Gardening Across the Pond

For four hundred years there has been a special relationship between Britain and what is now the United States of America in many aspects of life, not least in gardening.  From the early settlers taking their familiar English plants to the New World and early plant-hunters bringing back exciting new plants for English gardens to the twenty-first-century English infatuation with ‘prairie gardening’, ideas and plants have been crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic.

In Gardening Across the Pond, Richard Bisgrove explores four centuries of translantic influences, from the Tradescants, plant-hunting in seventeenth century Virginia, to the prairie landscapes of the 2012 London Olympic Park, and attempts to answer that thorny question – is the English cottage garden an American invention?