Horticultural modernisms: reading the modernist garden

These writers’ oeuvres are fecund with horticultural imagery that sprouted from a passion for gardening that each of these writers, in differing capacities, shared. In their passions, these roaming and voracious minds inevitably encountered horticultures that were modern, experimental, or unfamiliar, including: advances in scientific understandings of biological processes such as composting and photosynthesis; hospital gardens established during radical reassessments of health and social care; transnational and trans-philosophical gardens including Zen Buddhist gardens; and modern horticultural ‘vogues’ like tropical plant collecting and domestic mushroom cultivation.

Each of these horticultural innovations were presented by Stevens, Fitzgerald, Lowell, and Barnes respectively as a symbol of modernity, and each writer used these figures as a vehicle of expression for their own intellectual concerns: Stevens on the nature of the sublime and the relationship between reality and the imagination; Fitzgerald on psychoanalysis and modern patient/psychiatrist relationships; Lowell on the opposition between capitalism and spiritual wealth; and Barnes on the relationship between history, decadence, the body, and death.<br>