British Garden Literature: Historiography and Idiomatic Change

© 2008 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Literature Compass 5/5 (2008): 894–905, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00564.x

British Garden Literature: Historiography and Idiomatic Change

Rachel Crawford*University of San Francisco

AbstractBritish garden literature, limited in this essay to horticulture, has been publishedsince the advent of printing. The writing of garden history, however, is usuallyidentified with Stephen Switzer’s first, historical chapter in his Nobleman, Gentleman,and Gardener’s Recreation (1715); yet garden histories are a convention of the earliestprinted literature on gardens. Because early modern garden literature incorporatesdifferent historiographic conventions than modern, this aspect of it has beenneglected by critics. In an additional complication, two great idiomatic changespunctuate the timeline of garden histories: the first begins in the decades beforethe Interregnum, a transformation from a Catholic idiom to one that is Protes-tant; the second in the latter half of the eighteenth century, from an idiom thatwas religious, mythical, and legendary to one that is aesthetic. Only in recentdecades, with the pressure to reinsert history into literatures generally, have theembedded histories in early modern garden literature once again become legible.

A small, often reproduced painting portrays an imaginary Pict maiden poisednaked with a sword hung from a metal chain to a black braid around herwaist; her left hand holds her javelin while a black braid, like the one aroundher waist, encircles her neck (Fig. 1). Her long blonde curls, though boundtightly away from her face, fall behind her body and past her waist to herthighs. The fascination of the Young Daughter of the Picts, by Jacques Le Moynesde Morgues (c.1585), a Huguenot painter who accompanied a findingexpedition to Florida (1564) as an engraver and painter, is no doubt thenaked maid’s tattooed body – a garden of exquisite flowers that cover herfrom the black braid around her neck to her ankles and wrists. Her nipplesform the center of two centifolia roses, a large double peony covers herbelly just over her womb, and the flowers on her arms and legs – amongthem tulips, anemones, marvels of Peru, flags, and thistles – are perfectlypaired and at the peak of their bloom. Framed by the black braid, heruntattooed face stands out as a maiden head. Her engardened body (bothblossoming and guarded) brings to mind the elusive eternal spring soughtby gardenists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, flowering, as theydo, simultaneously on her flesh, while tufts that seem to have sprung up

© 2008 The Author Literature Compass 5/5 (2008): 894–905, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00564.xJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

British Garden Literature 895

where her feet have trod suggest that life germinates in the barren groundthat her body touches. This painting, in which the skin is transformed byart into a legible vestment of flowers, fascinates not merely for its beauty.Every element is emblematic: as an invented image of the Norman ancestorsof this French painter, her body produces meanings far beyond her singularform. The most obvious is the ancient and enduring linkage betweenfemininity and the soil, since the Pict maid standing on a barren patchthat the dun-colored village in the background mirrors, has the potentialto bring her fertility to her community, to transform it into a garden.

I have chosen to limit this survey on garden literature to horticulturalhistories. Like the representation of the ancient yet young body of the Pict,an ideology is at work in the texts that I survey: in le Moyne’s case, his

Fig. 1. Jacques Le Moyne de Morgue, ‘Young Daughter of the Picts’ (c.1585). Imaginaryportrait of an ancient Norman Ancestor engraved after le Moyne’s journey to Florida in 1584under Loudonniere, where he observed the blackish-blue tattoos worn by Floridian women.

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undisclosed syncretic theory of human progress, in which the real practicesof one human group (Floridian women) illuminate the imaginary practicesof the other (his European ancestors). Le Moyne’s young ancestor, in addition,bears an art emblematic of religious and social ideologies parallel withthose of the earliest printed garden literature. Her history thus indicatesways gardens in general have been studied: sometimes importing newmeanings even as traces of the old disappear; sometimes following trendsof modern scholarship; and sometimes archeologically disclosing the contoursof gardens and their shifting fashions.

