Publication of the week: Dr Katie Campbell

Campbell, K., British Gardens in Time: The Greatest Gardens and the People Who Shaped Them (London: Frances Lincoln, 2014). 224 pp.  ISBN: 978-0-711-23576-2.

Gardens have long been seen as markers of social status, wealth and taste, but they also reveal much about the personalities that created them. In the eighteenth century Lord Cobham used the landscape at Stowe to express his growing disillusionment with the government he helped into power. In the nineteenth century James Bateman used his plant collections at Biddulph Grange to proclaim his – increasingly untenable – belief in creationism. In the twentieth century the Messel family used their country estate of Nymans to achieve social acceptability while in the twenty-first century Christopher Lloyd used Great Dixter to challenge Britain’s entrenched horticultural sureties. While these four gardens reflect the unique obsessions and eccentricities of their owners, each is also representative of the age in which it was made. The different aims and approaches, the shifts in scale and focus, the changes in layout, ornament and plant material tell us as much about prevailing cultural values as they do about the private passions of the gardens’ owners. This book provides a social history of three centuries of British horticulture, exploring trends and influences, pioneers and visionaries.

Katie Campbell was a journalist and fiction writer before turning to garden history. She lectures widely, has taught on postgraduate and undergraduate courses at Birkbeck, Bristol and Buckingham Universities; she writes for various publications and leads garden tours. Her current book, British Gardens in Time, is a brief social history of British horticulture from the eighteenth  to the twenty-first century. Her penultimate book, Paradise of Exiles, explored the eccentric Anglo- American garden-makers in late nineteenth century Florence. Earlier garden books include Icons of Twentieth Century Landscape Design and Policies and Pleasances, A Guide to Scotland’s Gardens.