ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book takes as its subject the symbiotic relationship between physical gardens and their literary representations, the correlation of which influenced the development of garden design and of metaphorical gardens in literature. It focuses on how gardens in England developed in the period between 1560 and 1670. The book illustrates how gardens become a remedy in the national imaginary for the realities of life in sixteenth-and seventeen-century England, which was becoming increasingly urbanized and polluted. It organizes five horticultural categories-the political garden, the untended garden, the corporeal garden, the colonial garden, and the revolutionary garden. The book focuses on how the vision of the land as monarch reflects a fallen world; weakness in royal houses results in the complete degradation of the land. And, in turn, the royal body begins to acquire botanical qualities mirroring either the health or illness of the nation-state.
