Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 1 (2021), p. 155

This volume will be as much of interest to garden historians, as to anyone who has enjoyed a stroll around the grounds of an English stately home. It lifts the lid on the sheer effort required to create these gardens, and exposes the enormous sums required to pay for them. It helps us to question how gardens were built, why they were constructed in certain ways, and how they have been maintained. The book’s high quality derives from the author’s stature as an economic historian. During his long career Roderick Floud has produced ground-breaking research, initially using quantitative methods to study economic history and later transferring these methods to the history of human health. The application of Floud’s skill and experience to the economic history of English gardens has produced a book of great authority, with forensic attention to detail. Its major strength lies in Floud’s ability to assess the garden industry in the context of the social and economic history of England.

The first chapter provides an overview of the book’s arc, setting out the premise that gardening should be considered as an industry, providing a detailed explanation of the methods used to estimate relative costs, and putting rising garden spending into the context of economic and social change. The second chapter, ‘Gardens and the State’, makes a striking case that gardens built by the monarchy and paid for through taxation represented a state promotion of the garden industry, which should be seen as a process that continued with the nineteenth century building of public parks and the development of new towns in the twentieth. The structure of the remainder of the book traces the economic impact of all this spending, dealing in turn with the work of designers, nurserymen, gardeners and inventors and manufacturers. Floud concludes with chapters on ‘The People’s Gardens’ and ‘The Kitchen Garden’, demonstrating how increasing prosperity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries enabled the expansion of the suburbs and the widening of access to gardening. Throughout Floud has used trade papers, account books, family papers and probate records to piece together trails of who paid who and for what work.

Floud builds his case for the significance of the garden industry by establishing how much was spent and by comparing this spending with other sectors. In addition, he offers a fresh portrait of the garden designer as businessman. Capability Brown managed the labour and resources required to deliver major projects despite irregular income, geographically distant sites and a banking system that in the eighteenth century offered no protection from debtor’s prison if payments could not be made. Consistently within this volume, Floud is able to put garden spending into context, for example comparing the profitability of nurseries with other retail trades, and to provide nuanced answers to questions such as why the nursery trade was clustered around London whilst its products were shipped across the country. The book makes a significant contribution to the history of technology in highlighting the innovation required to achieve the impression of a natural landscape and the amounts garden owners were willing to pay for this. These developments are seen in the context of the growth of industry more broadly, linking invention in gardening to the development of canal and reservoir building, steam engineering and central heating.

Throughout the book, gardening is situated as a manifestation of luxury, of spare time and spare money, separate from growing for sustenance. This separation is justified in the final chapter, in which Floud’s understanding of the histories of economics and health come together to produce an excellent analysis of the place of the kitchen garden in economic history. He makes a strong case for viewing kitchen gardening as an exercise for show or pleasure, both within the context of the Royal gardens at Frogmore, and the local garden contest with its outsize onions and marrows. The purchase of farmed produce was the most efficient option at all levels of society. This chapter is significant in counterbalancing nostalgic fictions surrounding grow-your-own in the present day and makes an important contribution to long running debates about land use and the relationship between farming and gardening. There are many reasons for growing your own fruit and vegetables but economic efficiency, within our current system, is not one of them. My only criticism of the book is that after setting out so convincingly the interrelation of gardening and economics, it neglects in the conclusion to consider the ways in which these practices might be changed by the advance of climate breakdown.

However, this book is thought provoking, even unsettling. It demonstrates the success of the artifice of the natural garden scene, onto which the nymphs and cherubs have wandered as though in a Sellar and Yeatman cartoon. These gardens were built to appear timeless, yet Floud has made their temporality crystal clear. In laying out exactly how vast sums were spent alongside evidence of pervasive malnourishment among the poor, we are confronted by the inequalities on which the English idyll was founded. That such a work draws attention to the sources of this wealth, for example that the house and gardens of Harewood were funded by slave ownership, is particularly pertinent to current questioning of the roots of racism in Britain. An important area for further research is the economics of plant collecting, which Floud acknowledges he did not have space to consider. Along with Floud’s evidence on the sources of English wealth, such research would situate the economic history of the English garden in the context of Empire and Britain’s place in the world. This work successfully argues that the garden industry was and remains a significant part of the English economy. The mark of this success is the number of questions that it provokes, both about England’s past and about the future of the garden industry.