The Englishness of Gardening

Andrea Wulf is the author of that splendid account of a particularly English obsession with gardening, The Brother Gardeners.  She is not English. That matters. In fact, it goes a long way toward accounting for the particular size and shape or the argument. It may even be, as she suggests in the introduction, the “spark” across a cultural divide that energized the whole project.  She is German; I am American.  Neither of us is English, that is, and that may be how something uniquely English about gardening became perceptible — and interesting — to both.