石倉和佳
兵庫県立大学 環境人間学部 研究報告 10(10) 121-129 2008年3月
This paper explores the idea of the "wild garden" from a historical perspective in order to delineate the layers of cultural thought associated with it. The phrase "wild garden" has been popularized by William Robinson's book, The Wild Garden first published in 1870; in it he presented the "wild garden" as the key concept for his gardening practices. Robinson's concept of the "wild garden" is said to have been influenced by the newly developed idea of ecology in the 19th century, while the cultural relevance of this idea to the history of English literature has not fully been studied. In this paper Francis Bacon's essay, "Of Gardens" and Andrew Marvell's garden poems are examined in order to understand the characteristics of their descriptions of gardens, and their descriptions are compared with those in Robinson's "Wild Garden." This paper also examines the extent of the contribution of the interrelationship between the development of landscape painting and that of landscape descriptions in poetry to the understanding of the idea of the "wild garden," especially focusing on the pictorial values of natural scenery.