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 us both to return to nature and to tame it. Ranging across four millennia, avid gardener and literary historian Jonathan Bate traces our fascination with gardens through agriculture, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. Just as the Garden of Eden is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition and The Epic of Gilgamesh, gardens are a major preoccupation for authors such as Shakespeare, and John Milton, Anton Chekov, and Jane Austen.

Woven together with a brilliant account of our cultural obsession with the garden is a compelling account of our horticultural ingenuity from the gardens of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to the symbolic enclosures of medieval Europe and community gardens 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?

Wide-ranging, exuberant, and richly illustrated, Bate unearths a profound, wondrous, 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 biographies, all of which won prizes, of English literature's three great poets of nature: 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. The citation for his knighthood described him as "truly a Renaissance man" 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 British Museum's major exhibition during the 2012 London Olympics. He has a reading knowledge of ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French and German, but will ensure that colleagues with relevant expertise check his treatment of Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Japanese and Hispanic sources. He is a keen gardener himself.