Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (review)

The claim that the everyday is as important as the most cultivated products of a society is the starting point of this well-researched study of gardening between 1500–1800. Bushnell reshapes a long-standing theme of literary studies — the idea of nature — by appealing to many of the themes that have dominated New Historicist literary criticism for some time. She takes her evidence not from "elevated" literary, scientific, or philosophical texts, but from the common gardening manual. Practices described in these manuals provide a "local argument" (5) about how the English socially constructed the historically contingent category of Nature; as such, these manuals can illuminate high literary genres by "root[ing] literary texts in their contemporary cultural and historical moments" (7). It may be jolting to see Thomas Browne placed along side the ordinary how-to gardening book; however, in contrast to John Dixon Hunt's "high gardening theory," the "passionate debate" about nature seen from the perspective of "the nursery and household" rather than "the universities, gentlemen's societies, and literary salons" (5) reveals how "fairly ordinary men" wrote about "making art and transforming themselves as well as their surroundings" (7). The common gardening manual, neglected by historians of science as "tedious and naïve" (6) was in fact "engaged in important social and intellectual issues" (8), which "seeped" into the quotidian activity of gardening.

Emphasizing English gardening rather than the English garden, the book begins by looking at gardening as a form of work, and gardeners as a category of worker. Some gardeners in fact left evidence of their careers, and this evidence allows Bushnell to consider interrelations among gardeners from different social classes with different goals: ordinary weeders who worked for wages, gardeners in service to aristocratic estates, gardeners who marketed their products for profit, gentleman gardeners who gardened for recreation, and scholarly botanists working towards higher national productivity. Bushnell devotes a chapter to the place of women in gardening, making distinctions between women's actual gardening work and its representation in print as male fantasy; only in the late seventeenth century do women and flowers come to dominate gardening manuals, as gardening becomes a feminine activity. In fact, one of the strongest parts of this study is the evolution of the gardening book, specifically the reciprocal influence of the practice of gardening and the printing of garden books on each other, so that gardening and reading about gardens "became inextricably intertwined and even confused" (42). Bushnell is particularly interesting when she illustrates literary garden themes with reference to the real world of commercial horticulture, showing how the instability of the social order was reflected in debates about changing nature through gardening techniques, some of them quite fantasial.

In the end, Bushnell does link up gardening with high intellectual matters. With the influence of Bacon, gardening as a source of botanical knowledge became a principal justification for the gentleman to soil his hands in the earth, either for the purpose of unlocking the secrets of nature, or for the disinterested improvement of horticulture for the practical benefit of the nation. In fact, the Baconian legacy is the end toward which this book reaches as it moves from the humble lives of weeders in its early pages. By the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, gardening books became entangled in the debates over the claims of scientific truth. As readers came to expect the gardening book to be a source of knowledge, and as the claims of gardening books became larger, adjudicating the truth of those claims became more pressing. Bushnell shows how the social position of the writer lent credibility to disinterested truth claims, and she chronicles how experimental methods replaced local experience as the source of authority for objective truth about gardens and about nature in general.

Bushnell's book will undoubtedly be useful for those interested in the early modern home and its literature. It should be noted that this book is...