<p>This most unusual book traces the interrelations of architecture, horticulture, literature, social history and gender.<br/><br/>The Victorian conservatory and the lady enclosed within it proved to be ambivalent, enigmatic and self-contradictory. What began optimistically as protection ended as imprisonment. The metaphor offers a vision of fractured femininity, juxtaposing the vegetable against the human in a dialogue of disjunction and paradox.<br/><br/>The work is illustrated throughout with images from garden history texts, photographs, paintings and architectural drawings. It especially examines the critical ambivalence of the conservatory space and its paradoxes.<br/><br/>By the middle of the Anglo-American nineteenth century, greenhouse design and gardening had developed to the point where writers and painters saw the heated glass conservatory as a space that captured symbolically the paradoxes of nurture and display thought “natural” to the Victorian lady.<br