ABSTRACT
Gardening books printed during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England documented the shifting meanings of the garden at the same time they mobilized the differentiated positions among those who designed, worked, and owned them. Directly tied to practical methods and design, these manuals shaped a developing discourse about how to garden, who planted gardens, and what people sought when they planted them; in the process, they also cultivated the gendered relationships relevant to gardening practice and the garden spaces that people made. As such, these books have much to teach us about the interrelationship between the garden as a physical and a social space. But what, more precisely, is the nature of this interrelationship in these books? As prescriptive texts for everyday activities, these books certainly taught people how to plant the food they would later eat and how to grow the flowers they would later enjoy. At the same time, as Rebecca Bushnell rightly reminds us, these books also represented imagined relationships, what “ought to be,” as much as what arguably was to be found in the average household’s working garden (109).
