants", the plants become available because they have been preserved and cherished in the gardens (and cemeteries!) of the poor and middle classes.
If you see this book second-hand, it may be worth buying (at a sufficiently low price) for the excellent color plates. Otherwise, you can do better.
* The first citation I found for this was from The Bedside Book of the Garden by D.G. Hessayon , which looks like a much more interesting book.
