A charming introduction to the history, style, planting and morality of that most English creation, 'The Cottage Garden'.

Hollyhocks and cabbages, roses and runner beans: the English cottage garden combined beauty and utility, pride and productivity. But what were they used for in reality, beyond their immortalisation in images of thatched cottages with floral borders and ducks on the path?

This slim volume explores the many uses of the garden throughout England's history, including
- keeping food on the table
- as a status symbol and blaze of colour
- their philosophical and moral role in society: the rural cottager was never far from the mind of the Victorian middle classes, whether as a shining example to the indigent urban poor or as an aesthetic and social ideal of a utopian 'merrie England'.

The Cottage Garden is the history of this varied and important phenomenon and its myriad concepts and incarnations.