An Economic History of the English Garden

Sarah Rutherford, ‘Landscapes for the Mind: English Asylum Designers, 1845–1914’, Garden History, 33 (2005), pp. 61–86.

Between 1883 and 1903, £144 billion (£400 million) was borrowed, representing about 40 per cent of the total national debt, while total local government expenditure was about half of all public spending.41 Just as the royal parks of the eighteenth century were built and maintained by higher and higher levels of government borrowing, so too were the

Other surveys have found that the older you are, and the richer you are, the more gardening you are likely to do. Six out of ten of those interviewed thought that spending money on plants was a good investment, and eight out of ten thought the garden was important for relaxing and entertaining; seven out of ten took pride in their gardens, although

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

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.

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

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

The story of activist local government in the late nineteenth century – spearheaded and symbolized by Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham – is a complex one, but two landmarks in a convoluted progress were the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, which reformed a corrupt and inefficient system of local government, and the Public Health Act of 1848. The

money spent on gardens comes from whatever is left after we have provided for our basic needs for food, clothing and housing, together with the energy required for work.