The Garden
Our Four-Thousand-Year Quest for Paradise
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The Garden
Pre-order Now for £14.19
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Jonathan Bate
Gardens have always been sacred spaces, allowing humans both to return to nature and to tame it. Avid gardener and literary historian Jonathan Bate traces our fascination with gardens across four millennia, exploring their enduring influence on art, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. Just as the Garden of Eden is foundational to the Abrahamic traditions, gardens are a major preoccupation for authors like Ovid, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Emily Dickinson, and have carried great significance for everyone from kings to monks.
Woven together with a magnificent portrait of our cultural obsession with the garden is an illuminating account of horticultural ingenuity, from the gardens of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to the pleasure gardens of Versailles and public green spaces like New York City’s Central Park. Along the way, Bate offers practical botanical insights: Why have certain rose growers preferred old varieties over new? What makes a weed a weed? And how do certain plants serve essential roles in maintaining a garden’s health?
In this globe-spanning, exuberant, and richly illustrated work, Bate unearths an epic alternative human history and reminds us that to cultivate a garden is to practice care — for the earth, for others, and for the fragile beauty that sustains us.
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Critic reviews
"The fact that [Bate] is also a gardener, weeding away with the rest of us, explains so much about the truly enjoyable level of obsession on show in The Garden. . . . Panoramic in scope. . . but also delights in getting down and dirty with the detail." —Ann Treneman, The Times (UK)
"The Garden is the book [Bate] has waited a lifetime to write. It is both scholarly and relaxed, ambitious and kindly, bringing complicated ideas and feelings down to earth and grounding us in the humble human joy of real and imagined gardens." —Ruth Scurr, The Spectator
"Fascinating in its literary focus and magisterial in its sweep, The Garden is a must-have book.”—Sue Stuart Smith, author of The Well-Gardened Mind
"The Garden is the book [Bate] has waited a lifetime to write. It is both scholarly and relaxed, ambitious and kindly, bringing complicated ideas and feelings down to earth and grounding us in the humble human joy of real and imagined gardens." —Ruth Scurr, The Spectator
"Fascinating in its literary focus and magisterial in its sweep, The Garden is a must-have book.”—Sue Stuart Smith, author of The Well-Gardened Mind
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