Gardens

Abstract

Research on the Victorian garden brings together scientific, economic, social, and cultural histories into a deeply interdisciplinary field of study. This has not always been the case: for much of the twentieth century, garden history was a part of art history, and prioritized study of elite landscapes and landscape designers within a relatively narrow understanding of what a Victorian garden might be. Expansions of cultural and environmental theory over the past decades have changed the study of Victorian garden life, both by expanding the kinds of spaces that might be considered gardens, and by asking new questions of those spaces. These questions—of usage, accessibility, biodiversity, ecological impact, and symbolic meaning at both an individual and national level—have all helpfully broadened the field. Most significantly of all, advancing scholarship on the British Empire has demonstrated the revisions colonial expansions and circulations imposed on understanding of the natural world. These revisions shaped cultivated spaces like the garden as much as they did the wild nature of the British Isles; indeed, since so much of the territory of 19th-century Britain existed under some form of cultivation, research in Victorian gardens can help inform research in Victorian environmentalism more generally. Scholars of Victorian literature, who were once mostly confined to analyzing descriptions of gardens in realist novels, can now draw on a wide range of theories and methodologies to analyze the meaningful role the garden played in all kinds of Victorian writings.