Queer Undergrowth: Weeds and Sexuality in the Architecture of the Garden

Abstract

This article considers the queer roles of weeds and undergrowth in the architecture of the garden. With the garden defined as a site where human pleasure is ordered and controlled, undergrowth is interrogated as both architectural agent of queer space and as intimate co-producer of queer sensuality. This argument charts the roles of weeds in the sexual history of the English garden, with a particular focus on the vegetal architecture of eighteenth-century wildernesses, especially at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in Lambeth, London. The article produces two speculative modes of interrogating the queer potential of weeds and undergrowth. The first is a schematic outline of the material functions of undergrowth in creating spaces for queer desire, seduction and intimacy. The second is a narrative re-performance of the embodied labor of gardening, as a key site where the conflict of plant and human desires is enacted, and through which queer modes of sensual relation are constituted.

Keywords:

• garden history
• gardening
• wilderness
• Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens
• plant sexuality
• sensuality

Notes

1 Amy Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 21.

2 Darby Lewes, Nudes from Nowhere (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 2.

3 Ibid., 54.

4 Simon Pugh, Garden Nature Language (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 11.

5 Jane Brown, The Pursuit of Paradise: A Social History of Gardens and Gardening (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 28.

6 Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), Encyclopaedia of Gardening (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2012), 645.

7 Oxford English Dictionary (OED), s.v. “Weed, n.1,” https://www.oed.com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/view/Entry/226761?rskey=tSCn8t&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed June 30, 2017).

8 RHS, Encyclopedia of Gardening, 645.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden, 66.

12 Catriona Sandilands, “Fear of a Queer Plant?,” GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 23, no. 3 (2017): 421.

13 Greta L. Lafleur, “Precipitous Sensations: Herman Mann’s The Female Review (1979), Botanical Sexuality, and the Challenge of Queer Historiography,” Early American Literature 48, no. 1 (2013): 95.

14 Sandilands, “Fear of Queer Plant?,” 425.

15 Ibid., 425–26.

16 OED, s.v. “Undergrowth, n.,” https://www.oed.com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/view/Entry/211707?redirectedFrom=undergrowth (accessed July 3, 2017).

17 Tigner, Literature and the Renaissance Garden, 229.

18 Ibid., 230.

19 Philip Miller, The Gardeners’ Dictionary (London: Printed for the author and sold by C. Rivington, 1735), 513.

20 Ibid., 513, 515.

21 Ibid., 518.

22 Ibid., 517.

23 Ibid., 515.

24 Ibid., 516.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Lisa Moore, “Queer Gardens: Mary Delany’s Flowers and Friendships,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39, no. 1 (2005): 56.

28 Ibid., 59.

29 David Coke, “Vauxhall Gardens: A History,” https://www.vauxhallgardens.com/vauxhall_gardens_briefhistory_page.html (accessed August 24, 2015).

30 Linda Glazier, “Vauxhall Gardens: An Eighteenth-Century London Pleasure Ground” (M.A. thesis, California State University, 2000), 72, 80.

31 Miles Ogborn, “Locating the Macaroni: ‘Luxury, Sexuality and Vision in Vauxhall Gardens,’” Textual Practice 11, no. 3 (1997): 452.

32 Brown, Pursuit of Paradise, 41.

33 Simon Avery, “Structuring and Interpreting Queer Spaces of London,” in Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London c. 1850 to the Present, ed. Simon Avery and Katherine M. Graham (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 3.

34 William Weber, “Vauxhall Revisited: Pleasure Gardens and their Publics, 1660–1880” (conference proceedings, conference at Tate Britain, London, UK, July 14–16, 2008), 151.

35 Glazier, “Vauxhall Gardens,” 80.

36 Ibid., 90.

37 The development of this queer architectural schema of undergrowth was inspired by Katarina Bonnevier’s description of the “unruly overgrown” sous-bois at Natalie Barney’s literary salon in Paris – “a sexualised space for flirtation [and] female seduction”; Katarina Bonnevier, Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer Feminist Theory of Architecture (Stockholm: Axl, 2007), 152. It can also be commonly found in gay cruising areas of parks and woodland.

38 Emma R. Power, “Human–Nature Relations in Suburban Gardens,” Australian Geographer 36, no. 1 (2005): 39.

39 Ibid., 45.

40 Sandilands, “Fear of a Queer Plant?,” 428.