Chapter 3 - Poetical Plants and Leafy Landscapes

Summary

‘Poetical Plants and Leafy Landscapes’ counters perceptions of Restoration poetry as being overwhelmingly preoccupied with the urban environment. It begins by evaluating the importance attached to trees and plants in the political ideologies of the early Restoration, as exemplified in Edmund Waller’s A Poem on St. James’s Park (1661) and John Evelyn’s Sylva (1664). Sponsored by the Royal Society, and now recognised as a pioneering work in the fields of arboriculture and conservation, Sylva crucially relied on select quotations from Latin and English poets to achieve its principal aim: encouraging Evelyn’s gentlemanly readers to grow more trees. Later sections of the chapter explore the treatment of trees and plants by poets such as Abraham Cowley, John Milton, Mary Roper, Lucy Hutchinson, the earl of Rochester and Aphra Behn. Cowley’s treatment of trees and plants in his original English poems and translations are compared both with John Milton’s near-contemporary use of plant-life in Paradise Lost and also with his own Latin masterpiece, the Sex Libri Plantarum, while the Plantarum is considered as a work both of the 1660s (when it was mostly written) and of the 1680s (when it was controversially translated into English).