When botanists resembled a worldwide intelligence network
In The Garden Jonathan Bate leads us through 4,000 years of ‘green thought’, observing the interplay between literature, art and horticulture. Bate has long refused to be fenced in. His academic and biographical work ranges from Shakespeare to Wordsworth, John Clare, John Keats, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ted Hughes. He is also an editor, poet, playwright and novelist. The Garden is the book he has waited a lifetime to write. It is both scholarly and relaxed, ambitious and kindly, bringing complicated ideas and feelings down to earth and grounding us in the humble human joy of real and imagined gardens. The mapping of language on to gardens is a major theme from the start.
