%_./1 l~，~ll 1 o<br >The principal historians of the English garden have virtually<br >nothfiag to say about the cottage garden before Gertrude<br >Jekyll discovered it during the second half of the nineteenth<br >century as a source of ideas for larger gardens. Their interest<br >has very properly centred on the origins and growth of the<br >art of laying out gardens and the science of horticulture : that<br >being so， they have sought their material in the great gardens，<br >first of the Romano-British villas， then of the monasteries，<br >the castles and the great country houses of the nobility and<br >gentry. And， of course， it was in the great gardens of the rich<br >and mighty， and not in the little gardens of the poor and<br >humble， that both the art of gardening and the science of<br >horticulture developed.<br > But there is another reason why we find so little about early<br >cottage gardens in the garden histories: there are no， or very<br >very few， documents of any kind. So that if historians have so<br >little to say about cottage gardens until almost modern times，<br >it is for the best of all possible reasons: it is very difficult to<br >find out anything about them. For the whole period of time<br >before the scventeenth century， and one might ahnost say<br >the eighteenth， we have only hints and fragments; it rarely<br >occurred to garden writers， diarists or economists to notice<br >thc poor man s garden. And the great social historians seem<br >to be in no better case， although his small garden must always<br >have been of the very greatest importance， even economic-<br >ally， to the poor man; yet even in so considerable a work as<br >G. M. Trevelyan s tbur-volume English Social History， I doubt<br >whether there are fifty lines about the cottage garden， and<br >there are certainly fewer than that for the cottage garden in<br >the Middle Ages.<br > Moreover， until the time of John Claudius Loudon， say<br >the mid nineteenth century， the leading professional experts，<br >whcthcr artists like Wise， Kent， Capability Brown and<br >Humphry Repton， or the scientific horticulturists， gave their<br >