Reviews and Short Notices
General Gardens and Green Spaces in the West Midlands since 1700.Editedby Malcolm Dick and Elaine Mitchell. University of Hertfordshire Press. 2018. xvi + 212pp. £16.99. Writing about the history of gardeners and gardens is a tricky business. No longer is the focus on men like ‘Capability’ Brown and the great landscape gardens of the eighteenth century, but rather on less well-known gardeners and designers, the gardens of working people and public parks. Discussing William Shenstone’s gardens at The Leasowes in Halesowen with its obelisk and water features, John Hemingway is able to draw on ‘archaeological findings and . . . copious writings and watercolours’, but several of the contributors to this engaging survey of gardens and green spaces in the West Midlands confess that there are gaps in the records they are using. An interesting figure – such as Lydia Yates who ran a nursery in Derby in the 1780s – might appear and then vanish from sight or something unexplained might happen – such as the sudden closure of Vauxhall gardens in Birmingham in 1850 – or a source that might have been expected to survive – such as the garden plans for Joseph Chamberlain’s Highbury – has not. Malcolm Dick and Elaine Mitchell set out a bold ambition in their introduction. They intend to rescue their gardeners from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. (Edward Thompson, himself a heroic gardener at his country house in Worcestershire, would have smiled at this co-option of his famous phrase). Dick himself does not contribute a chapter to this collection, but Mitchell seeks to tell the story of Vauxhall pleasure gardens in Birmingham, which opened at some point between 1738 and 1745. Anyone with an interest in Birmingham in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will be aware of these gardens, but will know little about them. Drawing on a watercolour from 1850 and newspaper advertisements, Mitchell now provides us with their story, as far as it can be told. Biographical information on the founders of the gardens, or the artist who produced the watercolour, is unavailable, but we learn about who visited the gardens (there was an admission charge of one shilling) and what they did there (listened to music and watched fireworks and cock fights). Mitchell concludes by offering a persuasive explanation for the demise of these gardens. This difficulty in securing evidence is clear elsewhere in the volume. Harriet Devlin recovers the stories of the private gardens and woodland walks created at Coalbrookdale, but falls back on a good deal of contextualization. Having