A Passion for Gardening by Twigs Way is subtitled How the British Became a Nation of Gardeners.

I enjoyed looking at this book as much as reading it as it’s full of lovely old photographs of people standing proudly in their gardens, and old adverts from gardening magazines. It’s a great glimpse back in time to the beginning of plant life on this island of ours, which is to say there were very few plants indeed. Each band of invaders or settlers added more plants along the way, some more welcome than others.

I was interested to learn that weeding was one of the few ways that 16th century women could earn some money outside their home. They apparently had metal tipped gloves to help them in their task. Why don’t we have such things nowadays? I rarely bother with gloves as I like to get stuck in to the earth but sometimes I do wear them, especially if I know I’m going to be socialising soonish after my gardening stint, because people don’t half give you hard looks when they see that your nails are full of muck and the skin on your thumb and forefinger is manky black, despite scrubbing like crazy.

Anyway, this book has a foreword by Joe Swift, one of the more likeable gardening experts of this era’s crop of pundits. I still miss lovely old Geoff Hamilton.

If you want to get a glimpse inside the book you can do so here.

This is the first book by the author Twigs Way which I have read but she is apparently a gardening historian and has published quite a few books on the subject. I was disappointed that although the subtitle is How the British Became a Nation of Gardeners, the book contents concentrate almost completely on England. It is only when you get very close to the end of the book that there are a couple of lines which mention that some Scots had contributed to horticulture but had migrated to England.

Much was made of the Yellow Book National Gardens Scheme which is an England/Wales charity, but there was no mention of Scotland’s Gardens Scheme a charity which has been going since 1931 which you can read about here.

Considering that whole books have been written about Scotland’s plant hunters, there were so many famous ones, and that in the past it seems that almost all the big estates in England were ruled by Scottish head gardeners it seems odd that a book on gardening history is so remiss. From what I’ve read in the past Scots seem to have cornered the market in gardening, not unlike the way Scottish nannies did for childcare.