ABSTRACT
When Edmund Spenser publishes the first three books of The Faerie Queene (1590; 1596) the art of gardening had become an established practice among an increasing number of men and women from the middling sort in England. As discussed in Chapter 1, printed manuals detailed gardens for profit and pleasure of special interest to many upwardly mobile men, who might use their available funds to accumulate still more wealth and prestige in a market economy they occupied in increasing numbers. Spenser’s literary gardens draw on the way gardens for profit and pleasure were associated with male authority and status in England, and he applies this status and authority to the domain of Irish colonization, where \violent domination enacted by male English subjects was held in check by both a female sovereign and native Irish rebels. But Spenser’s imagined gardens also had a more immediate material relation to real English gardens during the period. His participation in the Munster Plantation in Cork County, Ireland made him master of his own plot of land, supervising the gardens planted on it, and serving as an authority over what he and others called the “planting” of the New English settlers there. The Munster Plantation was predicated on a literal cultivating of the Irish landscape, followed by the importation of English men and women who would do the farming and who would replace the native Irish. As such, this plantation project proposed to eradicate what was Irish about the landscape and those who inhabited it. In this context, Spenser’s literary gardens extend beyond actual gardens in England, as his poetic gardens are grafted onto the related practice of colonizing Ireland. They figure as both sites for actual planting (of people and land) across the sea and as spaces to imagine as the metaphorical English garden grown wild and in desperate need of English hands to cultivate it and make it productive.
