Agricultural History Review, Volume 74 Part 1 (2026), pp. 49–69

During the nineteenth century, agricultural globalization and consolidation increasingly supplied grain and meat to a growing population. Yet, British scientific societies still remained interested in gardens producing culinary vegetables. Indeed, both agricultural and horticultural science in Britain reinvig-orated interest in gardens throughout the century, whether they produced directly for the kitchen or the market. This article investigates how three premier British scientific societies incorporated vegetable gardens into their work: The Royal Horticultural Society (1804), the Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement (1793–1822) and the Royal Agricultural Society of England (1838). Gardens were engines for scientific knowledge in England. Not only were important experiments performed in elite gardens, but pest management and soil science often centred first on gardens as the ideal of fertility. While gardening was generally treated as a horticultural topic rather than agricultural, the connected projects of these societies show how the two sciences often co-constituted one another, not just in the scientific understanding of the cultivation of plants, but in class-based ideas of moral regulation and economic stability. While it may seem that gardens interrupted the development of capitalist agriculture, the work of these scientific societies shows that they complemented it by mitigating its excesses.