IN THE EARLY summer of 2016, a report commissioned by the National Gardens Scheme on the links frequently posited between gardens and human health was published in Britain. Its author, David Buck, presented this report's intention as making an important contribution to ‘the understanding, assessment and development of the links between gardens, gardening and health’, adding that it was also purposed at demonstrating how ‘gardens and gardening can make a strong contribution to keeping us well and independent’. One of the report's primary recommendations was that local governments work to ensure the sustainability of civic green spaces so that they may ‘continue to deliver positive health benefits’ on an equitable basis, particularly for those who may not have access to such spaces in a private capacity. This work, moreover, brings together much of what we have suspected but which has frequently remained unproven: as humans we are far more dependent on the so-called ‘natural’ world around us and its cyclical changeability than we have come to imagine. Indeed, considered within a time of a desperate climate emergency when the givens of that ‘natural’ world are being upended by human denial of its own global impact, the need to understand the importance of horticultural landscapes and their role within the human imaginary realm is, perhaps, even more pressing than ever.

For the purposes of this volume, my use of the term ‘imaginary’ follows the accepted Lacanian view of the world and human responses to it, as refracted through image and imagination rather than through the actual conditions of existence (the ‘real’). It operates according to the premise, moreover, that, under patriarchy, such a constructed imaginary is both phallic and masculine, forming a hegemonic system of understanding that has traditionally rendered its expression (the ‘symbolic’) as male-dominated and ultimately comprehensible only via the male gaze. Post-Lacanian analysis goes further, suggesting that the patriarchal imaginary is ultimately dependent upon the feminine (and other subordinates) for its hegemony, rendering the possibility of a female imaginary within such cultural contexts all but impossible.