Thanks so much to NetGalley for the free Kindle book. My review is voluntarily given, and my opinions and my own.

I really loved this book, although the title should include something about the focus being British history. Really loved reading about the history of the gardeners, and I kept thinking how much I wish I could share all of it with my grandma. She had a huge garden when I was growing up, and while she would not have read the book (not the best reader), she would have loved hearing all about it.

Just wish there would have been more pictures in the book than just a few included at the end. Other than that, loved the book!!! Definitely would recommend this and will be looking for more books from her in the future. :)

This was a very lovely read.

This was a topic that I did not know much about, although I enjoy gardens and mini gardening, I feel like I learned a lot.

In this book, Angela Youngman talks about many things related to gardening during this era from gardeners, to personal gardens, public gardens and even shows and tourism. My favorite chapter to read was the third chapter,,“The Rise of Female Gardeners”. We may associate gardening a lot with both genders and flower gardening even more with women but as we can see from this chapter, the women actually started to play a role later on which is during this time period. Without giving much spoilers, there are many interesting instances in this book, some are still related to women, that may surprise the reader which I think made the book very enjoyable.

One thing I also enjoyed were the literary and other type of media references. I believe this also helps to form a connection with the general audience as well. Youngman also mentioned many newspapers and especially gardening journals which peaked my attention.

There are also pictures, although black and white, at the end of the book which were nice to look at.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and I would recommend it to anyone, especially if they have at least a bit of interest in gardening. However, even without the gardening element, there is still much to learn from this book for its time period.

Thanks to Netgalley, Pen & Sword and Angela Youngman for this advanced reader copy.