A survey of printed garden manuals from the sixteenth century to theeighteenth reveals that virtually all, not merely those beginning with theeighteenth century, provide histories of the garden. Operating within anhistoriographic tradition alien to ours, these may not appear to us as historyand have been neglected as such in part because the history of gardeningin Britain is punctuated by two great linguistic shifts: the first beginningin the decades before the Interregnum (1649–60), an active transformationfrom a Catholic to Protestant idiom, which introduced into the garden theevangelical plot of regeneration; the second in the latter half of the eighteenthcentury, when the religious, mythical, and legendary idiom of historiesshifted to one that was aesthetic, emptying history, as it was understoodin earlier times, out of the discourse. The aesthetic tradition of the latterhalf of the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on the pleasure gardensof the wealthy, remained in place well into the second half of the twentiethcentury when, under the force of current critical theories, history andproduction were reinserted into garden histories. We can trace these idiomaticchanges through the use of the terms profit and pleasure.

Early Modern Histories and Sir Thomas Browne

The history of British gardens is commonly thought to begin with the openingchapter in Stephen Switzer’s The Nobleman, Gentleman, and Gardener’s Recreation(1715). The history of the garden is enriched when we reach further backin time, however, than what David Jacques refers to as ‘the first attemptat a comprehensive history of English garden-writing and -making’ (119)and Switzer’s claim that his ‘is the first that has appear’d in this kind’ (1).Garden histories predating Switzer’s tend toward brevity and are locatedin extra-instructional material such as Epistles to Readers rather than inthe instructive portion of the text. They typically include claims that thegarden is a re-creative activity and that pre-lapsarian horticultural laborprovides an apology for post-lapsarian ‘mechanickall’ toil. They also followa conventional trajectory: the Garden of Eden gives the art its special mandate,while biblical anecdotes and the classics provide pedagogical touchstonesfor the development of gardens in history. In them the terms profit andpleasure become metaphoric containers of different meanings over the courseof time. Initially, these terms allude to the quality of the garden described



by the Romans as utile dulci, which referred to the garden’s re-creative laborand sensuous delight. The first major changes in this idiom began in Englandbefore the Interregnum, but, hastened by that decade, introduced a distinctlyProtestant dimension to garden manuals in general and to the meaning ofthe words profit and pleasure in particular. Few texts in the new idiomare as systemically hermeneutical as Ralph Austen’s and his most clearlyreveal the Protestant notion of pleasure and profit that permeates thosethat follow, even when the spiritual element is attenuated. In Austen’stexts, and others such as John Beale’s and, earlier, Hugh Plat’s, pleasureand profit relate not only to the Roman ideal of utile dulci, but the soul’sprofit and pleasure in learning the garden’s natural language. Ultimately,the supramundane purpose of Austen’s manuals is to reveal through thegarden’s natural vocabulary reconciliation with God of the sinner saved bygrace. Once neutralized, the terms produce pragmatic meanings – marketprofit and sensuous pleasure – which harmonize with radical Protestantideology as the visible reward for heeding the garden’s spiritual instruction.

Though Switzer’s history is progressive, echoing an observation madeby Louis XIV’s kitchen gardener, Jean de la Quintinye, that the pleasuregarden is the apex of garden art, it does not represent a signal change ingarden histories; rather, it culminates early modern histories. Like them,Switzer’s history precedes his practical instructions, locates the origin ofgardening in the Garden of Eden, refers to classical texts and legendarygarden heroes, and quotes other garden texts. This lays the basis for hisattention to pleasure gardens. He inaccurately alleges with writers beforehim that the Interregnum interrupted the progress of gardening, when theInterregnum was actually an active time in the history of gardens thatwould profit from further scholarly study; finally, he dates the impetusbehind pleasure gardens to the Restoration (1660) and locates the pleasuregarden’s high-water mark at the Glorious Revolution and accession ofWilliam III (1688), points currently being reassessed.

