Illustrated survey of gardening lore from the Norman Conquest to the Renaissance reveals wealth of ancient secrets drawn from obscure sources, chronicling cultivation of pleasure gardens as well as herbariums, orchards, and vineyards.

English gardens in the Middle Ages are one of the most neglected aspects of our heritage. Yet gardening was already old in England when the Normans came, and almost every dwelling in town and country, from castle to cottage, abbey to humble hermitage, had an enclosed plot which few herbs for flavour, healing and strewing, flowers for garnishing, vegetables for the pot. These gardens are among the most varied, colourful, fragrant and neglected delights of English history. They are overdue for redemption from the obscurity into which the better-documented, still-surviving gardens of later centuries have plunged them. That happy task has now been undertaken by Teresa McLean, a young historian whose immense research is gracefully presented in this book, the first on the subject for over fifty years. She has devotedly tracked down the fragmentary records tucked away in account rolls, charters and surveys, and her book contains a vast amount of hiterhto inaccessible information on gardens and what grew in them in the period between the Norman Conquest and the Renaissance. It is a book for the horticulturist and the historian, but it is no dry, specialist work. Rather it is a book for those who like gardening and are homesick for the pre-industrial world of harvesting, gardening Christendom. It is about a world which has long since vanished, but is still there for anyone with a willing imagination to recreate. -- Book Jacket.

In the preceding 25 years to this book’s publication in 1985 there was an extensive and unprecedented burst of archaeological activity in evidence from below-ground deposits, above-ground structures, and artefacts. During the boom of the late 1960s and 1970s, which led to go much central town redevelopment, it was buried remains which yielded the most dramatic information. In the recession of the 1980s it was realised that upstanding remains had a lot to offer as well and they were being subject to ever more sophisticated study techniques. This book examines those recent developments in archaeology and assesses their bearing on the study of medieval English and Welsh history. Taking a series of important themes such as government, religion and the countryside, the book offers a chronological approach from the coming of the Vikings, 850 AD, to the Reformation in 1530. This approach focuses on the impact of man on the urban and rural landscape. An important text for students of ancient history.

Everyday Life in Medieval England captures the day-to-day experience of people in the middle ages - the houses and settlements in which they lived, the food they ate, their getting and spending - and their social relationships. The picture that emerges is of great variety, of constant change, of movement and of enterprise. Many people were downtrodden and miserably poor, but they struggled against their circumstances, resisting oppressive authorities, to build their own way of life and to improve their material conditions. The ordinary men and women of the middle ages appear throughout. Everyday life in Medieval England is an outstanding contribution to both national and local history.

Combining her historical knowledge with practical experience of recreating medieval gardens in various sites in England, Landsberg explains how she designed Queen Eleanor's garden at Winchester and Brother Cadfael's physic garden at Shrewsbury.

What was a "garden" in medieval and early modern British culture and how was it imagined? How did it change as Europe opened up to the wider world from the 16th century onwards? In a series of fresh approaches to these questions, the contributors offer chapters that identify and discuss newly-discovered pre-modern garden spaces in archaeology and archival sources, recognize a gendered language of the garden in fictional descriptions ("fictional" here being taken to mean any written text, regardless of its purpose), and offer new analysis of the uses to which gardens - real and imagined - might be put. Chapters investigate the definitions, forms and functions of physical gardens; explore how the material space of the garden was gendered as a secluded space for women, and as a place of recreation; examine the centrality of garden imagery in medieval Christian culture; and trace the development of garden motifs in the literary and artistic imagination to convey the sense of enclosure, transformation and release. The book uniquely underlines the current environmental "turn" in the humanities, and increasingly recognizes the value of exploring human interaction with the landscapes of the past as a route to health and well-being in the present.

Richard Taylor, author of the best-selling How to Read a Church, joins forces with garden historian Andrew Eburne to produce the ultimate guide to historic and modern gardens. Gardens are amongst the fastest-growing visitor attractions today - in the UK alone 15 million people will visit a garden this year. How to Read an English Garden is the essential book for every garden lover. It provides an account of the different elements of gardens of all ages and explains their meaning and their history: here, you'll find the answer to such questions as: when were tulips introduced into our gardens, and what was 'tulip-mania'? What is a knot-garden, and what was the origin of its design? Who was 'Capability' Brown, and how did he get his name? Why are mazes such a common feature in English garden design? In addition, the book explains how lawns, flowerbeds, trees and ponds came to be a feature not just of grand houses but of gardens everywhere. Among the many subjects covered are: garden design, plant introductions and collectors, kitchen gardens, water gardens, and garden styles from around the world: English, American, Chinese and Moorish to name just a few. Clearly laid out and beautifully illustrated, How to Read an English Garden brings historic and modern gardens to life: a book to accompany garden visitors everywhere, or to be enjoyed and dipped into at home.

“A fascinating account of formal gardens during the middle ages,” including plants and their uses, features, tools, cultivation techniques, and more (Books Monthly). Medieval gardens usually rate very few pages in the garden history books. The general perception is still of small gardens in the corner of a castle. Recent research has shown that the gardens were larger than we previously believed. This book contains information and pictures that have not been generally available before, including the theory and practice of medieval horticulture. Many features of later gardens were already a part of medieval gardens. The number of plants was limited, but was still no less than many modern gardeners use in their own gardens today. Yet medieval gardens were imbued with meaning. Whether secular or religious, the additional dimension of symbolism, gave a greater depth to medieval gardens, which is lacking in most modern ones. This book will be of interest to those who know little about medieval gardens and to those with more knowledge. It contains some of the vast amount of research that the author carried out to create the medieval gardens at the Prebendal Manor, Nassington, Northamptonshire. The author has tried to use previously unused sources and included his own practical experience of medieval gardening methods that he carried out to maintain the gardens. “Beautifully illustrated . . . a fascinating read for the armchair gardener as well as the more practical variety . . . The author draws on a wide range of sources: herbals, animal management, medieval manuals, illuminated manuscripts, account books, poems, paintings, and tapestries.” —The Ricardian Bulletin

During the Middle Ages, the arresting motif of the walled garden - especially in its manifestation as a sacred or love-inflected hortus conclusus - was a common literary device. Usually associated with the Virgin Mary or the Lady of popular romance, it appeared in myriad literary and iconographic forms, largely for its aesthetic, decorative and symbolic qualities. This study focuses on the more complex metaphysical functions and meanings attached to it between 1100 and 1400 - and, in particular, those associated with the gardens of Eden and the Song of Songs. Drawing on contemporary theories of gender, gardens, landscape and space, it traces specifically the resurfacing and reworking of the idea and image of the enclosed garden within the writings of medieval holy women and other female-coded texts. In so doing, it presents the enclosed garden as generator of a powerfully gendered hermeneutic imprint within the medieval religious imaginary - indeed, as an alternative "language" used to articulate those highly complex female-coded approaches to God that came to dominate late-medieval religiosity. The book also responds to the "eco-turn" in our own troubled times that attempts to return the non-human to the centre of public and private discourse. The texts under scrutiny therefore invite responses as both literary and "garden" spaces where form often reflects content, and where their authors are also diligent "gardeners" the apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve, for example; the horticulturally-inflected Hortus Deliciarum of Herrad of Hohenburg and the "green" philosophies of Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias; the visionary writings of Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn collaborating within their Helfta nunnery; the Middle English poem, Pearl; and multiple reworkings of the deeply problematic and increasingly sexualized garden enclosing the biblical figure of Susanna.