Jonathan Bate | The Garden – Our 4,000-Year Quest for Paradise
Sat 21 Nov 2026 | 2:00pm - 3:00pm
In the UK, more than 27 million of us tend a window box, rooftop, or patch of earth – and find solace, sustenance and equilibrium. Jonathan Bate, one of our greatest literary critics and cultural historians, shares his major new history The Garden, which explores not only actual gardens, from palace estates to city allotments, but the meaning of gardens. Drawing on poetry, painting, philosophy and religion, from Ovid to Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson, an event to console and inspire. Green fingers not required.
In conversation with Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
Venue: Old Divinity School
Duration: 1 hour
Tickets available soon.
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Author Biography
Sir Jonathan Bate is the author of twenty books, including biographies, all of which won prizes, of English literature’s three great poets of nature: William Wordsworth, Ted Hughes and John Clare. Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University and a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University, where he was formerly Provost of Worcester College, he is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholars as well as a pioneer of ecological approaches to literature and culture. The citation for his knighthood described him as ‘truly a Renaissance man’. He has a reading knowledge of ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French and German, but will ensure that colleagues with relevant expertise check his treatment of Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Japanese and Hispanic sources. He is a keen gardener himself.
Chair Biography
Todd Longstaffe-Gowan is one of Britain’s leading landscape architects and landscape historians. Many of his projects include an element of conservation; he brings to his garden design a sense of the complexities of our relation to the past that is informed by his training and experience as an architect, landscape architect, cultural geographer and historian. He is the author of several books including The London Square (2012), English Garden Eccentrics (2022), and Lost Gardens of London (2024). He lectures widely on landscape history and design both in Britain and abroad and is a lecturer on the MA course in Historical and Sustainable Architecture at New York University (London).
