This review appears in the current issue of Gardens Illustrated magazine.

American gardeners have a strangely ambiguous attitude towards British plants and gardens. Creating traditional English herbaceous borders backed by adobe walls in Santa Fe, New Mexico seems to reveal an excessive devotion to the English style, at the same time many American gardeners are justifiably sceptical of books on plants and gardens originating in Britain.

America’s Romance With The English Garden by Thomas J. Mickey examines influence of English garden style as it swept America in the late nineteenth century. The author highlights the development of a cheap and reliable postal service from the mid-nineteenth century as the means not only for distributing seeds and plants to a predominantly rural population but also for distributing ideas through the mail order catalogues with their often exquisite coloured engravings. For the first time colourful styles could be cheaply and widely and enticingly popilarised - across the whole country after the Civil War - and many of these ideas originated in England and were championed by emigrants from across the Atlantic.

Focusing on the many intriguing and entrepreneurial individuals who promoted English gardening in America in the nineteenth century, this is an illuminating book packed with the very readable results of dedicated and thoughtful research and helps us all understand a little more of how English gardening has been admired in North America for so long.

America’s Romance With The English Garden by Thomas J. Mickey is published by Ohio University Press at £23.95/$26.95

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