The English Garden: A Social History

Charles Quest-Ritson

Editions

Review

In this entertaining survey of the English garden from 1500 to the present day, author Quest-Ritson leaps into his introduction, guns ablaze and aiming to cause a stir in the stately realms of The Garden History Society.  “Garden history has been abducted by the art historians.  This book is an attempt to get it back for the social historians”.  According to our knight in shining armour, too much attention has been paid to what gardens “looked like”, and not enough attention paid as to “why people garden”, and “the need to discover the costs and the benefits as they have been perceived down the years”.  To the unnamed academic who argues that gardening is concerned with “aesthetic pleasures and art”, he replies, “I think this is bunk, and pretentious bunk at that!”  Heady stuff.

In five chapters, covering roughly a century each, from the distribution of land in the 1520’s following the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII, he pursues his argument with great vigour.  I’m not so sure that his ideas are always be quite as original as he thinks.  For example, Timothy Mowl, in my favourite gardening read of  2001, Gentlemen And Players: Gardeners Of The English Landscape arrives at similar conclusions, albeit by a different route and in greater depth.  It’s almost inevitable too, that the facts and personalities of the 20th Century are more familiar to us and have been moulded a bit to fit his scenario.

All that said this is a pretty good summary, from an unusual perspective, of the significance of one of this country’s most rewarding preoccupations. - review by Stewart Grimshaw