{"title":"Gardening","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"garden-against-time-in-search-of-a-common-paradise","title":"Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's \u003cem\u003eParadise Lost\u003c\/em\u003e to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut the story of the garden doesn't always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It's also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Olivia Laing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52088040030572,"sku":"9781324110385","price":18.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0912\/7985\/1884\/files\/9781324110385-us.jpg?v=1753290376"},{"product_id":"garden-politic-global-plants-and-botanical-nationalism-in-nineteenth-century-america","title":"Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHow worldwide plant circulation and new botanical ideas enabled Americans to radically re-envision politics and society\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Garden Politic\u003c\/i\u003e argues that botanical practices and discourses helped nineteenth-century Americans engage pressing questions of race, gender, settler colonialism, and liberal subjectivity. In the early republic, ideas of biotic distinctiveness helped fuel narratives of American exceptionalism. By the nineteenth century, however, these ideas and narratives were unsettled by the unprecedented scale at which the United States and European empires prospected for valuable plants and exchanged them across the globe. Drawing on ecocriticism, New Materialism, environmental history, and the history of science--and crossing disciplinary and national boundaries--\u003ci\u003eThe Garden Politic\u003c\/i\u003e shows how new ideas about cultivation and plant life could be mobilized to divergent political and social ends. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eReading the work of influential nineteenth-century authors from a botanical perspective, Mary Kuhn recovers how domestic political issues were entangled with the global circulation and science of plants. The diversity of Harriet Beecher Stowe's own gardens contributed to the evolution of her racial politics and abolitionist strategies. Nathaniel Hawthorne's struggles in his garden inspired him to write stories in which plants defy human efforts to impose order. Radical scientific ideas about plant intelligence and sociality prompted Emily Dickinson to imagine a human polity that embraces kinship with the natural world. Yet other writers, including Frederick Douglass, cautioned that the most prominent political context for plants remained plantation slavery. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Garden Politic\u003c\/i\u003e reveals how the nineteenth century's extractive political economy of plants contains both the roots of our contemporary environmental crisis and the seeds of alternative political visions.","brand":"Mary Kuhn","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52841485566316,"sku":"9781479820153","price":32.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0912\/7985\/1884\/files\/9781479820153-us.jpg?v=1762356426"}],"url":"https:\/\/commercestreetbooks.com\/collections\/gardening.oembed","provider":"Commerce Street Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}