Beauty in beastly surroundings

The vast majority of books written about British gardens and their histories are concerned with large ones, made and maintained, sometimes over several centuries, by people with money. ’Twas ever thus. In this country, recognisable gardens began in monasteries, as well as the surroundings of palaces and noblemen’s houses, and it is only in the last couple of centuries that the middle classes have got into the act. As for the poor and dispossessed, theirs has been a very different story, too rarely told.

Which is why Margaret Willes’s The Gardens of the British Working Class is so welcome, since the author brings together much scattered and hard-to-find information on, for example, the history of allotments, the 17th-century ‘florists’ and 19th-century flower shows, and weaves it into a narrative with a compelling underlying theme: namely that being poor and disadvantaged has never meant that you could not recognise beauty when you saw it.