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Terms and conditions applyThe Head Gardeners: Heroes of Horticulture
Toby Musgrave
Product details
Format: Book
Pages: 256
Publisher: Aurum Press
Date Published: Feb 2009
Stock Code: 68668
Binding: Paperback
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Description
The Head Gardeners explores an extraordinary group of men who fluorished in the golden age of the British country house in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, enjoying a status and an importance that extended far beyond the walled frontiers of their fiefdoms. They were men of strong character who had educated themselves in the sciences of botany, etymology, plant breeding, plant physiology, surveying, perspective drawing and much else. Among other things they invented the trade of floristry, wrote bestselling books and published the first gardening magazines.
In this scholarly and highly entertaining book Toby Musgrave rescues the head gardeners from the backwaters of horticultural history and restores them to their rightful place as the founders of their profession. This is a fascinating study of the great Victorian and Edwardian head gardeners, a remarkable group of self-made men who transformed gardening from menial labour into a profession. It recreates the social world of the great country house gardens where staffs of up to fifty might be employed in growing produce of awe-inspiring variety in prodigious quantities. It reveals that it was the head gardeners of the past who were largely responsible for creating the science of horticulture as we know it today.
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