English Commercial and Private Garden Production from the Sixteenth Century until the coming of the Railways

This paper outlines the history of fruit and vegetable growing for the market in England from the sixteenth century until the coming of the railways, drawing on my own research over many years and the work of others in the field of commercial gardening. It will act as an overview of the topic, providing a factual history and describing the geography of market gardening. Commercial gardening was conducted in a variety of ways – near large markets production was intensive; plots were spade-dug; walls surrounded gardens, giving shelter and warmth, as did large amounts of glass coverings. Copious amounts of manure made the soil fertile. Further from markets the gardening was less intensive, shading into farmer-gardening where conventional field crops were rotated with garden produce, with the garden plots being spade-dug or ploughed. The most intensively worked gardens for much of the period were near London, which was by far the biggest city in England – in 1700 its population was some 600,000 whereas the next biggest cities at that time, Bristol and Norwich, both had populations of about 25,000.