Cottage Garden (Bloomsbury Publishing)

Hollyhocks and cabbages, roses and runner beans: the English cottage garden combines beauty and utility, pride and productivity. Immortalised in images of thatched cottages with flower-filled borders, what was the reality of the cottage garden? For many, the garden was essential to keep food on the table. For those more fortunate, the garden was a blaze of colour and a status symbol. Gardens did not just appeal to the senses, however: they played a philosophical and moral role in society, and thus in our social history. Visions of the rural cottager were never far from the mind of the Victorian middle classes, whether as a shining example to the indigent urban poor, or as an aesthetic and social ideal of a utopian 'merrie England'.