Gardening in the British Isles (1830–1950)

The book examines gardens and how they were perceived, designed and tended within British society which grew ever more democratic and open to social reforms from the onset of the Victorian period to the aftermath of World War II.

Gardening in the British Isles (1830–1950). Growing Agency in a Democratising Society explores the power dynamics that took root and flourished in nineteenth- and twentieth-century gardens in the British Isles. Examining a wide range of gardens (from private plots and nurseries to school gardens and public parks), gardeners (artists and writers, allotment holders and landlords, designers and landscapers, urban planners and slum dwellers, horticultural educators and pupils, nursery proprietors and plant customers, social reformists and trade unionists), gardening accounts (press articles, essays, diaries and novels), as well as practices across England, Ireland and Scotland from the Victorian era to the post-war period, the book uncovers the aesthetic, social and political discourses that grew in the garden and underpinned various modes of control, democratisation or self-assertion. Considering gardens as physical places, designed compositions, and spaces in motion, i.e. in situ, de visu and de motu, Gardening in the British Isles (1830–50) probes the social history of gardens and gardening, showing how social evolutions within the garden mirrored and even shaped collective imagination, horticultural taste and literary representation.