In the original dust jacket. Green cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean rare copy from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. Jack founded the Midsummer House, Cambridge’s paramount restaurant. This dining experience is hidden amongst the grassy pastures and grazing cattle of Midsummer Common and perched on the banks of the River Cam. The Midsummer House experience is imaginatively curated to delight and amaze, so our surprise set menu changes regularly and is our playground to showcase our reverence for purity of flavour and natural seasonal ingredients.

Country house kitchen gardens were designed as perfect ‘grow your own’ environments and ensured that households were supplied with their own fruit and vegetables throughout the year. This book offers an insight into the digging and sowing of these gardens, as well as exploring how walled gardens contributed towards a sustainable lifestyle and often were a source of not just foot, but also of natural medicines. A wealth of contemporary illustrations, material from archives, gardening manuals, seed catalogues, engravings and other documents, paint a vivid picture of the country house kitchen garden and its development over three and a half centuries. This delightful book records an important part of our historic houses and their national heritage – to be enjoyed by gardeners and non-gardeners alike.

Review: Thoroughly enjoyed this book and have learned a lot and shared with friends. Now I have to ask the universe for a heated glasshouse….

Constance Anne Wilson (12 July 1927 – 8 January 2023) was a Welsh food historian and librarian. Wilson was born in Gower, near Swansea, the elder daughter of Rowland Wilson (later Professor of Mathematics at Swansea University) and his wife Constance Laycock. She attended Mumbles primary school and Glanmor Grammar School for Girls, Swansea and then followed her mother to Girton College, Cambridge where she read Classics. She subsequently obtained a London postgraduate diploma in the Archaeology of the Iron Age and the Roman Provinces. In 1961, Wilson was appointed an Assistant Librarian in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds. She was subject librarian for classics, archaeology, and ancient history, to which she subsequently added art and music. In the mid-1960s she catalogued the John F. Preston collection of historic cookery books (at the time a recent gift to the Library), which led to her developing an interest in food history. She published the wide-ranging Food and Drink in Britain in 1973, and her more specialised The Book of Marmalade: its antecedents, its history and its rôle in the world today won the 1984 Diagram Prize for the oddest title of the year at the Frankfurt Book Fair. In 2006 she published Water of Life: a history of wine-distilling and spirits; 500 BC – AD 2000. She edited several volumes of the proceedings of the Leeds Symposium on Food History and Tradition. Wilson retired from Leeds in 1992.