Gardens are ambivalent spaces of representation, characterised by such dichotomies as nature and art, order and wilderness, private and public, preservation and change, past and future, pastoral and conquest, interior and exterior, Englishness and otherness. While being associated with leisure, aesthetic enjoyment and even nostalgia or escapism, gardens also have a concrete political dimension, not only because of the imperial plant trade, but also due to their status as monuments of the power to subdue nature.

Being spaces of creativity, projection and experimentation, gardens can be said to act as counter-sites to the urban cosmopolitanism of Bloomsbury modernism. In the garden, change, innovation, tradition and decay can be seen to co-exist and overlap, mirroring the complex restructuring of society that took place in Edwardian and Georgian England.

Gardens are among the sites which Michel Foucault has labelled as heterotopias, a category situated in uneasy proximity to utopia and one which this paper proposes to rethink. It will do so by analysing and comparing utopian and heterotopian functions of gardens in selected works by Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, E.M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield.

Emneord: Faculty of Humanities: Gardens, Modernism, Utopia, Mansfield, Katherine, Woolf, Virginia, Forster, E.M.