Contemporary works
1. There were several manuals of French gardening published during the craze years containing detailed accounts of procedures. The best are:
Paul Aquatias, Intensive Culture of Vegetables on the French System: with a concise monthly calendar of operations (London: Upcott Gill, 1913)
Thomas Smith, French Gardening (London: Utopia Press, 1909)
John Weathers, French Market-Gardening (London: John Murray, 1909)
2. A feature of 1908 were a number of slim volumes, hastily published to catch the wave of public interest. The Daily Mail’s effort sold particularly well:
C.D. McKay, The French Garden: A Diary & Manual of Intensive Cultivation (London: Daily Mail, 1908)
3. Thomas Smith’s The Profitable Culture of Vegetables (London: Longmans Green, 1911) is one of many books on vegetable cultivation generally that contained chapters on French gardening.
4. Edwin Pratt’s The Transition in Agriculture (London: John Murray, 1906) is a good contemporary survey of innovations in agriculture. It includes an account of Bengeworth Nurseries.
Modern works
5. The essential work on the land reform movement is Paul Readman’s Land and Nation: Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880-1914 (Woodbridge: The Royal Historical Society, 2008)
6. For the Daily Mail’s approach to journalism see Jean K. Chalaby, ‘Smiling Pictures Make People Smile: Northcliffe’s Journalism’, Media History, 6, no.1 (2000), pp.33-44; also Joel Wiener, The Americanization of the British press, 1830s-1914: speed in the age of transatlantic journalism. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
7. Two modern works that consider French gardening, albeit briefly, are:
Joan Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp.184-185
David H. Haney, ‘“Three Acres and a Cow”: Small-Scale Agriculture as Solution to Urban Impoverishment in Britain and Germany, 1880–1933’. In: Imbert, Dorothée, (ed.) Food and the City : Histories of Culture and Cultivation. (Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 17-53
[I regret coming across Haney’s chapter too late for discussion in my dissertation as it is a thoughtful account of different approaches to small-scale agriculture, French gardening among them]