The Garden
Description
Crossing continents and cultures from antiquity to the present, The Garden encompasses a global history of the garden, the place where culture and nature converge.
The uniqueness of the book will come not only from its global scope - the embracing of East and West, English aristocrats and enslaved African Americans - but also from its movement between the story of actual gardens and revelations of the importance of gardens in a huge range of great works of literature and art, as well as in key ideas in philosophy and religion. We will meet the great garden designers - Ji Cheng in China, André le Nôtre in France, Jefferson in the USA, Humphrey Repton and Gertrude Jekyll in England - but we will also range from Gilgamesh to Gethsemane, Eden to the Eden Project, and we will enter the imagined gardens of Shakespeare and Frances Hodgson Burnett, Goethe and Chekhov, Monet and Van Gogh, Confucius and Epicurus, and many, many more.
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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 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.