Gardens are places of pleasure and of punishment; they are places to read, to dance, to work, to laugh, to study, to labour, and to rest; they are places of horticultural competence and of happy amateurism; they are places to imagine, to make, to own and to visit; they are places which speak of elsewhere and places which signify home; they are places of retirement and of ostentation, they are places of transgression, of meditation, of excitement, boredom, seduction, luxury, and suicide. All but the last are the subject of this book.

This, then, is a book about gardens; but more than that it is a book about eighteenth-century women and the gardens they created, inhabited, and imagined. It starts from the assumption that the shaping of physical space is the shaping also of identity, and that gardens are microcosms, speaking of and reacting to a world beyond themselves. It starts also with an anecdote. In the summer of 1761 Sarah Lennox could be found in the hay fields of Holland Park: dressed in her finest clothes, and with one eye on the turnpike road, she was a shepherdess in search of a prince (Figure 1). This was no pastoral daydream, however, for the prince in question was the newly crowned George III and for a time – with the aid of her pastoral trappings – it seemed that she might succeed in becoming the queen of England. Ten years later, disgraced by an extra-marital affair and by the scandal of divorce, she had swapped the landscape of pastoral for a landscape of disgrace. Where before she had been a beautiful shepherdess waiting for her handsome prince, now she was a penitent waiting for absolution; and where once she had inhabited the splendid gardens of Holland Park, now, wearing plain clothes and a doleful expression, she was banished to an old manor house and country obscurity in the recesses of her brother's estate at Goodwood. Forced by her family to exchange the pastoral for the penitential, Sarah Lennox traversed the extremes of how her society imagined a woman in a garden; at each extreme she knew only too well the conventions, the expectations, and the costs.