The Garden

PREORDER — Expected release: 02 March 2027. This book is not yet available. Dispatch is subject to supplier availability and publication-date changes.

'Fascinating in its literary focus and magisterial in its sweep, The Garden is a must-have book' SUE STUART SMITH

From the Garden of Eden to Gethsemane, from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the pleasure gardens of Versailles, from the Zen gardens of Kyoto to the landscapes of Capability Brown and New York's High Line, the garden has always been far more than somewhere to grow things. It is where humanity has worked out its relationship with the natural world - the place where culture, spirituality and nature converge. An inspiration for poets, painters and philosophers across four thousand years and every civilisation on earth.In this magnificent work of scholarship, one of our greatest literary critics and cultural historians takes us on an extraordinary journey through the gardens of both the world and the human imagination. Sweeping in scope and ambition, this sumptuous and richly illustrated book reveals the garden as a place where we have always worked out our deepest longings for beauty, order, innocence and belonging. Drawing on poetry, painting, philosophy, mythology and religion - from Ovid and the Song of Solomon to Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson - he shows how the garden has inspired our greatest art and consoled us in our darkest hours.Here is the space where, as Andrew Marvell wrote, we may annihilate ‘all that's made / To a green thought in a green shade' - that perfect, paradoxical stillness in which the mind empties itself into nature and finds itself restored.Gardening is the most popular leisure activity in Britain. More than 27 million of us tend a plot, a window box, a rooftop or a patch of earth. Illustrated with more than 150 beautiful images, this book reminds us that it is to the garden, private and public, that we turn for solace, sustenance and sanity. It is a reminder that wherever we human beings have settled, we have reached, instinctively, towards the garden.

About the author

Jonathan Bate, CBE, is Provost of Worcester College and Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. He is Vice-President of the British Academy, a Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and a 2014 judge for the Man-Booker Prize. His biography of John Clare (a poet who was a key influence on Ted Hughes) was shortlisted for seven literary prizes and won three of them, including Britain’s two oldest literary awards, the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and the Hawthornden Prize.