The growth of provincial nurseries: The Norwich nurserymen, c. 1750-1860

English nurserymen of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have received far less academic attention from garden historians than the designers of gardens and parks. But the activities of the latter depended fundamentally on the existence of a sophisticated nursery industry, the logistics and operations of which remain largely unknown. The Norwich Nursery, which operated between c.1750 and 1859, was one of the largest nurseries in eastern England, and yet it has fallen into relative obscurity. This paper redresses this gap in our current knowledge of provincial nurserymen, while demonstrating that provincial nurseries were often far larger, more complex and sophisticated enterprises than has been previously assumed.