By contrast, Sir Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus (1658), though aneccentric, hermetic interpretation, eschews like modern histories practicalinstruction to focus on design, foregrounds interpretation, and limits hissubject of inquiry while deepening the scope of his speculation. Thoughhe resorts to conventions of early modern histories, his, unlike those of mostof his contemporaries, focuses on a single element. Convention providesa backdrop for his contention that ‘While many of the Ancients do poorlylive in the single names of Vegetables; All stories do look upon Cyrus, asthe splendid and regular planter’ (94). The key to Cyrus’s greatness washis exploitation of a particular kind of form, the quincunx, that accordswith the central order of the universe, thus unifying the garden with theinternal workings of the mundane order and the eternal workings of thesupramundane. Despite Browne’s use of convention, then, his interpretationof the quincunx provides the garden with far greater significance than hadgenealogies beginning with the Garden of Eden. The quincunx was the



common organization of many fruit gardens – a square of four trees interlockingwith those adjacent to it, bearing at its center a fifth tree:

That is the rows and orders so handsomely disposed; or five trees so settogether, that a regular angularity, and through prospect, was left on every side,Owing this name not only unto the Quintuple number of Trees, but the figuredeclaring that number. which [sic] being doubted at the angle, makes up theLetter χ, that is the Emphaticall decussation, or fundamentall figure. (94–5)

As a pragmatic contrivance of fruit gardens that influenced the plantingof wildernesses in the landscape park, the quincunx was designed to providethe maximum number of trees with the greatest access to air and light;for Browne, however, the figure is an emblem embedded ubiquitously inthe landscape and celestial bodies. In his marvelous prose he proposes thatbeginning with the design of the Garden of Eden, this figure informs all‘Architectonicall relations’ (103) of nature. It also defines our human nature,reducing it to its essence in the Greek χ. Browne observes that, when spun,chi appears to be a circle and thus proves that the quincuncial chiasmusanchors the duality of our nature:

The circle declaring the motion of the indivisible soul, simple, according tothe divinity of its nature, and returning into it self; the right lines respectingthe motion pertaining unto sense, and vegetation, and the central decussation,the wondrous connexion of the several faculties conjointly in one substance.And soon conjoined the unity and duality of the soul, and made out the threesubstances so much considered by him; That is, the indivisible or divine, thedivisible or corporeal, and that third, which was the Systasis or harmony ofthose two, in the mystical decussation. (186)

The quincunx’s unity-in-duality figures in the central image of error inthe first garden: the Tree of Knowledge. We can extrapolate from Browne’sinterpretation and note that seventeenth-century pleasure gardens of NorthernEurope were built around knots and mazes, calculated principles of erroror wandering controlled by the ‘decussive’ principle of the quincunx.

Browne’s syncretic history contrasts with both early modern and eighteenth-century garden histories, the latter of which introduced the (false) notionthat eighteenth-century landscape designers invented the ‘English manner’and privileged landscape parks in which extension was an end in itself.Ironically, Dezallier D’Argenville notes in 1709 (English translation 1712)that in practice the term quincunx ‘is now used to denote a Plantationwhere the Trees, that made the middle Points are left out, and the othersform a perfect Square, and are so repeated throughout (Marginalia 3; repeatedin the text, 51). Visual designs from British manuals in the eighteenthcentury suggest either that in Britain both formations were in play or thatthose depicting the quincunx are idealizations. Browne’s history, regardless,offers profound and beautiful alterities to the conventions laid down inthe eighteenth century.



