The Garden is where humanity has worked out its relationship with the natural world. The place where spirituality and nature converge.

The Garden

In this magnificent work of scholarship, one of our greatest literary critics and cultural historians takes us on an extraordinary journey through the gardens of both the world and the human imagination. Sweeping in scope and ambition, this sumptuous and richly illustrated book reveals the garden as a place where we have always worked out our deepest longings for beauty, order, innocence and belonging. Drawing on poetry, painting, philosophy, mythology and religion - from Ovid and the Song of Solomon to Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson - he shows how the garden has inspired our greatest art and consoled us in our darkest hours.

Here is the space where, as Andrew Marvell wrote, we may annihilate 'all that's made / To a green thought in a green shade' - that perfect, paradoxical stillness in which the mind empties itself into nature and finds itself restored.

Gardening is the most popular leisure activity in Britain. More than 27 million of us tend a plot, a window box, a rooftop or a patch of earth. Illustrated with more than 150 beautiful images, this book reminds us that it is to the garden, private and public, that we turn for solace, sustenance and sanity. It is a reminder that wherever we human beings have settled, we have reached, instinctively, towards the garden.

Jonathan Bate

Sir Jonathan Bate is Regents Professor of Literature and Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in Global Futures, the School of Sustainability and the College of Liberal Arts at Arizona State University. He was formerly Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Provost of Worcester College, Oxford. He has published extensively on Shakespeare, and his 2003 biography of John Clare won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. He was made an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's in 2001, and was knighted in the 2015 New Year's Honours for services to literary scholarship and higher education.

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