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04/2001. xviii, 224 pages.
089672445X
978-0-89672-445-7

Wordsworth's Gardens

By Carol Buchanan
Photographs by Richard Buchanan
Foreword by Peter Elkington

Readers of the poems of William Wordsworth have likely encountered at least in some small way his love of the garden and gardening. And those who’ve visited the Great Britain’s Lake District know well that Wordsworth was master of more than one craft.

Each year, thousands of visitors from throughout the world treat themselves to an enchanting taste of Wordsworthian England on the grounds of Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount. There they find themselves awed by the aesthetic of the poet who designed the functional and pleasure grounds of the Wordsworth family gardens.

Whether you’ve ever had the fortune to stroll the very terraces on which Wordsworth paced out his lines for posterity, you can do so again and again in this elegant full-color photostudy by Carol and Richard Buchanan.

In all of Wordsworth scholarship, no one has so definitively connected the themes of Wordsworth’s poetry to his philosophy of gardening or has truly in one work demonstrated how nature in the raw and rocky Lake District became the soul and backbone of a poet and gardener who would not be enslaved by the tastes of his day.

Counterposing poems of the garden and the letters and journals of Wordsworth and his eloquent sister Dorothy, Carol Buchanan, in her quiet and sensitive manner, manages to picture the whole Wordsworth: poet, gardener, and devoted and longsuffering family man. Illuminating Buchanan’s perspective on Wordsworth’s gardens, and on the Lake District that shaped Wordsworth’s sensibilities, are three never-before-published garden plans and more than one hundred breathtaking photographs by Richard Buchanan.

The general layout and functional economy of the argument and explanations are very satisfying—like walking through a well ordered garden; and the authority of Buchanan’s discussions of the gardening work and thoughts of the Master is worn so unassumingly that no reader will be intimidated, yet scholarly readers will recognize the thoroughness of her study and be delighted at their own level.—Mark L. Reed