Dirty hands with green fingers

The unpretentious title of this excellent, delicious book is clever. Does it mean ‘a modicum of garden history’ or, in a Victorian sort of way, ‘a little volume’ of it? Either, for it is beautifully produced, would make you want to buy it but neither would prepare you for nearly 350 pages of entertaining, scholarly riches; fine type, fine text, colour plates, MS reproductions from Aelfric to The Ladies’ Flower Garden, illustrations, drawings, cartoons and photographs.

British gardens began early BC, with nomadic clearings in the wilderness and thorn hedges to keep out wild animals. The book ends with 2003 AD and the children’s Mughal Garden in Bradford and the Eden Project in the south-west. Following Jenny Uglow’s formidable biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, Hogarth and, last year, her 18th-century The Lunar Men, you might expect this book on gardens to have been something planned for light relief as she takes breath.