Modernity: Thomas Whately

Thomas Whately signals the second shift in idiom after that of the Inter-regnum in Observations on Modern Gardening (1770), in which he applies aconsistently aesthetic vocabulary. Seventeenth-century garden writers operatedopenly under the assumptions of Protestantism in a pre-enlightenment worldwhile at the same time finding it increasingly necessary to disclose differencesbetween their worldview and those encountered through travel, as le Moyne’simage illustrates: the Pict maiden’s tattoos reveal his syncretic theory of humanorigins, while he preserves a specular difference between his ancestor andFloridian women by transforming her body from what Europeans consideredaboriginal disfiguration into the beauty of European figuration; hers is anepidermal florilegia. The aesthetic idiom of the later eighteenth centurydisguises the nature of such difference, since aesthetics subscribes to categoriesof sensory judgment which transcend history and evacuate space. Whatelyhimself pilfers from the rhetorical tradition of garden writing while alteringand concealing the bases of his analysis; he privileges what he calls expressiveover emblematic (or ideological) designs, an alteration John Dixon Hunt seesas a general ‘development from emblematic to expressive gardening’ (294). Theprimary alteration was, however, produced by historians: although kitchengardens remained predominant in Britain, historians and designers shiftedtheir emphasis to landscape parks, which provide rich sites for aestheticinterpretation. Whately imbues the ground with particular ‘Characteristics,’an aesthetic rather than emblematic term; if design observes the land’sinherent Characteristic, the garden becomes part of nature’s design; however,if it obscures or alters the Characteristic, art appears out of kilter with nature.Pope, perhaps remembering the phrase, ‘the Genius of the soil,’ in thecelebratory poem to de la Quintinye prefixed to his treatise on kitchengardens (Victorinus, no line nos.), noted the importance of ‘consult[ing]the Genius of the place’ (line 57). Whately’s Characteristic modernizes ‘theGenius of the soil,’ suggesting that the alteration from emblem to expressionis more accurately understood as a transformation from emblematic to aesthetic,precisely because it reflects an emptying out of history and productionprocesses that might mar our pleasure; the bejeweled body of the Pict canbe enjoyed without its emblematic history, le Moyne’s arduous travel, orhis speculation about human development, all aspects of production thatmade the image possible.

This idiom is most apparent in Whately’s conversion of the terms profitand pleasure to beauty and use – which though comparable in meaning,differ radically in application. Labor, with its attendant connotations ofmaterial reward and physical pleasure, is eviscerated, as Raymond Williamsmight point out, in favor of an aesthetic idiom. Whately underscores thispoint by referring only rarely to a specific plant, while Browne, with hisbaffling mystical revelry, refers to nearly 150. For Whately, beauty becomesa thing in itself, unmindful of particulars such as cabbages or roses. Nevertheless,



he, like British aestheticians such as Henry Home, Lord Kames, is unwillingto forego the pragmatic. As he says of buildings, in a comment that has widerapplication, ‘beauty becomes their use’ (134); or, as William Mason expatiatesin his poem, The English Garden, ‘Beauty scorns to dwell/Where Use isexil’d’ (lines II.21–2). While this notion flies in the face of Kant’s laterjudgment of beauty as incompatible with use, beauty and use in Britishaesthetics of this period conjoin: if use is the primary historical object ofthe vernacular garden, then beauty becomes an aesthetic force because ofthe nature of use in the pleasure garden. Yet aesthetics inevitably becomesmore important than profit and pleasure. Despite Whately’s retention of use,his translation of profit into use provides a means by which aesthetics canbe made the central, compulsory component of any garden.

Modern Garden Histories: The Neo-Kantians

Garden histories from the mid-twentieth century until the present havetended to follow, as Hunt suggests when he discusses parallels betweengardening and literature, the trends of literary scholarship. The mid-twentiethcentury, especially, saw histories of gardens burgeon into exhaustive worldhistories that reach their apogee in the ‘English manner’, or others devotedprimarily to Britain. Despite the confrontation between a neo-Kantian aestheticand Whately’s pragmatic aesthetic, these should be grouped together, as theysolidify formalist ideas now rejected by New Historicists and Postcolonialists.Derek Clifford’s A History of Garden Design (1963) assumes as its foundingposition that

A garden is man’s idealized view of the world; and because most men arerepresentative of the society of which they are a part, it follows that fashionablegardens of any community and any period betray the dream world which isthe period’s ideal. All history is one. (17)

In this undifferentiated history, Clifford turns to garden ideals of eighteenth-century historians. Vegetable gardens are not gardens at all precisely becausethey belong to the category of use. As Clifford explains, ‘Men were toopreoccupied with the survival of their bodies in this world and of theirsouls in the next to refine very much upon the art of living’ (18).

