<aside> 💡 The archetype of “Gardens” can be found in the following texts: 1) The Bible - The Garden of Eden Eden connotes safety, purity, paradise - a place where Adam & Eve could be their true selves, where they were naked together. It can indicate privacy in love because they are the only people in the world. It is also where the forbidden fruit is, so it also could connote the evil pull of curiosity and lust. 2) Romeo and Juliet - Capulet’s Garden Capulet’s Garden is a private, walled place where the lovers can finally express their love for each other. This is Juliet’s garden, however, and Romeo has broken into it. The danger of this intrusion is emphasised by describing the walls that guard the garden:
JULIET
How camest thou hither, tell me, and wherefore?
The orchard walls are high and hard to climb,
And the place death, considering who thou art,
If any of my kinsmen find thee here.
ROMEO
With love's light wings did I o'er-perch these walls;
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
This garden can represent the ways that forbidden love can bloom in private and against all odds (like walls and the threat of death).
**3) The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett ”**The secret garden, with its robin family twittering away in their nest, ancient sprawling roses, apple trees trained flat against the wall, and ivy covering up the hidden door, is a private space of mystery, transformation, learning, and healing.” - https://gardentherapy.ca/book-gardens/#:~:text=In literature%2C gardens represent spaces,send characters into magical realms.
4) Jane Eyre - Rochester’s Garden Taylor has made references to Jane Eyre before, so it wouldn’t be surprising that she has noted the symbolism of Rochester’s proposal to Jane happening in his garden. ”Ripe and blooming, the world offers various sensual pleasures; the gooseberry-tree is laden with fruit large as plums; the sweet-briar, jasmine, and rose have yielded a "sacrifice of incense"; Rochester tastes the ripe cherries as he walks through the garden; and the nightingale sings. This moment combines material pleasures with the spiritual pleasures of a "sacrifice of incense" and Jane's feeling that she could "haunt" the orchard forever.” - https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/j/jane-eyre/summary-and-analysis/chapter-23
In all of these gardens, there are common themes of privacy, innocence, childlike wonder, discovery, transformation and curiosity.
“Gardens easily represent complicated relationships between nature and nurture. They also contain both images of unbridled human experiences, such as sexuality and fertility, and references to the trappings of civilisation, including human interventions into natural processes.” - https://www.ft.com/content/2c2d36ce-0e06-11e6-b41f-0beb7e589515
**Quotes from the article below: ”**the garden, which is the locus amoenus par excellence, represents in literature and art a dimension that is separate from our everyday life, a human-scale space” “Pictorial arts were inspired by this vast literature to represent the garden as the symbol for the power that humans have over nature. Represented as a luxuriant place, sometimes surrounded by walls, filled with fountains, fruit trees or domesticated animals, the garden is depicted as a place of peace and spiritual refreshment.
Each element becomes a symbol and conveys a message: The walls have an initiatory and sacred connotation, and the garden becomes a borderland between two worlds, nature and culture”
The garden [of Eden] also takes on an aesthetic and erotic connotation. Characterized by a strong animistic dimension of Platonic inspiration, anima mundi, and the Edenic motif of the tree of life, the garden is transformed, also thanks to courtly literature, into a garden of love. An enchanted territory, full of forbidden fruits, a place that follows the archetypal form of the Wonder Garden: inhabited by Juno, Minerva and Venus (representing power, wisdom and pleasure), it gives access to the lover, the one and only allowed to discover the mysteries of love.
The Garden, a place of symbolism
</aside>
<aside> 🌈 Queer history: Elsa Gidlow was the first known poet to release a poetry book in English about lesbian experiences in 1923. She wrote a poem about sleeping with a woman in a garden called “For The Goddess Too Well Known” as well as another insinuation of intimate things happening with a friend in a garden in the poem “Of A Certain Friendship” Lil Nas X sings about the Garden of Eden in his hit “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)
</aside>
https://www.glamour.com/story/taylor-swift-bomb-shell-in-blue-jeans
22 Things You Learn Hanging Out With Taylor Swift
If You’re Anything Like Me (poem) - If you’re anything like me, you never wanted to lock your door, your secret garden gate or your diary drawer… but Darling, now you have to”
Call It What You Want: All my flowers grew back as thorns, windows boarded up after the storm
“My Hobbies” Taymoji
https://www.vogue.com/article/taylor-swift-cover-september-2019
