This book investigates the key roles played by John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843) and Jane Webb Loudon (1807–1858) in the democratization of the gardening press. Despite the valuable work they performed in their capacities as authors and editors, until recently they have been studied only in terms of the contribution they made to the history of landscape design in the Georgian and Victorian eras. Dewis proposes a new point of view. She studies the Loudons' works within the context of the history of print culture and popular gardening. She mainly focuses on the characteristic features of the Loudons' work in disseminating the gardening press to middle-class gardeners, who had been previously ignored by the horticultural magazines and books. The anachronistic use of the term ‘cultural industry’ in the subtitle of this book is surprising because the author leaves it unexplained. She seems to want to draw attention to the fact that the Loudons had a voluntary and adroit editorial strategy, based on ideological principles and a sound knowledge of the publishing trade.

From this perspective, Dewis examines mainly the Gardener's Magazine, edited by John Loudon from 1826 to 1844. She also analyses his other writings, such as the Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1822–1835), Arboretum et Fructiceum Britanicum (1838) and Laying Out, Planting and Managing of Cemeteries and Churchyards (1843). She completes this corpus with Jane Webb Loudon's series of Ladies' Companions on Flower Gardening and Botany and the Ladies' Magazine of Gardening (1841–1842). Dewis develops an interpretive framework that highlights the Loudons' editorial strategy. She demonstrates that their editing and writing activities proceeded from an educational aim, founded on an ideological conception of gardening in British society.

The Loudons' target audience was the middle-class gardener. However, this type of gardener was not an effective reality but an ideal that John Loudon intended to achieve. Inspired by his radical convictions, by Enlightenment, utilitarian and Presbyterian ideas (Chapter 1), he wished to give the middle class access to a reasoned practice of gardening. Gardening is an activity that requires attention, knowledge, discipline and organization. It brings, therefore, educational benefits for the mind and morality. Moreover, gardening is also linked to the ideal of property and contributes to improving tastes. For Loudon, developing the practice of gardening among the middle and the poorer classes may have contributed to accomplishing a social and national goal. The Gardenesque style, promoted by him, was proposed for democratizing aesthetic principles, which became accessible beyond an exclusive circle of rich landowners. This emerges from the representation of the gardener as a transformer of the landscape, and a pivotal element of the nation. The democratization of gardening became a step forward in civilization's march to the appropriation of national public spaces and to a new form of social cohesion (Chapter 4). In symmetry with that national scale, gardening also found an echo in the domestic sphere (Chapters 5 and 6). Both John and Jane Loudon addressed their publications to a female readership, providing them with serial writings containing botanical knowledge and aesthetic principles that were not accessible to them in the women's literature of the time.

Beyond this demonstration that explores the ideological elements of the Loudons' editorial strategy, Dewis analyses their practical applications. She studies all the issues of the Gardener's Magazine published over a period of eighteen years and the archives of the publishing house (Longman). This allows her to draw a comparison between this magazine and other botanical and farming publications of the time, in order to explain how John Loudon wanted to occupy an original position in the editorial context and differentiate the Gardener's Magazine from other publications, especially from the more elitist Horticultural Transactions. His success is also studied in the context of the competition introduced in the 1830s by the publication of other popular periodicals, such as the Horticultural Register or Gardener's Gazette. Another important aspect analysed by Dewis is the magazine's content, in terms of editorial structure. She interprets the place given to contributors and readers, to articles written by foreign botanists and gardeners, and to a miscellaneous section, where questions and answers created permanent contact with the public. She also follows the progression of the magazine's price over time (five shillings to three shillings and sixpence) in relation to the salaries of gardeners, and analyses the magazine's buyers and its circulation in libraries. The last aspect of this study of the Gardener's Magazine concerns the relationship between text and images. Dewis estimates that the average proportion of images rose from 5 per cent in 1826 to up to 20 per cent by 1839. She further presents the evolution of the main types of image (sketches, diagrams, botanical illustrations, photographs, pictures and plans) in regard to the evolution of the objects they illustrate: whole plants or microscopic views, landscape design, gardening tools and cultural techniques.

Through this study on the Loudons' authorial and editorial work, Dewis conducts a well-documented historical investigation which is rigorously integrated in the context of the time, and extremely appealing to readers interested in the cultural history of the press, gardening and landscape design. What benefit does this book bring to historians of science? It addresses a very little-studied matter in the history of botany in the first half of the nineteenth century: the acculturation of science in the world of practitioners of horticulture and gardening. The dissemination of botanical knowledge among gardeners, explicitly defended by John Loudon, opens ‘scientific horticulture’ (promoted by the horticultural societies) to a larger social audience, including women. Historians of science will be interested in the role played by the gardening press as an essential element of the powerful link established at that time between the advancement of knowledge in plant physiology and cultivation techniques, between debates on the plant systematics and the classification of fruit trees, between descriptive botanics and cultivation of plants introduced from other continents in nurseries – reserved until then to the botanical gardens or the greenhouses of wealthy owners. It would have been interesting to pursue this proposal and to analyse the dialogue between science and practice in the reverse direction, by studying how scholarly publications mobilized the gardeners and gave them experimental or theoretical meaning, such as seeding in view of obtaining new horticultural varieties, bud variations or monstrosities. This book also calls for establishing comparisons with other gardening periodical publications of the time, such the french Almanach du bon jardinier. The references to the Loudons' writings in other countries could give Dewis's book a broader perspective into international networks of horticulture and would be useful for studying the transfer of knowledge between botany and horticulture in an extremely interesting period in the history of cells, heredity, hybridization, the chemical nature of the phenomena of life and the transformation of species.

Sarah Dewis's study can therefore provoke new areas of research in the field. The diverse historical elements which Dewis corroborates in this book, namely ideology, printing techniques, analysis of market strategies and the circulation of knowledge, make it a valuable multifaceted study in the history of print media, gardening and botanical sciences.