Routledge Research on Gardens in History

Perhaps more than anything else, gardens are places offering fine-grained histories of our relationships with broader environmental issues – illuminating, especially, on the tensions between resource exploitation, valuation and protection and on the essential insolubility of nature and culture. As artefacts of the Anthropocene, they elucidate how diverse human societies have idealized green space while highlighting the role of humans in engineering "the natural world."

Gardens offer particularly exciting places for examining entanglements of nature/culture across different periods and places. This series encourages interdisciplinary works which consider the role of gardens as material and imaginative sites. We invite both monographs and edited collections that are grounded in garden history and ancillary disciplines, as well as works which offer new methodologies for approaching gardens through time.

We are particularly interested in encouraging submissions which examine one or more of the following topics:

-Gardens and cultural identities

-Urban environmental histories and gardens

-Space and designed landscapes

-Private and public spaces

-Health and well-being

-Animal and non-human histories

-Gardens as places of cultural contact

-Botanical and plant networks

-Indoor and outdoor spaces

-Gender, class, race and gardens

-Gardens at micro and macro scales

-Imperialism and gardens

-Colonisation and contestation