This most unusual book traces the interrelations of architecture, horticulture, literature, social history and gender.
The Victorian conservatory and the lady enclosed within it proved to be ambivalent, enigmatic and self-contradictory. What began optimistically as protection ended as imprisonment. The metaphor offers a vision of fractured femininity, juxtaposing the vegetable against the human in a dialogue of disjunction and paradox.
The work is illustrated throughout with images from garden history texts, photographs, paintings and architectural drawings. It especially examines the critical ambivalence of the conservatory space and its paradoxes.
By the middle of the Anglo-American nineteenth century, greenhouse design and gardening had developed to the point where writers and painters saw the heated glass conservatory as a space that captured symbolically the paradoxes of nurture and display thought “natural” to the Victorian lady.
