The Garden

A globe-spanning, never before told, epic history of the garden—from antiquity to present.

Gardens have always been sacred spaces, allowing us both to return to nature and to tame it. Ranging across four millennia, avid gardener and literary historian Jonathan Bate traces our fascination with gardens through agriculture, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. Just as the Garden of Eden is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition and The Epic of Gilgamesh, gardens are a major preoccupation for authors such as Shakespeare, and John Milton, Anton Chekov, and Jane Austen.

Woven together with a brilliant account of our cultural obsession with the garden is a compelling account of our horticultural ingenuity from the gardens of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to the symbolic enclosures of medieval Europe and community gardens like Central Park. Along the way, Bate offers practical botanical insights–why have certain rose growers preferred old varieties over new? What makes a weed a weed? And how do certain plants serve essential roles in maintaining a garden’s health?

Wide-ranging, exuberant, and richly illustrated, Bate unearths a profound, wondrous, alternate human history, and reminds us that to cultivate a garden is to practice care: for the earth, for others, and for the fragile beauty that sustains us.