Dr Clare Hickman

Winner of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, sponsored by the Center for Cultural Landscapes at the UVA School of Architecture and shortlisted for the Hughes Prize by the British Society for the History of Science

Dr John Coakley Lettsom and his garden at Grove Hill, London, provide the central point for this framing of the late British Georgian landscape as a place of scientific understanding, education and agricultural experimentation, as well as a place for pleasure and the display of rare and interesting botanical specimens and animals. By considering the use and experience of these spaces by professional medical men in the past, and the movement of people, plants and animals through them, the late eighteenth-century garden can be understood within its local, national and global contexts. It also moves the narrative of such gardens beyond the better understood grand country house landscapes of the period and instead considers how successful professional men created spaces that helped reinforce their identity as medico-gentlemen. It also locates the garden as a place to be read and understood in relation to other polite spaces such as museums and libraries, and blurs the boundaries between private, public and institutional scientific designed landscapes. It concludes by arguing that by highlighting these alternative ways of understanding how landscapes were used and experienced in the past, new research approaches can be used to tell more inclusive stories for today’s visitors. From the relationship of garden plants to the wider Empire to the feeding of tortoises by gardeners, the historic gardens of today can offer a range of new, exciting and diverse stories for the visiting public.

This original book provides a cultural history of the late British Georgian landscape as a place of scientific understanding, education and agricultural experimentation, as well as a place for pleasure and the display of rare and interesting botanical specimens and animals. Using the English physicist and philantropist John Coakley Lettsom and his garden at Grove Hill, London, as the prime example, The Doctor’s Garden moves the narrative of such gardens beyond the better understood grand country house landscapes of the period. It demonstrates how successful professional men created spaces that helped reinforce their identity as medico-gentlemen – merging the history of medicine, health and science with that of the landscape and environment. This book also locates the garden as a place to be read and understood in relation to other polite spaces such as museums and libraries. It thus blurs the boundaries between private, public and institutional scientific designed landscapes. By highlighting how landscapes were used and experienced in the past, it ultimately also lays the foundation for more inclusive stories to be discovered by today’s visitors.

There is an open access version of the book, The Doctor’s Garden, freely accessible to read here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK584349/

Other related publications from research funded by the Wellcome Trust through a Fellowship in Medical History and Humanities

• ‘The want of a proper Gardiner’: Late Georgian Scottish botanic gardeners as intermediaries of medical and scientific knowledge. The British Journal for the History of Science, 1-25. doi: 10.1017/S0007087419000451
• ‘Curiosity and Instruction: British and Irish botanic gardens and their audiences, 1760-1800’ Environment and History 24 (2018), 59-80
• ‘The Garden as a Laboratory: The role of domestic gardens as places of scientific exploration’. Post-Mediaeval Archaeology 48: 1 (June 2014), 229-247