Gardening is the nation's hobby. It is worth around £3 billion in annual business, much of it generated by television makeovers. No one is letting on that what keeps us spending is the pursuit of a dream. Makeovers are showbiz, brilliant marketing tools, but Eldorado will never be found at B & Q or the garden centre. Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall's new book, The Garden: An English Love Affair (Weidenfeld, £25) takes a beguiling look at what gardens have meant to us over the last 1,000 years. Garden histories, for the general reader, tend to employ recycled facts to demonstrate a bewildering number of trends, but recent books have tried different perspectives. Tom Williamson's Polite Landscapes explained the economics of the 18th-century landscape and Charles Quest- Ritson's The English Garden: A Social Historyâ which came out last year, was well written and refreshingly iconoclastic. Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall is less interested in theory than practice, and she is never authoritarian. In her introduction she refers to 'washing-line gardens' and writes that her policy has been to choose middle- sized or smaller gardens, the ones which can be seen on foot, rather than places on the scale of Castle Howard which require horses (or cars) to be appreciated. Her book relies on contemporary quotations to suggest what was happening. The material is beautifully organised and much of it will be fresh to non-specialists.

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