Gardens and Gardening in Great Britain (1830-1950)

Description:

This edited volume examines gardens and how they were perceived, designed and tended within British society which grew ever more democratic and open to social reforms from the onset of the Victorian period to the aftermath of World War II. From kitchen gardening to floriculture, from the amateur's as well as the professional's perspectives, across genders, genres and social classes, the chapters gathered in this volume give fresh insights into the mechanisms, both intimate and institutional, that underlay such democratisation. Chapters delve into the extent to which gardening was dependent on class and gender in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the book therefore investigates how class conditioned gardening practices and aesthetics, and how individual men and women's experiences of gardening or access to gardens differed during this timeframe. This book thus tackles power dynamics in the garden and interrogates the extent to which gardening became a means of emancipation for men and women, depending not only on their class and gender, but also on the plots they worked on and the horticultural system(s) they found themselves contributing to.