Natural History
Book Details

Reading the Garden

Katie Holmes, Susan K. Martin & Kylie Mirmohamadi

Reading the Garden explores our deep affection for gardens and gardening and illuminates their numerous meanings and uses.

Opinion

‘[Reading the Garden] highlights how, throughout our history, gardens and gardening have enabled us to cultivate a sense of attachment to the places in which we live.’
The Weekend Australian 23/2/2008

‘a terrific book, and how typical of the stimulating qualities of Reading The Garden that it should have stimulated this reviewer to go out on a sobering suburban garden stickybeaking expedition.’
The Canberra Times 29/3/2008

About this Title

'Planting a garden is … an act of memory and settlement: those who make a garden look back to recollected forms and forward to new growth that will become a special kind of place.'

Whether a small plot in the backyard of an inner-urban home or a capital city's sprawling botanic garden, Australians have long desired a patch of dirt to plough or enjoy.

Reading the Garden explores our deep affection for gardens and gardening and illuminates their numerous meanings and uses from European settlement to the late twentieth century. More than just a pastime, the act of garden making has helped migrants create 'home' and an identity in a new place, and we continue to use our outdoor landscapes to preserve the memory of a loved one, feed the family or beautify our surrounds.

In Reading the Garden, new ways of seeing Australian history and culture-memory and belonging; domestication and civilisation; nationalism and identity-are woven into a compelling narrative around gardens and landscape.

About the Author

Katie Holmes is an Associate Professor of History at La Trobe University. She has published widely on gardening in Australia. Her book Spaces in Her Day was shortlisted for the NSW and Victorian Premiers' Awards and she has co-edited other anthologies, including Freedom Bound.

Susan K. Martin is an Associate Professor in English at La Trobe University. Her writing on Australian literature, culture and garden history has been featured in many books, including The Oxford Literary History of Australia and Imagining Australia, and journals such as Postcolonial Studies and Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes.

Kylie Mirmohamadi is an historian who writes on Australian garden history, and Australian history and culture. With the other writers of this book, she co-edited Green Pens, a volume of Australian garden writing.

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978-0-522-85115-1