An Economic History of the English Garden

A garden, much like a home, is a blunt, bare-faced extension of the human beings who control it. If you are the caretaker of a piece of land, that piece of land will inevitably come to embody your behavioral and cultural values, albeit in an abstract sort of a way.

Gardens are a mechanism by which we make life bearable. They protect us from the frenzy and tumult unleashed by history. They counter annihilating and anarchic forces. Gardens have been with us – or we have been with gardens – forever. Some say they emerged after agriculture. But if gardens are to agriculture what poetry is to prose, who knows, gar

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To garden is to care deeply, inclusively and audaciously for the world outside our homes and our heads. It’s a way of being that is intimately interwoven with the real truths of existence—not the things we’re told to value (money, status, ownership), but the things that actually matter (sustenance, perspective, beauty, connection, growth).