New take on garden rake

Gardening Women: Their stories from 1600 to the present

But this book isn’t some film tie-in to cash in on our love of all things green. It reads more as a labour of love by someone who is a master at in-depth research into matters horticultural and historical – indeed author Catherine Horwood is honorary research fellow of the Bedford Centre for the History of Women at Royal Holloway and is about to be a visiting fellow at Yale.

So we can take it that the information here has been meticulously researched. Actually, there is such a wealth of facts on gardening women over the past four centuries that at times it reads more like a postgraduate thesis than a tale of gardening women.