In this scholarly and highly entertaining book, Toby Musgrave rescues the head gardeners from the backwaters of horticultural history and restores them to their rightful place as the founders of their profession. This is a fascinating study of the great Victorian and Edwardian head gardeners, a remarkable group of self-made men who transformed gardening from menial labour into a profession. It recreates the social world of the great country house gardens where staffs of up to fifty might be employed in growing produce of awe-inspiring variety in prodigious quantities. It reveals that it was the head gardeners of the past who were largely responsible for creating the science of horticulture as we know it today.