Dear All,
One of our PhD students who isn't very into the net (hence it's better
to contact her by snail mail or phone) is called Rebecca Preston and is
completing a thesis on 'Home landscapes:amateur gardening and popular
horticulture in the making of personal, national and imperial
identities, 1815-1914'. Her MA thesis at the RCA in London was on
suburban gardens between the war. The thesis thinks about the practices
of making a garden, and how the garden became a marker of differences of
class, race and gender. She's not published much yet, but there is a
paper on imperialism in the domestic garden which is coming out in
Ecumene, and in the book on Imperial Cities that Felix Driver and I are
putting togther (I guess that both won't appear until 1999). The
immediate response to Nick's question suggests to me two things - one is
that Rebecca's work will have a broader audience than specialist garden
historians (and it is a very accessible thesis for those of you with
publishing connections), and secondly that a conference session on
popular gardening somewhere (rather than landscape gardening which has
been the focus of 'the school of' Denis Cosgrove & Stephen Daniels)
might be interesting. We quite often have one-day specials here at
Royal Holloway, or maybe at one of the bigger conferences - any
interest?
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David Gilbert
Department of Geography,
Royal Holloway,
University of London,
Surrey TW20 0EX.
Tel (01784) 443653
Fax (01784) 472836
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