Kew Gardens as a literary space

摘要

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which celebrated their 250-year anniversary in 2009, have been extensively studied in disciplines as diverse as garden history, economy, anthropology, ecocriticism, post-colonialism and various branches of cultural studies. In this essay I aim to complement the list with a discussion of Kew Gardens as a literary subject by looking at a corpus of poetic and fictional writings it has inspired throughout its history. This essay explores different dimensions of how the Royal Botanic Gardens are represented, and what it reveals about the ways different writers conceptualize human constructions of nature. The texts discussed in this essay, though only partly aware of each other's existence and politics, map how Kew Gardens became a public monument, and at the same time, a location of private, individual recreation, recovery and creativity.