Victorian Gardens

Abstract

Brent Elliott's argument in Victorian Gardens is that nineteenth-century British gardens (he does not deal with Irish ones) reflect a shift from the ‘eighteenth-century rhetoric of nature’ to ‘self-conscious artistry’. This thesis serves to focus an enormous and diverse body of material. Elliott is especially good on the impact of inventions on Victorian gardening, the increasing professionalization of gardeners, advances in botany, the importance of colour effects, the growing interest in the history of gardening, and (not least) the gardens and gardeners to which and to whom William Robinson was indebted. Elliott is also good on the contribution made by Scots, both as theorists and as paractising gardeners, and his explanation of the development of the Gardenesque is particularly well set out.