The Green Fuse

Emma — Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Dig deep into our powerful connection with gardens across media and realms of human experience-from music to philosophy, painting to religion.

Why do interiors of houses mimic nature-the wallpapers and curtains, flowers in vases, a vaporizer in the bathroom? Why do we so often connect our childhoods with gardens? Why has the myth of a lost Eden been so ubiquitous and so formative? The Green Fuse: Essays in Making Sense of Gardens explores our deep-rooted impulses to create gardens, examining them through the lenses of history, religion, nostalgia, and myth. It connects gardens with the other arts-painting, music, literature, and theater-and contemplates their intellectual and philosophical significance. Blending lyrical reflections with research, The Green Fuse offers an unusually wide-ranging and thoughtful perspective on gardens and why we make them. It will be ideal for all readers interested in gardening and its cultural implications.

Versed in Living Nature

Emma — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Verdant with illustrations, a meditation upon the rootedness of trees in Wordsworth’s writing and beyond.

This is the first book to address William Wordsworth’s profound identification of the spirit of nature in trees. It looks at what trees meant to him, and how he represented them in his poetry and prose: the symbolic charm of blasted trees, a hawthorn at the heart of Irish folk belief, great oaks that embodied naval strength, yews that tell us about both longevity and the brevity of human life. Linking poetry and literary history with ecology, Versed in Living Nature explores intricate patterns of personal and local connections that enabled trees-as living things, cultural topics, horticultural objects, and even commodities-to be imagined, theorized, discussed, and exchanged. In this book, the literary past becomes the urgent present.

Dale, Peter – The Bell Bookshop

The Green Fuse

Versed in Living Nature