This is the Garden
An Anthology

From Homer to Tom Stoppard, writers whose direct concern with gardening may only be slight, find themselves deeply involved with particular, maybe imaginary gardens. Thus gardens turn up in the most surprising contexts, from 10th century Japan to the more familiar world of 19th and 20th century English literature.

Gardens are used as settings, they are contemplated and described, they are engaged with metaphorically, and they are employed as emotional registers by authors as various as Goethe and Jerome K Jerome, Somerset Maugham and James I; to say nothing of Charlotte Bronte or ee cumming. And in this anthology the legendary editor and garden writer Charles Elliott has chosen a nicely suggestive collection of such encounters from all over the world and all ages to delight, to entertain and to inform.

Happy and sad, comic and serious, reassuring and threatening, the garden is seen here by over 100 great writers as one of mankind's most interesting, most useful and most variable creations.

Introduction



Romance



Garden Making



Enthusiasm



Far Away



Scepticism



Styles



Sinister



Intensities



Lost Gardens



A Who's Who of Writers Quoted

INDEX



A Celebration of Gardens

'A Dreary Story'

A House of Gentlefolk

'A Kyoto Garden'

A Winter Garden

Addison, Joseph

Alcott, Louisa May

Anne of Green Gables

Arcadia

Aubrey, John

Austen, Jane

Austen, Jane

Balzac, Honore de

Balzac, Honore de

Beatrix

Beauty and Sadness

Beckford, William

Bleak House

Boccaccio, Giovanni

Boswell, James

Bowen, Elizabeth

Bronte, Anne

Bronte, Charlotte

Browne, Sir Thomas

Burton, Robert

Byron, Robert

Cao Xueqin

?apek, Karel

Carr, Emily

Cather, Willa

Chekhov, Anton

Clare, John

Colette

Colette

Conrad, Joseph

Coup d'Oeil at Beloeil

Cummings, E. E.

Daudet, Alphonse

De la Mare, Walter

De Ligne, Prince Charles-Joseph

Dead Souls

Delany, Mary

Diary

Dickens, Charles

Disraeli, Benjamin

Donne, John

Dream of the Red Chamber

Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents

Dumas, Alexandre

Earlham

Eccentric Spaces

'Eight Poems of the Eastern Slope''

Elective Affinities

Eliot, George

Elizabeth Alone

Elizabeth and Her German Garden

Enright, D. J.

'Epistle to Burlington'

Essay on the Making of Gardens

Eugénie Grandet

Fielding, Henry

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

Flaubert, Gustave

Forster, E. M.

Galsworthy, John

Galt, John

Gaskell, Elizabeth

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von

Gogol, Nikolai

Gunn, Thom

Harbison, Robert

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Hazlitt, William

Headlong Hall

Hearn, Lafcadio

Heath, Robert

Henrietta Temple

Hofwijk

Hollander, John

Homer

Howard's End

Howells, William Dean

Humphrey Clinker

Huygens, Constantin

'In Memoriam'

Indian Summer

Innocents Abroad

'Instructions to the Landscaper'

Irving, Washington

James I of Scotland

James, Henry

Jerome, Jerome K.

Johnson, Samuel

Johnson, Samuel

Kawabata, Yasunari

Ker Porter, Sir Robert

'Kew Gardens'

Kipling, Rudyard

Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di

Lark Rise to Candleford

Lawrence, D. H.

Lear, Edward

Letters to Montagu

Letters Written during a Residence in Sweden

Little Women

Lu You

Lubbock, Percy

Mansfield Park

Markham, Gervase

Marvell, Andrew

Mason, William

Maugham, Somerset

Maxwell, William

Mitford, Mary Russell

Montgomery, L. M.

'Moor Park'

My Summer in a Garden

Nostromo

Odyssey

'On Clarastella Walking in her Garden'

'On Hawkstone Park'

Over Strand and Field

Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris

Parkinson, John

Peacock, Thomas Love

Penny Foolish

Pepys, Samuel

'Phantoms'

'Planting Flowers by the Eastern Embankment'

Po Chü-I

Pope, Alexander

Pride and Prejudice

Proust, Marcel

'Rappaccini's Daughter'

Remembrance of Things Past

Scenes of Clerical Life

Scott, Sir Walter

Sei Sh?nagon

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

Shirley, James

'Shoes'

Sitwell, Osbert

Sitwell, Sir George

'Small Garden'

Smollet, Tobias

Smollett, Tobias

Southey, Robert

Sterne, Laurence

Stevenson, Robert Louis

Stoppard, Tom

Strong, Sir Roy

Su Shi

Tanizaki, Junichiro

Temple, Sir William

Tender is the Night

Tennyson, Alfred Lord

'The Advice'

The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Awkward Age

The Black Tulip

The Chateau

The Country Farm

The Country House

The Decameron

The Doctor &c

'The English Garden'

The Eye of the Storm

'The Garden of the Gods'

'The Garden'

The Gardener

The Gardens of Cyrus

'The Glory of the Garden'

The History of Tom Jones

The House of All Sorts

'The Ideal House'

The Innocent Libertine

The Kingis Quair

The Last of the Lairds

The Leopard

The Life of Samuel Johnson

The Lives of the Poets

The Magician

The Makioka Sisters

The Natural History of Wiltshire

The Pillow Book

The Plumed Serpent

The Professor

The Red Lily

The Sketch Book

The Small House at Allington

'The Sunken Garden'

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

The Valley of Decision

'The Viceroy's Garden'

'The White Doe of Rylestone'

'This is the Garden'

Thompson, Flora

Three Men in a Boat

Travels in Georgia

Travels through France and Italy

Trevor, William

Tristram Shandy

Trollope, Anthony

Turgenev, Ivan

Twain, Mark

'Twicknam Garden'

Villette

Von Arnim, Elizabeth

Walpole, Horace

Warner, Charles Dudley

Waverley

Welty, Eudora

Wharton, Edith

White, Patrick

'Why Distant Objects Please'

Wives and Daughters

Wollstonecraft, Mary

Woolf, Virginia

Wordsworth, William