The Gardens of the British Working Class
WARNING
You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com
Margaret Willes
'Margaret Willes’s overview of working-class gardens adds to this growing body of literature, and provides a great introduction to an often overlooked history. . .Thanks to books such as this, historians can no longer ignore the stories of these other gardens, created outside of the estate boundary.'—Clare Hickman, BBC History Magazine
‘She has succeeded in letting the individual voices of the underdogs of the gardening fraternity shout or whisper tellingly through its pages.’—Katherine Lambert, New Statesman
‘A bravura historical survey full of rich detail, facts and anecdotes.’—The Sunday Times
‘Margaret Willes’s excellent book demonstrates how enclosure was a defining point in the British attitude to land, community, self-reliance and ownership. . .Willes writes fascinatingly of an upsurge of working-class gardening clubs that promoted gardening not only as a means of supplementing a meagre diet but as a source of delight in both competition and the beauty of flowers.’
—Lucy Lethbridge, The Financial Times
‘This is a welcome work of serious scholarship, which brings to the fore much that garden historians usually prefer to ignore.’—Ursula Buchan, The Spectator
‘From the 17th century to today, a magnificent study.’—The Sunday Times
'Margaret Willes, the hollyhock of garden historians. . .finds a space of her own to raise the theory that it is ordinary gardeners who have made the biggest contribution to the greening and flowering of Britain. . .She has demonstrated that the next best thing to gardening is total immersion in a really good book about how our forebears did it. And why.’—Elizabeth Grice, The Oldie
Publication Date: July 28, 2015
16 pp. color + 87 b/w illus.