`Disciples of Flora' explores, through a variety of approaches, disciplines, and historical periods, the place and vitality of gardens as cultural objects, repositories of meaning, and sites for the construction of identity and subjectivity; gardens being an eminent locus where culture and nature meet.
This collection of essays contributes to a revision of histories of gardens by broadening the scope of scholarly inquiry to include a long history from ancient Rome to the present, in which contesting memories delineate new apprehensions of topography and space. The contributors draw attention to alternative landscapes or gardening practices, while recalling the ways in which spaces have been invested with an affective dimension that has itself been historicized.
The three editors of this volume teach at the University of Florida, where Victoria Emma Pagán is Professor of Classics, Judith W. Page is Professor of English, and Brigitte Weltman-Aron is Associate Professor of French. Their research areas include landscape gardening theories and practices across the ages, and their books on these topics include Rome and the Literature of Gardens (Pagan, 2006), Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape (Judith W. Page and Elise Smith 2011, 2014 [paperback]), and On Other Grounds: Landscape Gardening and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Weltman-Aron, 2001).