The assumption that those who labor do not have time for art, asthough the one is distinct from the other, takes aim at the socialist foundationsof the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement and its practitioners.William Morris, for example, argued that art begins with the commonperson preoccupied with survival. Such an idea would have been suspect,however, among post-WWII neo-Kantians. Inevitably lost, then, are theterms profit and pleasure, which had such appeal for the British in earliercenturies, who were disinclined, even when adopting aesthetics, to driveuse out of the domain of beauty. In English Gardens and Landscapes 1700–1750(1967), Christopher Hussey alludes to the concepts of beauty and use only



as part of a structural opposition he discerns at work in the vast estates ofthe first half of the eighteenth century, which, he explains, is part of theEnglish national character (13–14). Integral to Hussey’s understanding ofthe working synthesis achieved from these oppositions is his climaticunderstanding of human nature:

And in so far as national character is conditioned by climate, there are significantanalogies between prevalently cloudy and temperate weather and such unclassicaltraits as the Englishman’s phlegmatic commonsense and tendency to sentiment,his love of fair play that underlies his conception of freedom, and of the Baconianempiricism linking him to natural philosophy from which the landscape movementand no less the industrial revolution followed. (15)

The relationship between a phlegmatic constitution, love of fair play, andnatural philosophy can be better understood as an aesthetic construct: thephlegmatic character is unlikely to consider that to endorse the Galeniccategory of the phlegmatic is in itself privileged, part of a belief inone’s own disinterestedness, a conception John Barrell addresses in EnglishLiterature in History 1730–1780: An Equal, Wide Survey (1983). The gardensHussey describes represent what he views as an interim period between thebaroque, when English gardens were dominated by French and Dutch models,and the garden revolution, when essential Englishness broke through. Thoughseventeenth-century garden histories routinely acknowledge English gardenelements, such as the bowling green and grass parterre, this narrative, activatedin the eighteenth century, has had extraordinary power and continues, despitecurrent skepticism, to inform the assumptions of many garden historians.

Yet the most deeply aesthetic garden account of the mid-twentieth centurywas probably Christopher Thacker’s global history. Written in an ellipticaland sometimes whimsical style, The History of Gardens (1979) spills forthpropositional truths. Having toured Persia, China, and Japan in a spatio-temporal survey, Thacker finds himself in Europe, ever more proximate toEngland. Though the book closes with the modern period, the Britisheighteenth century and ha-ha focalize it:

So long as gardens were enclosed – to obtain privacy, to keep out cattle, tomark a boundary between the garden and the surrounding land – an enclosure,a wall, a hedge, a fence was necessary. And so long as the garden was thus enclosed,its relationship with the surrounding land, with the landscape and with ‘nature’was inevitably limited. Behind a wall, the garden was inward-looking, tied tothe house, its aspect and its proportions . . . The garden remained architectureon the flat. (182–3)

The ha-ha, or sunk fence, dealt with this problem by making possible thecardinal point embedded in this comment: unlike the garden, which looksinward, the park looks outward; the garden dwells upon particulars, the parkupon the unity of humanity with nature – a thought drawn directly fromWhately. Thacker’s history thus closes any remaining gap between Whatelyand the mid-twentieth century. With their differing emphases, these histories



naturalize the great estates of the eighteenth century, thus cementing acanon of gardens for scholars and tourists alike. It becomes plain that whenan aestheticizing language sets into garden writing, when tourism abets itby advertising the vast estates of the wealthy, as occurred during the FrenchRevolution with the emergence of domestic tourism, and when readersare delighted by book after book which routinely showcases the Stourheads,Badmintons, Blenheims, Studley Royals, and, first and foremost, Stowe, thevernacular gardens that Clifford disparages as ‘patches of farm’ (18) disappear;the millenarian ideal of the mid-seventeenth century that all England shouldbecome a garden gets lost in time and language.

