The Garden

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

Gardens have always been sacred spaces, allowing humans both to return to nature and to tame it. Avid gardener and literary historian Jonathan Bate traces our fascination with gardens across four millennia and explores their enduring influence on agriculture, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. Just as the Garden of Eden is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition, gardens are a major preoccupation for authors like Ovid, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Emily Dickinson, and have carried great significance for everyone from kings to monks.

Woven together with a magnificent portrait of our cultural obsession with the garden is an illuminating account of horticultural ingenuity, from the gardens of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to the pleasure gardens of Versailles and public green spaces 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?

In this wide-ranging, exuberant, and richly illustrated work, Bate unearths a magnificent 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.