Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens eBook

$39.99

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.

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About this eTextbook

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 Gardener's 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.

Publication details

Author: Rebecca Weld Bushnell
Publisher: Cornell University Press
eText ISBN: 9781501722455, 150172245X
Print ISBN: 9780801441431, 0801441439

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About this eTextbook

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 Gardener’s 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.

Publication details

Author: Rebecca Weld Bushnell
Publisher: Cornell University Press
eText ISBN: 9781501722455, 150172245X
Print ISBN: 9780801441431, 0801441439

What you receive

A licensed digital edition of this title, supplied as PDF or EPUB. The format is set by the publisher, so email us the ISBN before ordering and we will confirm which one it is.
Delivered to the email address on your order as a secure download link, usually within minutes and always within 24 hours of payment.
Download links do not expire and there is no cap on re-downloads. Readable on any computer, tablet or phone, online or offline.
This is a digital edition. Nothing is printed, packed or posted, and there is no delivery charge.