The Gardens of the British Working Class - Hardcover

Willes, Margaret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 030018784X ISBN 13: 9780300187847

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2014

Synopsis

This magnificently illustrated people’s history celebrates the extraordinary feats of cultivation by the working class in Britain, even if the land they toiled, planted, and loved was not their own. Spanning more than four centuries, from the earliest records of the laboring classes in the country to today, Margaret Willes's research unearths lush gardens nurtured outside rough workers’ cottages and horticultural miracles performed in blackened yards, and reveals the ingenious, sometimes devious, methods employed by determined, obsessive, and eccentric workers to make their drab surroundings bloom. She also explores the stories of the great philanthropic industrialists who provided gardens for their workforces, the fashionable rich stealing the gardening ideas of the poor, alehouse syndicates and fierce rivalries between vegetable growers, flower-fanciers cultivating exotic blooms on their city windowsills, and the rich lore handed down from gardener to gardener through generations. This is a sumptuous record of the myriad ways in which the popular cultivation of plants, vegetables, and flowers has played and continues to play an integral role in everyday British life.

About this title

Book Description:

Spanning four centuries, Margaret Willes’s vibrant people’s history examines the myriad ways that the popular cultivation of plants, vegetables, and flowers has played an integral role in everyday British life for more than four centuries.

About the Author:

Margaret Willes is an enthusiastic gardener and the former publisher at the National Trust.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 030018784X
• ISBN 13: 9780300187847
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416