The Garden - by Jonathan Bate (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A globe-spanning, never-before-told epic history of the garden--from antiquity to present

Gardens have always been sacred spaces, allowing humans both to return to nature and to tame it. Avid gardener and literary historian Jonathan Bate traces our fascination with gardens across four millennia and explores their enduring influence on art, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. Just as the Garden of Eden is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition, gardens are a major preoccupation for authors like Ovid, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Emily Dickinson, and have carried great significance for everyone from kings to monks.

Woven together with a magnificent portrait of our cultural obsession with the garden is an illuminating account of horticultural ingenuity, from the gardens of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to the pleasure gardens of Versailles and public green spaces like Central Park. Along the way, Bate offers practical botanical insights: Why have certain rose growers preferred old varieties over new? What makes a weed a weed? And how do certain plants serve essential roles in maintaining a garden's health?

In this wide-ranging, exuberant, and richly illustrated work, Bate unearths a magnificent alternate human history, and reminds us that to cultivate a garden is to practice care: for the earth, for others, and for the fragile beauty that sustains us.

About the Author

Sir Jonathan Bate is the author of twenty books, including the prizewinning biographies of William Wordsworth, Ted Hughes, and John Clare. Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University and a senior research fellow at Oxford University, where he was formerly provost of Worcester College, he is widely regarded as one of the world's leading Shakespeare scholars as well as a pioneer of ecological approaches to literature and culture. He has written extensively on classical antiquity, studied art history as a graduate student at Harvard, and became well versed in material culture and global history when co-curating the exhibition Shakespeare: Staging the World at the British Museum during the 2012 London Olympics. He shares his time between Arizona and the UK and is a keen gardener himself.