134 EVESHAM AND ITS STORY 



advance ; but, with the advent of the Midland and 

 Great Western Railways, giving improved access to 

 Oxford and London, to Birmingham and the North, 

 to Gloucester and Bristol, and other populous cities 

 besides, considerable expansion followed, so that by 

 1870 the gardening area had increased to about 1,000 

 acres. 



As long as general farming was profitable the market- 

 gardening played only a secondary role. When, how- 

 ever, agricultural depression came, the big farms that 

 were no longer sufficiently remunerative under cereals 

 were cut up into small farms or small holdings for 

 fruit and vegetable cultivation, and this brought upon 

 the scene a large body of farmers' sons, labourers, rail- 

 way men, and others, who had been awaiting some 

 such opportunities for starting as market-gardeners on 

 their own account. 



Prior to this development many young men, despair- 

 ing of getting land at Evesham, had migrated to 

 Canada, and settled there. Such migration now prac- 

 tically stopped, and scores of active, intelligent, and 

 sturdy workers, who might otherwise have been lost to 

 their country, settled down on holdings varying in size 

 from 2 to 10 or more acres. Evesham became, in fact, 

 a land mainly of small holders, and the gardening area 

 has spread out so far in the district that it may to-day 

 be put at from 20,000 to 25,000 acres. 



Taking the market-gardeners of Evesham as a whole, 

 it may be said that 75 per cent, of them started life as 

 labourers. The crop to which many of them have been 

 mostly indebted for success is asparagus, and I have 

 heard it said that, ' until the blight came, no man who 

 had once got his asparagus bed in good order had been 

 known to fail.' Whatever the crop, the amount of 

 produce the growers secure from a comparatively small 



