Gardening is one of the most popular leisure activities today, and most people take it for granted not only that suitable plants and equipment are easily available, but that there is plenty of information to guide and inform gardeners. It was not always so. It was only in the 1860s that the foundations for modern amateur gardening as we know it today were laid down - before then middle-class garden owners had to learn the new skills needed by trial, error and hard work. This book recreates for us the world of the Victorian gardener - not the doyenne at the head of the large estates but the amateur and small time gardener in towns and villages. These amateur gardeners had to write the books themselves and create their own gardening magazines because professionals refused to believe that gardens in towns were a practical possibility. Through persistence, dogged determination and belief that gardening could be not only interesting and profitable, but enjoyable, amateur gardeners turned the horticultural world upside down. In this fascinating, richly illustrated new book Anne Wilkinson draws on the vast wealth of contemporary gardening magazines and other sources to give us an extraordinary insight into the Victorian gardener.

Anne Wilkinson (21 September 1910 – 10 May 1961) was one of Canada's few female modernist poets writing during the 1940s and 50s. Born into a wealthy family in Toronto, she grew up there and in London, Ontario, and travelled extensively over the course of her private education. She published her first collection of poetry, Counterpoint to Sleep, in 1951 at the age of 40, followed by her second, The Hangman Ties the Holly, in 1955. Though she considered herself an outsider in Canadian poetry circles, Wilkinson was highly regarded by her peers, and contributed greatly to the Canadian writing community, as a poet, the author of two books of prose, and as a founding editor of The Tamarack Review.

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