Abstract
In his Essays published in 1597, Civil and Moral, Francis Bacon offers the following insight on gardening: ‘GOD ALMIGHTY first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures’ (Bacon 1909, 117). From a strict, biblical-reading standpoint, gardens preceded humanity and gardening truly finds its roots in the Garden of Eden, the Terrestrial Paradise, initially planted for Man to live in a ‘paradise of pleasure’ (Genesis 2:8, KJV).
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Notes
- 1.
OED 3.a. ‘The business or occupation of a husbandman or farmer; agriculture, cultivation; (deployment of) farming methods and techniques’.
- 2.
OED 5.b. ‘† A body of knowledge, a science. Obsolete’.
- 3.
Leonard Digges (c.1515–c.1559) was a well-respected mathematician surveyor, cartographer and engineer. He is believed to have created the theodolite, an optical instrument to measure angles.
- 4.
On the impact of the Little Ice Age on agriculture between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, see Mark B. Tauger, Early modern agriculture and European agricultural dominance: 1500–1800, Routledge, 2010.
- 5.
‘1. Noxious vapour rising from putrescent organic matter, marshland, etc., which pollutes the atmosphere’ (OED).
- 6.
On gnats, see Sophie Chiari, ‘The Plague of Gnats in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries’ in Sophie Chiari (ed.), The Experience of Disaster in Early Modern English Literature, Routledge, 2022.
- 7.
‘†2. An authoritative book or document. Obsolete’ (OED).
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Van Parys-Rotondi, J. (2023). Tending One’s Own Garden: Husbandry, Weather Lore and Prognostication in Early Modern England. In: Patel, S., Chiari, S. (eds) The Writing of Natural Disaster in Europe, 1500–1826. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12120-3_3
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