![]() ![]() Here the statue of Peter Pan salutes the park’s own role in stirring JM Barrie’s imagination, as well as reminding passers-by of its place as the backdrop to his fairy’s adventures ![]() Literature has also taken on solid form in Kensington Gardens in London. These Tudorbethan groves, as it happens, are usually modelled along horticultural lines prescribed in the essay Of Gardens, by the bard’s near-contemporary Frances Bacon. ![]() Though generally less fraught with peril, many other public parks also have Shakespeare gardens. It ranges from the bawdy verse of A Ramble in St James’s Park by the court rake John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, to contemporary US novels like Garth Risk Halberg’s City on Fire, whose plot turns on a murder in punk-era Central Park – a time, according to Woody Allen’s Annie Hall at least, when even actors performing Shakespeare in the park lived in fear of losing their leotards to muggers. ![]() Since literature and horticulture have always gone hand in hand, the canon of park-related writing is vast. A mong the pleasures of researching my book, A Walk in the Park, a historical survey of parks and green spaces from their origins as aristocratic hunting preserves to their modern role as public spaces, was not only visiting lots of parks but also reading plays, poems, novels and memoirs about them. ![]()
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