Digging deep

Gardening

An Economic History of the English Garden

Roderick Floud (Allen Lane, £25)

AS Roderick Floud repeatedly tells us, the economic importance of the garden has long been underestimated. This book is a spirited and largely successful attempt to redress that perceived imbalance, although, ultimately, it might have been better titled ‘The Business of the English Garden’, as it ranges far wider than raw economics, covering vital topics such as technological innovation and the profession of the garden designer. The story is told, for example, of Rosemary Verey commenting to Sir Roy Strong that the single most important thing to know about a client was precisely how much money they were prepared to spend. That is probably good practical advice for any tyro designer. The wide scope of the book is fortunate, because, for this reader at least, the economic calculus underlying several of the author’s conclusions proves unconvincing.

To deal with this at the outset: the index of labour earnings (see has been deployed to work out the equivalent values of sums of money now and in the