Along with this attention to the delights of reading, it analyzes the strange dignity and pleasure of garden labor and the division of men's and women's roles in creating garden art.

Green Desire describes the innovative design of the old manuals, examining how writers and printers marketed them as fiction as well as practical advice for aspiring gardeners. Like early modern 'books of secrets,' early gardening manuals often promise the reader power to alter the essential properties of plants: to make the gillyflower double, to change the lily's hue, or to grow a cherry without a stone.

In particular, the earliest English garden books, such as Thomas Hill's The Gardener's Labyrinth or Hugh Platt's Floraes Paradise, mix magical practices with mundane recipes even when the authors insist that they rely completely on their own experience in these matters. These books powerfully evoke the desires of gardeners: they show us gardeners who, like poets, imagine not just what is but what should be. London : printed for the author, and are to be sold at his house, at the sign of the Golden Ball in Winchester Street, near Broad Street, 1673.For Rebecca Bushnell, English gardening books tell a fascinating tale of the human love for plants and our will to make them do as we wish. Written by John Archer one of His Majesties physicians in ordinary. Also a compendious herbal, discovering the physical vertue of all herbs in this kingdom, and what planet rules each herb, and how to gather them in their planetary hours. A treatise of melancholly and distraction, with government in cure. Shewing their causes and signs, danger and cure. The second part shews the full knowledg and cure of the pox, running of the reins, gout, dropsie, scurvy, consumptions and obstructions: agues. Treating also of air, passions of mind, exercise of body, sleep, the use of tobacco, a new hot bath venery, with an infallible secret to prevent the pox. Also the nature and faculties of all food as well meats as drinks, whereby every man and woman may understand what is good or hurtful to them. Every man his own doctor, compleated with an herbal: shewing, first, how every one may know his own constitution and complexion, by certain signs.

The Gardener's Labyrinth by Thomas Hill