“I love visiting other people’s gardens,” admits Roderick Floud. Nothing unusual about that, of course: what’s not to like about strolling around beautifully landscaped lawns and borders? But as well as admiring the flowers, Floud – a professor of economic history – has a keen eye for the investment of time, skill and money needed to create and maintain a garden. He has written a new kind of garden history, one which focuses on the economics of our love affair with water features and colourful flower beds.
Beginning with the restoration of Charles II in the 17th century, Floud’s study ranges across 350 years of English history, from the designers of royal estates who could earn millions of pounds in today’s money to jobbing gardeners mowing lawns in the suburbs. He explores gardening as a major industry, one largely excluded from GDP figures, yet now worth at least £11bn, one which has “changed the face of England not once but many times”.
Floud also argues that gardening is “a catalyst to economic development”, stimulating innovation. The nation’s canal network was inspired by the lakes and waterways created in gardens of the 17th and 18th century, such as St James’s Park in London and Wrest Park, Bedfordshire. The use of iron and glass as structural elements in buildings was pioneered in gardens for greenhouses and conservatories. Central heating originated in experiments to heat greenhouses with hot-water pipes. Gardening, Floud argues, deserves to be included “as one of the earliest and largest of the creative industries that play an increasing role in England’s economy and society”.
The levels of expenditure as well as the earnings of some of the designers are astonishing: “Spending money on gardens has been one of the greatest, and certainly most conspicuous, forms of expenditure on luxury in England since the 17th century or earlier.” Floud estimates that at least £1bn has been spent each decade since the 17th century by the English state on gardens, such as the royal parks, a figure that increased exponentially from the middle of the 19th century as local authorities began spending an enormous sum annually on public parks, such as Bath’s Royal Victoria Park, open to anyone of “a decent appearance and good behaviour”. Indeed, by the 19th century Britain had “a garden industry unrivalled anywhere in the world”.
Floud has uncovered Capability Brown’s account book at the Drummonds bank, which shows him to have been “not only an influential and successful designer but a shrewd businessman and a proficient manager of men and of his numerous wealthy and distinguished clients”. His accounts from 1755-83 show receipts equivalent to £840m in modern money. Brown was earning more than £20m a year, a “stupendous” amount and remarkable evidence of just how significant gardening was to the economic history of the nation.
Filled with fascinating and often surprising details – a rhododendron would set you back the equivalent of more than £1,000 in the 1770s – the book reveals the economic context to our love of gardening and shows that “the history of English gardens is, in many senses, the history of England”.
• An Economic History of the English Garden by Roderick Floud is published by Penguin (RRP £25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020 3176 3837. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
