Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens

One of the merits of this book is to bring women—too often the great absents from garden history—into the picture. Here, Rebecca Bushnell shows us poor women working as weeders in the gardens of the rich, country and urban housewives working in their kitchen garden as providers for their own family and producers for the market, and women of higher ranks as planners of great gardens. * Journal of Women's History * Bushnell (English, Univ of Pennsylvania) offers this engagingly written, wide-ranging study examining an esoteric subject—16th-and 17th-century English gardening books addressed to readers interested in more ambitious, arcane, or otherwise sophisticated strategies for growing fruits and flowers—yet she manages to reveal the relevance of this modern era.... Summing Up: Highly Recommended. General readers; graduate students; faculty. * Choice * From its sensitive attention devoted to a neglected textual form, it reflects subtly and intelligently on critical early modern struggles over the meanings of nature and culture. Given this breadth and quality, it is a book deserving of a wide audience. -- Andrew McRae, University of Exeter * English Historical Review * Green Desire is an unstintingly interesting book. Bushnell writes with great sympathy and quiet wit about the mixture of empiricism, magic, and popular lore in the seventeenth-century gardening manuals, and tells the story of the way they were superseded by the apparently more scientific works on horticulture.... She shows how gardens could be places of both fantasy and discipline, in which gentry gardeners sought to exercise power over nature, and create spaces which were in their way as artful as poems. -- Colin Burrow * London Review of Books * In Green Desire, Bushnell examines the role that books, specifically 16th- and 17th-century gardening manuals, played in the development of the English garden. These colorful, idiosyncratic treatises were not only full of practical gardening information, they also helped define their readers' relationship with nature. Bushnell argues that the plantsmen who wrote the manuals, though not superstar designers, nonetheless had an important role to play in developing the art of gardening. It's a fascinating story. -- Patricia Jones * Plants and Garden News *