Professor Sir Jonathan Bate the Garden: our 4,000 Year Quest for Paradise

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From the Garden of Eden to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, from Versailles and the Zen gardens of Kyoto to the landscapes of Capability Brown and New York's High Line, gardens have always been far more than places in which to grow things. They are spaces where nature, culture, spirituality and the human imagination meet.
In this fascinating talk, inspired by his magnificent new book, The Garden: Our 4,000 Year Quest for Paradise, acclaimed literary critic and cultural historian Professor Sir Jonathan Bate takes us on an extraordinary journey through the gardens of the world and of the imagination. Described by Sue Stuart-Smith as "fascinating in its literary focus and magisterial in its sweep" and "a must-have book", The Garden ranges across four thousand years of history to explore why gardens have occupied such a powerful place in human civilisation.
Drawing on poetry, painting, philosophy, mythology and religion - from Ovid and the Song of Solomon to Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson - Bate explores our enduring desire to create places of beauty, order, refuge and belonging. He reveals how gardens have inspired some of our greatest works of art, offered solace in troubled times and provided a setting in which humanity has continually tried to understand its relationship with the natural world. He also considers how gardens can deepen our understanding of nature and our responsibility to protect it. At a time when more than 27 million people in Britain garden in some form, Bate asks why the urge to create our own small piece of paradise remains so extraordinarily powerful.
Professor Sir Jonathan Bate is one of Britain's most distinguished literary scholars, critics and cultural historians. A renowned authority on Shakespeare, Romanticism and the relationship between literature and the natural world, he has written numerous acclaimed books and is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature. He was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, from 2011 to 2019 and is now Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University and a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford. A regular broadcaster and commentator on literature and culture, he was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship.
A Q&A Session will follow.