MAVE Dissertation,
Lancaster University 2001

Towards female environmental aesthetics, a view through nineteenth and twentieth century women gardeners

Jane Gibbon

Supervisor:  Emily Brady-Haapala

ABSTRACT

Extending beyond the art world environmental aesthetics embodies the view that every environment, natural, rural or urban offers much to see and appreciate (Carlson, 2001).  The garden, although a human created environment, can provide important natural habitats (Owen & Owen, 1975) and environments that can be viewed through environmental aesthetics (Ross, 1998).

Using feminist aesthetics of art (Kneller 1997; Worth 2001) this work explores the possibility of developing a female environmental aesthetic through feminist interpretation of Kant and an ecofeminist framework.  The place for emotion and imagination within ethics through aesthetic theory is stressed by feminists (Kneller 1997) and ecofeminists (Warren 2000; Plumwood 1996; Gilligan 1982) the ethic of care being one method of addressing this (Warren, 2000).

Current environmental aesthetic developments such as the cognitive approach (Carlson, 1993) and the non-cognitive approaches such as the aesthetics of engagement (Berleant, 1990) and imagination (Hepburn, 1993, Brady, 1998) are examined.  Children’s use of imagination in the natural world is also studied in order to demonstrate caring and responsibility in relation to environmental aesthetics.

Women gardeners and Gertrude Jekyll are used as a case to support a feminist framework  focussing on the written record of nineteenth and twentieth century gardeners, particularly Gertrude Jekyll.  The interpretation of the record of her life and work (mostly written) is used to look at the influences on her, her thought, imagination, view of nature and gardens for children in order to move toward developing an imaginative feminist environmental aesthetic.

Key words / themes:  	Ecofeminism
Feminist aesthetics
Environmental aesthetics
				Women gardeners
				Imagination

Index

									Page Number

Abstract									 2

Introduction									 4		
Ecofeminist Philosophy							 6
		Conceptual interconnections			
		Epistemological interconnections			
		Ethical interconnections					 7
		Ethics of care						 8

Feminist Aesthetics: A view of Kantian Autonomy			10

Emotion and Emotional Intelligence					14

Environmental Aesthetics							15

The Garden									19

Case Study of Gertrude Jekyll (GJ)					22
		Ruskin, Morris and The Arts & Crafts Movement	22
	Gertrude Jekyll’s Life					22
	Artistic and Feminist Influences on GJ			23
	William Robinson and the Wild Garden			24
	Lutyens Influence, childhood and imagination		25

Conclusion									27

References									29

'Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination.'
 
	Mrs C.W. Earle, 1897 in Women Gardeners, ed. Deborah Kellaway

Introduction

Ecofeminist philosophy helps develop an understanding of how mainstream environmental practices and policies often reflect, reinforce, or create practices and policies that devalue, subvert, or make invisible the actual needs and contributions of women, people of colour, the underclass and children.  This work explores conceptual, epistemological and ethical ecofeminist interconnections in order to argue that the Kantian ethical framework that makes strong use of the reason / emotion dichotomy needs to be explored further in order to strengthen the place of emotionality within an ethic of respect, care and responsibility.

Plumwood’s (1996) ecofeminist critique of Kantian autonomy shows she believes it should not be abandoned but reassessed.  In order to reassess this, a richer understanding of 'emotionality and particularity' is needed.  Jaggar (1989) supports this view and Kneller (1997) provides one way of exploring this reassessment.  By going beyond the work of Arendt (1982) and O'Neill (1989), Kneller comes to the conclusion that an 'empowered' imagination could be an important part of a theory where persons ('others') could imagine the possibility of a world where their particular feelings, desires and fears are not written off as irrational.

Although, Kneller is looking from a feminist perspective, not from environmental aesthetics, her work explores through imagination the that emotion has a valid place in aesthetic theory.  I see this as supporting the ecofeminist argument for the ethic of care and as a useful way of developing an environmental aesthetic that includes 'emotionality and particularity' (Plumwood 1996).  This theme is further explored through work on emotional intelligence (Warren 2000).

The development of environmental aesthetics in the twentieth century has resulted in a dualism between the cognitive approach (Carlson 1993) and the non-cognitive approaches such as the aesthetics of engagement (Berleant 1990) and imagination (Brady 1998).  These are considered and a feminist framework is used to develop an environmental aesthetics that includes emotionality and imagination.  This is in order that the utility and self-interested value of nature is excluded from environmental aesthetics and a move towards an imaginative alternative of caring can be developed. These approaches to the aesthetic appreciation of nature are in terms of the context and situation of the appreciator, including subjective aspects like emotion and imagination.  The conceptual, ethical and epistemological interconnections developed within an ecofeminist framework support this approach.

The use of gardens and female gardeners provide examples of created environments with the potential to be important areas for wildlife.  The garden as an environment and as a work of art is examined (Ross 1998; Miller 1993) through the work of female gardeners.  Women have created and tended gardens since early history and this study focuses on the work of Gertrude Jekyll.  The record of her life and work is used to examine her view of nature, the cultural and feminist influences of her time, her imagination and view of nature and gardens for children.  Gertrude Jekyll's work could be interpreted as providing an example of a female garden designer and artist supporting a move towards female environmental aesthetics.

