ABSTRACT
Each spring, countless men and women take shovels in hand and move outside to transform the landscape, whether that involves tackling a small flower plot in their backyards or a planting a community vegetable garden to share with friends and neighbors. No matter the scale of their gardens or their experience as gardeners, these enthusiasts proceed with a vigor unsurpassed by so many other kinds of household “work.” Botanical gardens attract visitors from far and wide to spend a few hours, or perhaps the entire day, strolling in the well-kept beds of flowers both common and exotic. What is it about gardening that has captured the interest of the laborer and admirer alike for centuries, though? Just as they are today, early modern English gardens were sites of particular interest for men and women at least in part because they were spaces for growing things. Yet they were also ideologically-charged spaces that conveyed social meaning. Gender and the Garden reconstructs how gardens functioned as such spaces, how they typified what geographer Denis Cosgrove terms historically-contextualized and geographically-specific “ways of seeing” the world (xxix).1 The book argues that early modern gardens, both actual and imagined, provide a window into how early modern social space-and of particular interest here, the gendered power relationships in it-was shaped and reshaped by people as they made and remade the places they inhabited. As such, this book understands the early modern English garden to be a site where men and women transformed the look of the natural world, but the garden was also a space where they could manipulate their position in society, too.
