Flower Lovers

Flower Lovers: Cultivating Queer Time in the New England Garden examines networks of queer women writers who forged intimate connections through flowers and gardening in New England during the long nineteenth century. Reading writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Celia Thaxter, Alice Brown, Alice Morse Earle and Angelina Weld Grimké, amongst others, H. J. E. Champion traces erotic ecologies and pleasurable possibilities in the garden. Drawing from short stories, poems, essays, paintings and photographs, Champion explores the cultivation of relational and temporal modes of queerness: historical floral (af)filiations, growing rhizomically, cultivating girlishness, plant/human entanglements, spectral eidolons, floral inheritance practices, and queerly generative seed dispersal. Champion writes of queer women writers flourishing in nonlinear directions, like the rose that rustles across the garden wall, like the perennials that come back every year, or like interconnected and proliferating rhizomes. These writers stake out their place in a form of queer floral future that distances itself from newly emerging sexual categories and narratives of sexual deviance. Flower Lovers is a book about how women garden, how women love gardens, and how women love.