Victorian Garden
Aug. 3rd, 2005 11:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyjadwigaTom Carter, The Victorian Garden. (Salem, NH: Salem House, 1985)
For lovers of Victoriana and keen garden-book browsers, The Victorian Garden is a feast. Not only does it include a wide variety of Victorian images-- depictions of gardens, seed catalog pictures, advertisements, and diagrams decorate each page, and are supplemented with extensive sidebars of text taken from Victorian-period publications. Carter addresses in turn the Kitchen Garden, garden Artifices, Glass use in gardening, Science in the Garden, the Pleasure Ground, Floramania, and the Garden Indoors. Extensive diagrams of 19th century inventions and their use, including such favorites as the cucumber glass and the Wardian case, and sidelights such as the introduction of Garden Gnomes, the history of the Crystal Palance, and the deplorable death of collector David Douglas in a bull-trap, liven a serious history. However, for the serious working gardener the book is less helpful; no plant lists or even simplified explanations of Victorian trends meet the spade-weary browser's eye. Nor are modern photographs or modern reconstructions included. However, it's a fascinating book, and a fit companion to Susan Campbell's Charleston Kedding : a history of kitchen gardening (London : Ebury Press, 1996) with which it should be paired on the shelf.
For lovers of Victoriana and keen garden-book browsers, The Victorian Garden is a feast. Not only does it include a wide variety of Victorian images-- depictions of gardens, seed catalog pictures, advertisements, and diagrams decorate each page, and are supplemented with extensive sidebars of text taken from Victorian-period publications. Carter addresses in turn the Kitchen Garden, garden Artifices, Glass use in gardening, Science in the Garden, the Pleasure Ground, Floramania, and the Garden Indoors. Extensive diagrams of 19th century inventions and their use, including such favorites as the cucumber glass and the Wardian case, and sidelights such as the introduction of Garden Gnomes, the history of the Crystal Palance, and the deplorable death of collector David Douglas in a bull-trap, liven a serious history. However, for the serious working gardener the book is less helpful; no plant lists or even simplified explanations of Victorian trends meet the spade-weary browser's eye. Nor are modern photographs or modern reconstructions included. However, it's a fascinating book, and a fit companion to Susan Campbell's Charleston Kedding : a history of kitchen gardening (London : Ebury Press, 1996) with which it should be paired on the shelf.
