Mrs Beeton's Garden Management: The Art of Gardening

Isabella Beeton was born in 1836, the eldest of twenty-one children, and died at the age twenty-eight. Despite the shortness of her life she managed to produce not only her world-famous book of Household Management but also this lesser known but equally comprehensive book of 'Garden Management'. The subjects covered are familiar to all those who read modern journalism and books on gardening or watch gardening programmes on television: soil structures, manures and compost, planning and landscaping, walls and fences, ornamental features, tools, sowing, planting and transplanting. There are chapters on trees, shrubs, flowers, vegetables, herbs and fruit growing; on frames and glasshouses; and finally twelve chapters covering the gardening year. Mrs Beeton first published 'Household Management and Garden Management' in the 1860s at a time when Victorian middle-class families had money to spend but little or no previous experience of owning or managing houses and gardens. Mrs Beeton's guidance proved extremely useful and popular. Her information and wisdom were so sound that many of her precepts remained 'rules' well into the middle of the twentieth century. 'Mrs Beeton's Garden Management' is not only packed with horticultural advice on the use of traditional methods - always with an eye to new ideas - but it is also a social document providing an insight into the art of gardening as it was so enthusiastically practised in the past. AUTHOR: Born Isabella Mary Mayson in 1836 in Victorian London, she would go on to become the universally known Mrs. Beeton, the writer of the most famous cookery book in British history.She died in 1865 at the age of just 28, but her place in gastronomic history had already been secured. b/w illustrations