Conclusion: Reinventing History

The fascination that produced garden histories that plotted the ‘true’garden narrative, was curbed by a pull in an opposing direction by theadvent of New Historicist and Postcolonial studies in the 1980s. Whenlooking at the young Pict’s body as an aesthetic device, beauty evacuatesuse. We are reminded that a linguistic root of georgic is gemma, or to bud,from which both the words georgic and gem derive (OED); the latterderivation, associated with isolated, luminous beauty, sanctions the aesthetic.But can it do so without disclosing the garden’s production processes? NewHistoricists and Postcolonialists say not, that the fascination with the Pict’sepidermiality is itself indicative, as are the horizons, temporal and spatial,that restrict le Moyne’s understanding of body art and the interpretive lensof European culture. For these scholars such elements constitute the image,not extra-artistic information.

But neither do New Historicists or Postcolonialists provide answers tothe problems posed by aesthetics; rather, they check its impulses to neglectthe historical and subaltern – the position of those who do not have wealthor political power, but nevertheless, as Michel de Certeau theorizes, employtheir own tactics to counter the strategies of those who own their spaces.Garden histories that follow Postcolonialist thought, especially, may alsobe excessive or reductive in their assumptions, and by no means dominatethe scholarly literature of gardens today; they exist side-by-side with gardenhistories that promulgate claims based on seemingly disinterested research,such as Mark Laird’s scholarly account of floriculture, which interrogatesthat part of garden history that claims that the English abandoned flowersin the eighteenth century; and those that cling to the historical outlinespromulgated by Switzer, such as Penelope Hobhouse’s uncritical gardenhistory or Charles Ritson-Quest’s acerbic yet nevertheless conservative one.Postcolonial garden histories themselves, which often assume their own verities,provide a field for further, more detailed inquiry.

Postcolonial histories, though rarely self-interrogative, frequently lardthemselves with guilt. This drew me to Beth Fowkes Tobin’s ColonizingNature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760–1820 (2006), which



provides a vivid illustration of the Postcolonial dilemma, an outgrowth ofthe fact that so much scholarship in this vein is written by academics whohave profited by birth from colonialism and in their professions by theirtimely involvement in the postcolonial dialogue, and also by writers descendedfrom colonized ancestors who have, ironically, profited from precisely thesame circumstances. Tobin awakens this boar beneath the Garden of Adonis,by beginning with a confessional that reveals something not always evident:a theory that began with the insights of people whose countries had beencolonized by the British, has itself been colonized by those, in Tobin’swords, beleaguered by liberal guilt. Hybridized by scholars from colonizingnations, Postcolonialism can be traced back genealogically to the millenariansof England’s Interregnum. Denaturalized by a confession such as Tobin’s,it exposes its Puritan confessional roots, which differ from Catholicism’sbecause its guilt cannot be assuaged by publications exposing the catastrophicresults of Western incursion on foreign soils – in this case literally, sinceTobin’s book explores the colonial effects of botany. She thus mirrors, insecular mode, the religious content of early modern garden manuals and,like those histories, reveals her undergirding historiography. Raised in NewEngland, she enjoyed working in the vegetable garden where her familyraised pumpkins, corn, and beans; yet as a professor in Hawai’i she wasunable, despite her husband’s urging, to apply her scholarly interest inplants to its application in their own backyard; she became transfixed betweenthe guilt of colonialism and the pleasure of gardening.

