An Economic History of the English Garden

Demand and supply in gardening produces constant change; we alter our gardens far more frequently than we modify our houses.

current annual UK expenditure in nurseries and garden centres and on landscape contractors is over £11.4 billion, without including the amount we spend on gardeners, or the value of all our own labour or the cost of all the land that we use. For centuries we have been spending, and now continue to spend, far more on our gardens than almost anyone r

Loudon, who in 1843 published the first – and apparently still the only – treatise on the subject: On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries; and on the Improvement of Churchyards.

We live our lives and spend our money quite differently; few of us spend half our income on food and half of that on bread, as was common until the twentieth century.

Britannia Illustrata: or Views of Several of the Queen’s Palaces. As also of the Principal Seats of the Nobility and Gentry of Great Britain by Johannes Kip and Leonard Knyff; it was published in London from 1707 and contains eighty bird’s-eye views of parks, houses and gardens.

In past centuries, every upper-class and most middle-class households would have employed a gardener, but today only 5 per cent of us still do so.

Gardens are, in the main, a form of luxury.

Actually, as an unlikely saviour – the Heritage Lottery Fund – has found, over 57 per cent of the British population use their local park at least once a month and, for those with young children, it rises to 90 per cent.44 The fund is financed by Britain’s gamblers – perhaps the least well-off sector of the public – and has been spending millions e

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, every naval ship on a long voyage carried a botanist – paid for by the navy or by British botanical gardens – whose job was to dash ashore when the ship docked at a foreign port and seek out new plants to be brought back, often with great difficulty, to Kew and then cultivated for sale by nurse