Keynote: Prof. Emma Spary (Cambridge)

Since ancient times, gardens have been created and tended by both women and men; they can be interpreted as a fundamental expression of human cultural achievement.This is evidenced by both literary and visual records, which often form our main source of knowledge about the art of gardening in past times. These records have been used extensively to study princely gardens and their aesthetics as well as botanical gardens and scholarly botanical knowledge. On the whole, more mundane aspects of garden history such as the kitchen garden or the actual practices that were instrumental in creating and maintaining them have gone largely unnoticed. Addressing this lacuna, this conference focuses on kitchen gardens as spaces for knowledge production and examines them from an interdisciplinary, trans-epochal and transcultural perspective. By doing so, it sheds light on marginalised actors and their practices and critically discusses the gendering of gardens and horticultural practices from the early modern to the modern age.