Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens

by Rebecca Weld Bushnell

Overview

For Rebecca Bushnell, English gardening books tell a fascinating tale of the human love for plants and our will to make them do as we wish. These books powerfully evoke the desires of gardeners: they show us gardeners who, like poets, imagine not just what is but what should be. In particular, the earliest English garden books, such as Thomas Hill's The Gardeners Labyrinth or Hugh Platt's Floraes Paradise, mix magical practices with mundane recipes even when the authors insist that they rely completely on their own experience in these matters. Like early modern "books of secrets," early gardening manuals often promise the reader power to alter the essential properties of plants: to make the gillyflower double, to change the lily's hue, or to grow a cherry without a stone. Green Desire describes the innovative design of the old manuals, examining how writers and printers marketed them as fiction as well as practical advice for aspiring gardeners. Along with this attention to the delights of reading, it analyzes the strange dignity and pleasure of garden labor and the division of men's and women's roles in creating garden art. The book ends by recounting the heated debate over how much people could do to create marvels in their own gardens. For writers and readers alike, these green desires inspired dreams of power and self-improvement, fantasies of beauty achieved without work, and hopes for order in an unpredictable world—not so different from the dreams of gardeners today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501722455
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	07/05/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	30 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Rebecca Bushnell is Professor of English and Dean of the College, University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance, and Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles' Theban Plays, all from Cornell, and editor of A Companion to Tragedy.

What People are Saying About This

Valerie Traub

Reading gardening manuals in relation to early modern discourses of gender, labor, status, science, and nature, Green Desire demonstrates just how important the 'how-to' of growing plants was to the way people crafted their identities. Scholars and gardeners—and those who are both—will appreciate how passion, pleasure, work, and knowledge all come together in Bushnell's perceptive analysis.

Wendy Wall

Green Desire addresses hot topics among scholars today: the importance of the material form of books as part of their meanings; ideologies of gender; the relationships among different classifications of knowledge; social status; and ways in which writers construct a past history. Rebecca Bushnell's book has a particular charm created by her understated wit and quiet mastery over a body of research.

Editorial Reviews

One of the merits of this book is to bring women—too often the great absents from garden history—into the picture. Here, Rebecca Bushnell shows us poor women working as weeders in the gardens of the rich, country and urban housewives working in their kitchen garden as providers for their own family and producers for the market, and women of higher ranks as planners of great gardens.

Journal of Women's History

Bushnell (English, Univ of Pennsylvania) offers this engagingly written, wide-ranging study examining an esoteric subject—16th-and 17th-century English gardening books addressed to readers interested in more ambitious, arcane, or otherwise sophisticated strategies for growing fruits and flowers—yet she manages to reveal the relevance of this modern era.... Summing Up: Highly Recommended. General readers; graduate students; faculty.

Choice

Green Desire is an unstintingly interesting book. Bushnell writes with great sympathy and quiet wit about the mixture of empiricism, magic, and popular lore in the seventeenth-century gardening manuals, and tells the story of the way they were superseded by the apparently more scientific works on horticulture.... She shows how gardens could be places of both fantasy and discipline, in which gentry gardeners sought to exercise power over nature, and create spaces which were in their way as artful as poems.

London Review of Books - Colin Burrow

From its sensitive attention devoted to a neglected textual form, it reflects subtly and intelligently on critical early modern struggles over the meanings of nature and culture. Given this breadth and quality, it is a book deserving of a wide audience.

English Historical Review - Andrew McRae

In Green Desire, Bushnell examines the role that books, specifically 16th- and 17th-century gardening manuals, played in the development of the English garden. These colorful, idiosyncratic treatises were not only full of practical gardening information, they also helped define their readers' relationship with nature. Bushnell argues that the plantsmen who wrote the manuals, though not superstar designers, nonetheless had an important role to play in developing the art of gardening. It's a fascinating story.

Plants and Garden News - Patricia Jones