The Garden

Crossing continents and cultures from antiquity to the present, The Garden encompasses a global history of the garden, the place where culture and nature converge.

The uniqueness of the book will come not only from its global scope – the embracing of East and West, English aristocrats and enslaved African Americans – but also from its movement between the story of actual gardens and revelations of the importance of gardens in a huge range of great works of literature and art, as well as in key ideas in philosophy and religion. We will meet the great garden designers – Ji Cheng in China, André le Nôtre in France, Jefferson in the USA, Humphrey Repton and Gertrude Jekyll in England – but we will also range from Gilgamesh to Gethsemane, Eden to the Eden Project, and we will enter the imagined gardens of Shakespeare and Frances Hodgson Burnett, Goethe and Chekhov, Monet and Van Gogh, Confucius and Epicurus, and many, many more.

Reviews

PRAISE FOR BRIGHT STAR, GREEN LIGHT:

‘Keats is unmissably present throughout Fitzgerald’s work … [Bate] borrows a classic form to pay tribute to the broadest, extratemporal similarities between Keats and … Fitzgerald’

Sunday Times

‘Keats was Fitzgerald’s guiding star … An energetic and highly engaging game of literary ping-pong across the ages. Life, writing and inspiration are served and returned in a rapid rally of ideas … What an immensely charismatic pair they are … Powerful … Go now, read this book’

Laura Freeman, The Times

‘A daring, dizzying attempt to connect Keats and F Scott Fitzgerald has plenty to take pleasure in … Bate, whose recent biography of Wordsworth I admired, is at his best when he zeroes in on the work: his feeling for it, by being so exacting, is infectious, especially in the case of Keats … But in the end, the principal achievement of this pairing is to remind us of the way that literature connects us’

Rachel Cooke, Observer

‘Admirable … lively and well researched … Bate’s book is certainly an excellent introduction to each writer … satisfying, engaging and accessible … well designed to make us return to

the work of both Keats and his ‘Keatzian’ devotee’

New Statesman

‘Bate tells the tales of these accursed creatures frightfully well’

Daily Mail

‘With a fine-tuned ear for poetic language, a master-biographer’s eye for the revealing detail, and an astonishing mental filing system that recognizes countless meaningful matches among the works and lives of these two great, doomed writers, Jonathan Bate has written a wonderfully illuminating and moving book’

Robert Watson, Distinguished Professor of English, UCLA