John Evelyn’s Experimental Garden

This book concerns three gardens by John Evelyn, interpretated in terms the understanding of Nature and experiment he held in the middle years of the seventeenth century, the time of their creation. Two of the gardens are detailed in his great unfinished work, Elysium Britannicum; or the Royal Gardens. The third is the garden he planted at his home in Sayes Court c. 1653.

As a Royalist living in enforced retirement under the Commonwealth, Evelyn had time to write, garden, and grapple with the rich cultures of experiment and gardening he had first encountered in his youthful tours of Italy and France. These European ideas coupled with his dawning interest in Francis Bacon’s reformist programme prepared the ground for Evelyn’s Elysium Britannicum. A monument to late Humanist culture, the Elysium describes the ideal Royal Garden in all its aspects whilst also detailing Evelyn’s speculative physics, and describing a range of curious hortulan experimental episodes designed for inclusion within its bounds - experiments in hydraulics, alchemy, optics, and curious harmonic cures. Evelyn’s gardens emerge as latent laboratories.

The book will be of interest to garden historians, and historians of Early Modern science and ideas, and those interested in the spatial expression of scientific culture.