Rousham

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.

Important historic gardens fall into two main categories: those made by one person, whose vision has been carefully preserved down the years, sometimes for centuries, and those that are altered and developed by succeeding generations. Rousham, in Oxfordshire, is an example of the first and Bodnant, in the Conwy valley in north Wales, the second. Books on both have been published this year. Francis Hamel is an artist, whose studio is in an old stable close to ‘the big house’ at Rousham, which was built in 1635 by the Dormer family.