Green Retreats: Women, Gardens, and Eighteenth-Century Culture by Stephen Bending (review)

Stephen Bending begins (and shapes) his delightful volume on “the assumption that the shaping of physical space is the shaping also of identity, and that gardens are microcosms, speaking of and reacting to a world beyond themselves” (1). As Bending notes, the emphasis on garden design in scholarly literature has effectively escorted women out of the garden by focusing solely on the intellectual exercise of design and the male designers who defined gardening aesthetics. By relying on the written records of male garden planners, these works served to obscure the ways women were part of garden history. The experiences of gardening—including the inevitable and repeated triumphs and disasters of cultivation—act as a springboard in Bending’s narrative for women who used that fluctuating experience as a segue to reflect on their place in the world. Solitude, retirement, and renewal are all tones within the literature left by gardeners and “a great mass of writing that claimed the garden as its subject while addressing issues spreading well beyond the cultivation of trees and flowers” (5). As Bending justifies his focus on elite landscape gardens, he notes that these gardens were quasi public, but essentially private, arenas constitutive of their owner’s cultural and social identities. We must, therefore, approach the garden “as a private space visited by the public, as a public space shaped by a private individual . . .” (3). More to Bending’s point, “the landscape garden was addressed by eighteenth-century women owners and women visitors with a sustained and particular intensity” (4). The garden as a demarcated space between nature and culture, between the wild and the domestic—but fundamentally attached to the house, with all its implications for women’s place and women’s roles—gives us a particular window into women’s self-fashioning. As Bending so ably demonstrates in chapter two, the garden was the preeminent site that allowed women to situate the self in cultural narratives, “whether they be of Eden, Paradise, and the Fall, of desire, temptation, and punishment” (93).

In Bending’s argument, literary models that captured the imagined pastoral location and the women within it exercised a significant influence on the reality of women’s gardening experience and how they imagined inhabiting a space in the country. For women, to write about gardens was to write about themselves—the garden as avatar. Bending’s argument suggests that eighteenth-century consumption of the garden—specifically, women’s habitation of the garden—was fundamentally dialogic: on one side of the conversation, the design and physical evolution of the space; on the other side, the intentions, emotions, and meanings of the individuals who planned, planted, and visited. The volume makes clear that the significance of the garden within its eighteenth-century context can only be understood when listening to both sides of the conversation that constituted self-fashioning in the arguably natural realm. Gardens were cultured and culturally multivalent sites—for punishment, seduction, retirement, knowledge—and were shaped by concepts of use and of femininity. They were, therefore, both geographically and ideologically linked to social practices and gendered notions. By beginning with literary expressions of retirement and connecting them to the garden, Bending attempts to erase what he perceives as the false distinctions between the culture of the garden, its literary manifestations, and its physical reality.

Part one focuses on aspects of what is essentially the social and cultural conversation regarding the meaning of “retirement.” Bending’s discussion very convincingly delineates the cultural apparatus that presents retirement as a gendered experience. Retirement could demonstrate men’s gentility or their desire for political and social renewal. For women, retirement could imply the desire for self-reflection and piety—or, more painfully, the implications of women’s forced enclosure in the garden as a result of moral transgression. Representations of women in the landscape have many valences, and Bending describes the ways that retirement (and therefore the garden) had shades of virtue and vice for women, with the...