Breaking with the idea that gardens are places of indulgence and escapism, these studies of ritualized practices reveal that gardens in Europe, Asia, the United States, and the Caribbean have in fact made significant contributions to cultural change.

This book demonstrates methods and the striking results of garden reception studies. The first section explores how cultural changes occur, and devotes chapters to public landscapes in the Netherlands, seventeenth-century Parisian gardens, Freemason gardens in Tuscany, nineteenth-century Scottish kitchen gardens, and the public parks of Edo and modern Tokyo. The second part provides striking examples of construction of self in vernacular gardens in Guadeloupe and American Japanese-style gardens in California. Finally, the third section analyzes struggles for political change in gardens of Yuan China and modern Britain.

 Contents
Introduction: The Significance of Bodily Engagement with Nature 			000
	Michel Conan
Garden and Landscape Performances: Contributions to Cultural Changes 		000	
Taking Fresh Air: Walking in Holland in the Early Modern Period, 1650-1800
	Erik de Jong
Royal Gardens, Fashionable Promenades, and Public Opinion in 				000
Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Paris				
	Michel Conan
Stages of Knowledge, Settings for Brotherhood: 						000
Gardens and Freemasonry in Tuscany during the First Half of the 19th Century		
	Alessandro Tosi
Meaning and Change in the Walled Kitchen Gardens of Nineteenth-Century Britain	000
	Susan Warren Lanman
Tokyo's Modern Parks: Spaces and Practices							000
	Sylvie Brosseau
Achieving a Social Construction of the Self		
Caribbean and African-American Landscapes: The Embodiment of the Gardens		000
	Catherine Beno¿t
Performing Hybridity: Wedding Rituals at Japanese-Style Gardens 				000
in Southern California
	Kendall H. Brown
Struggling for Political Changes	
Academy Landscapes and the Ritualization of Cultural Memory 				000
in China under the Mongols		
	Linda Walton
Naumachia: The Nationalistic Ritual Performed in British Landscape Gardens 		000
as a Patriotic Celebration of Naval Supremacy and Empire
	Patrick Eyres
Rituals of Transgression in Nineteenth-Century Urban Parks				000
	David Lambert