GARDENING is by its nature an optimistic pastime that looks purposefully to the future planning, planting and pruning for seasons to come. Thus, the Victoria and Albert Museum's major summer exhibition, The Garden: A Celebration of One Thousand Years of British Gardening, is a sunny conclusion to its previous gloomy conservation shows on the destruction of the country house and the Uncertain future of English churches.

As with no other nation, gardening reflects the social history of Britain. In countries such as, Italy and France, gardens were a royal pleasure and when royalty disappeared the garden remained static. In Britain, however, it never stopped evolving, influenced as much by economics as by the numerous British explorations that documented and retrieved foreign plant specimens and eventually enriched the horticultural knowledge of the world.

In its effort to lay out the history of gardening in the British Isles, The Garden can only hint at the complex relationships between gardening and architecture, daily domestic life and the reigning intellectual, esthetic and scientific movements of each era. What The Garden does achieve is a delightful afternoon's divertissement, even as it inspires a vague longing for something more substantial.

Roy Strong, the director of the museum, was himself frustrated at the lack of scholarship in garden history. I came to the history of gardening by trying to plan a garden myself, he recalled. There was a dearth of written works. While there is still no satisfactory general garden history book, nor even one on English gardens, the exhibition has yielded a slim volume which, while not a conventional catalogue containing data on the works in the show, does fill in many of the historical gaps in the exhibition."