I had been interested in history since I was a child, so after enjoying a career as a professional gardener (including time as a head gardener), I decided I wanted to learn how people in the past looked after their plants and see whether I could apply those techniques to the present day. Through my research, I found that many of the modern gardening tools we use today were first adopted by the ancient Romans, and a lot of early gardening practices were copied from books written by the Romans, too. I also learned about the practical uses of the plants themselves, which were not only eaten as food, but used to , cosmetics and dyes.
Even roses, which we now consider to be purely decorative, had many other uses in the past. Some people still use rose flavouring in food or as cosmetics, but our ancestors also used them medicinally. When it came to researching the medieval period, I spent a lot of time studying pictures from illuminated manuscripts to see how gardens were set out and the tools that were used to maintain them.
I also visited the British Library to research original documents, and I translated a lot of information from a book that had been written in medieval French. Studying gardening in later periods was much easier, especially when I could find printed material written in English. What surprised me is how little gardening tools and practices changed over the centuries, even if the gardens themselves evolved as new styles came in and out of fashion.
It was also int.