Pleasures of the garden
Subtitle: a literary anthology
By: selected by Christina Hardyment
Publisher: British Library
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780712357203
Subjects: Literary collections; Gardening; Gardens
Description: This collection of classic garden writing presents the garden as place of solace in our busy world, a retreat for lovers, and even an earthly paradise. Bringing together a wide range of voices from across the centuries and around the globe - from Pliny in first-century Italy to Robert Louis Stevenson in nineteenth-century Hawaii - 'Pleasures of the Garden' features fiction and poetry, memoirs and letters, all in celebration of gardens. The gardens themselves vary widely, too, including the stately landscaped parks of Georgian England, the exquisitely managed gardens of Japan, and the painterly gardens of the Arts and Crafts movement. At times lyrical and light-hearted, at others analytic or inspirational, the works compiled here from such authors as Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, Charlotte Brontë, Alexander Pope, D. H. Lawrence, and many more reveal that gardens have long nurtured much more than the plants they contain - their peace, order, and seclusion also have a long tradition of inspiring the pen and fueling the soul.
Table of contents: title: Paradise made (Genesis) / John Gerard; title: Homeward / Tao Yuan Ming; title: Bright green and lush (Romance of the rose); title: The air of paradise / Hafez; title: Purest of human pleasures / Francis Bacon; title: A brood of nightingales / William Lawson; title: Innocent delights / Joseph Addison; title: Syringa ivory pure / William Cowper; title: We talk also of a laburnum / Jane Austen; title: The pride of my heart / Mary Russell Mitford; title: How little one wants / Gertrude Jekyll; title: Enjoy thyself a day (Tale of the Garden Flowers, ancient Egyptian); title: A garden enclosed (Song of Solomon); title: The lusty month of May / Thomas Malory; title: A garden fair by music's tower / Stephen Hawes; title: Make me a mandrake / John  Donne; title: No nook more Eden-like / Charlotte Brontë; title: The planet of love is on high / Alfred Tennyson; title: The cap and bells / William Butler Yeats; title: An abundance of brimstone / Diodorus Siculus; title: The blue fig with luscious juice o'erflows / Homer; title: All is calm and composed / Pliny the Younger; title: The pleasant whisking wind / Robert Laneham; title: A princelike garden / Francis Bacon; title: The Shalimar Bagh / Constance Villiers-Stuart; title: The genius of the place / Alexander Pope; title: A labyrinth of my own raising / Joseph Addison; title: The horticultural xenophobe / Tobias Smollett; title: In the hands of the improvers / Jane Austen; title: The simplest way / William Morris; title: No plan of any kind / William Robinson; title: Tears of ecstacy / Reginal Farrer; title: A garden of sweet scents / Gertrude Jekyll; title: Whatever had the most blooms / Bai Juyi; title: A full dung barrow / Walafrid Strabo; title: Nosegays and posies / John Gerard; title: Bring your orange tress boldly out / John Evelyn; title: Vegetable pride / Erasmus Darwin; title: Gross fog boeotian / William Cowper; title: Snapdragons blooming / Thomas Jefferson; title: A bachelor of husbandry / Philip Yorke; title: Well stricken in years / Robert Louis Stevenson; title: They gardened in bloomers (Punch magazine); title: A cast-iron back with a hinge in it / Charles Dudley Warner; title: Being entirely ignorant / Elizabeth von Arnim; title: The unkindest cut / Samuel Reynolds Hole; title: Grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives / Rudyard Kipling; title: The actual tools / Gertrude Jekyll; title: The smoke's smell / Edward Thomas; title: The belly of the dragon (Japanese gardens); title: Your leaves are always at his lotus feet (Bhagavata Purana); title: Invisible wisdom / John Gerard; title: Clad in tattered dervish rags / Baqi; title: A pleasing savour of sweet instructions / John Parkinson; title: Killing and quickening / George Herbert; title: Fresh and spruce / Henry King; title: A green thought in a green shade / Andrew Marvell; title: Slow but sure / John Bunyan; title: Human grandeur is very dangerous / Voltaire; title: Prostrate peas / Henry James; title: Good taste and not a gaudy pride / John Clare; title: Paying back the garden / Edward Bulwer-Lytton; title: Roses and lovers / Algernon Charles Swinburne; title: Manifest autobiography / Alfred Austin; title: Persevere! / Helena Rutherford Ely; title: It isn't quite a dead garden / Frances Hodgson Burnett; title: A naton of gardeners / Avray Tipping; title: Even God would have to have a nose / D.H. Lawrence; title: Egoistic reverie / William Cowper, Edmund Gosse, Forbes Sieveking; title: Envoi: ferned grot / T.E. Brown.