Tobin eventually came to terms with her garden, in part because she didtry, in her homesickness for New England, to grow squash and corn. Whenthey failed, she and her husband concentrated on native Hawai’ian species.They cut down the chinaberry tree in their back yard, introduced by somehapless missionary who yearned for holly at Christmas. After twenty yearsin a vise between Postcolonial dilemmas and her scholarship, the couplemoved to Phoenix. Their first act, in their longing for the lush greeneryof Hawai’i, was to plant a bit of green in their backyard. Suddenly, sheconfesses, her gardening paralysis was broken.

In the ‘Epilogue: Decolonizing Garden History’, Tobin points out therole of planting in ‘performing a collective act of memory’ (200). Sheunderscores the point by reflecting on her study of eighteenth-centurygarden history:

These words – yam, cassava, callaloo – can also be found in eighteenth-centurygeorgic poetry, natural histories, and traveler narratives that describe the agri-cultural abundance of the slaves’ gardens and provision grounds. As my chapteron slave gardens demonstrates, even in these colonialist and racist texts, the listof provisions resonates with Afro-Caribbean pride, defiance, and the will tosurvive. (201)

The same principle of memory and cultural preservation could be appliedto Tobin’s personal gardening experience, first, as a child, reproducing the



garden commodities introduced to British colonists by North Americanmaritime Indians, and then, like the homesick missionary, creating a familiargreenery in the Sonoran desert. Tobin thus reminds us that colonialist practicebecomes Postcolonialist dilemma; it works forward and back, where nostalgiafor the colonialist experience reproduces even in the critical practitionerperformances that mime the noncritical yet equally nostalgic practices ofour colonialist forebears, who sought through planting to bring a familiarworld with them into a strange territory.

The eschatology of aesthetics is beauty, which eliminates the Garden ofEden as the temporal and spatial origin that legitimates recreative labor inthe garden; postcolonial narratives, by contrast, restore the guilt associatedwith the Fall – particularly the satanic contamination of colonial cultureswith products from the metropole, even as the metropole once sought tobecome the Garden of the World by importing foreign botanicals, in Milton’swords, ‘All Trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste’ (Paradise Lost, lineIV.217). The Postcolonialist dilemma reminds us that while Milton’s visionof Paradise (and for England) has consequences that stem from the practicaloutworking of its ideology that need to be addressed – often effects fromthe past that may not be erased but that should not be repeated – that thereis scarce a ‘narrow room’ on earth where at least some part of ‘Nature’s . . . wealth’(Paradise Lost, line IV.207) has not been transplanted in some form in theinterest of creating the paradise on earth that gardenists such as RalphAusten anticipated – even in the case of colonized peoples who, like thoseof colonizing nations, enjoy moving plants around.

Short Biography

Rachel Crawford’s research focuses primarily on the production of socialspace and its implications for British literature during the Long EighteenthCentury, including the Romantic period. Her articles and reviews haveappeared in ELH, Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Romanticism,The Huntington Quarterly, two Blackwell Companions to the Eighteenth Century,and other collected editions. Her book, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape1700–1830 (Cambridge, 2003) explores how the value of space changed duringthis period in ordinary landscapes and literature. She is expanding her work onspace in two projects, one on the implications of cartographical methodsfor literary analysis and the other on Western missions in Siam during theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particularly emphasis on howSiam’s uncolonized status modified ideologies of both the missionaries andSiamese peoples. She teaches at the University of San Francisco, havingreceived her Ph.D. at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Note

* Correspondence address: Rachel Crawford, Department of English, University of SanFrancisco, 2130 Fulton St., San Francisco, CA 94117, USA. Email: [email protected].



Works Cited

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Beale, John. Herefordshire Orchards, a Pattern for all England. 1730; bound with Richard Bradley,New Improvements of Planting and Gardening, both Philosophical and Practical. 6th edn. London:J. and J. Knapton, et al., 1731.

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Documents

British Garden Literature: Historiography and Idiomatic Change