Ecofeminist philosophy

Ecofeminist philosophy is important because it helps one understand how mainstream environmental practices and policies often reflect, reinforce, or create practices and policies that devalue, subvert, or make invisible the actual needs and contributions of women, people of colour, the underclass, and children.  The term ecofeminism refers to a plurality of positions, some are mutually compatible, and some are not, growing out of and reflecting different and distinct feminisms such as Marxist feminism, radical feminism and socialist feminism.  Karen Warren (2000) identifies ten types of women-other human Others-nature interconnections:
	Historical
Conceptual
	Empirical
	Socio-economic
	Linguistic
Symbolic and literary
	Spiritual and religious
Epistemological
	Political
Ethical
Although not all these interconnections are philosophical positions themselves, they all raise interesting philosophical issues.  This work uses conceptual, epistemological and ethical interconnections as a possible ecofeminist framework upon which to build feminist environmental aesthetics.

Conceptual interconnections

The conceptual basis of structures of domination in hierarchically organized value is through dualisms (e.g. reason/emotion, mind/body, culture/nature, human/nature, man/woman) with an exaggerated focus on reason and rationality divorced from the realm of the body, nature, and the physical (Plumwood 1996).  Whilst Warren locates the conceptual connections in an oppressive and patriarchal framework, mediated by what she calls ‘a logic of domination’.  Ariel Salleh (1984) sees environmental ethics failing to:
 ‘recognise the primal source of the destructive dualism or the deeply engrained motivational complexes which grow out of it’ p340
According to Salleh the connection between women and nature needs to be recognised before there is any growth towards a 'sane, humane, ecological future.’

By recognising that western thinking is influenced by these conceptual structures ecofeminism strives to move towards changing and breaking down these barriers in order to understand, examine and improve change for women, other human Others and nature (Warren 2000). 

Epistemological interconnections

Ecofeminists interested in epistemology challenge some Western views about knowledge as being objective, that the knower is objective, detached independent & a rational observer; and that nonhuman nature is a passive object of knowledge.  By reviewing Kant's Critique of Judgement and specifically the aesthetic theory of Kant, from a feminist perspective provides a route towards understanding western views and developing feminist environmental aesthetics

Sandra Harding (in Warren 2000) argues that the social location of the knower is crucial to understanding and assessing epistemological claims.  Whilst Donna Haraway argues for an alternative, pluralistic, context-dependent view of knowledge, what she calls ‘situated knowledges’:
‘situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and his authorship of ‘objective’ knowledge….A corollary of the insistence that ethics and politics covertly or overtly provide the bases for objectivity…..is granting the status of agent/actor to the objects of the world’ (p34 Warren, 2000)

The job of the scientist, philosopher, and theorist is not to try and give accounts that ‘mirror nature’, since mirroring assumes that nature is an unconstructed ‘given’.  Their job is to provide knowledge claims and accounts that are relationally ‘situated’ in important social and material contexts.

According to Haraway ‘ecofeminists have perhaps been most insistent on some version of the world as active subject, not as resource to be mapped and appropriated in bourgeois, Marxist or masculinist projects.’ 
When one acknowledges ‘nature as subject’:
Accounts of a ‘real’ world do not, then, depend on a logic of ‘discovery’ but on a power-charged social relation of ‘conversation’. p35 (Warren, 2000) 
The 'conversation' of Haraway can be used to develop feminist environmental aesthetics based on other ways of gaining an understanding of the natural world other than the scientific. 

Ethical Interconnections

The ethic of flourishing (Cuomo 1997), draws on Aristotelian concepts of euaimonia: happiness, the good life, living well, excellence and flourishing, and a commitment to the value of flourishing, or well-being of individuals, species and communities.  Part of Vita Sackville West's philosophy supported this view: 'My liking for gardens to be lavish is an inherent part of my garden philosophy.  I like generosity wherever I find it, whether in gardens or elsewhere.  I hate to see things scrimp and scrubby.' p49 (1951).  The well-being of individuals, species and communities can be seen in the care of gardens.  Mara Miller (1993) sees every garden as a sign of human caring, this set of ethical interconnections based on care is examined in the next section.

Ethics of care 

Plumwood's (1996) critique of Paul Taylor's book Respect for Nature (1986) demonstrates that his defence of a biocentric ethical theory is embedded within a Kantian ethical framework that makes strong use of the reason / emotion dichotomy.  That the attitude of respect is a moral one because it is universalising and disinterested:
'that is, each moral agent who sincerely has the attitude advocates its universal adoption by all other agents, regardless of whether they are so inclined and regardless of their fondness or lack of fondness for particular individuals.' p41
Taylor draws on the familiar view of reason and emotion as sharply separated and opposed, and of 'desire', caring, and love as merely 'personal' and 'particular' as opposed to the universality and impartiality of understanding and of 'feminine' emotions as essentially unreliable, untrustworthy, and morally irrelevant, an inferior domain to be dominated by a superior, disinterested (and of course masculine) reason.

This sort of rationalist account of the place of emotions has come in for a great deal of criticism for its implicit gender bias and its philosophical inadequacy, especially its dualism and its explanation of public reason as sharply differentiated from and controlling private emotion (Benhabib 1987 in Plumwood, 1996 and Gilligan 1982).  By examining self, Plumwood develops this, arguing that the rationalist-inspired ethical concepts are highly ethnocentric and cannot account adequately for the views of many indigenous peoples.  The attempted application of these rationalist concepts to their positions tends to lead to the view that they lack a real ethical framework (Plumwood, 1996).  These alternative concepts seem better able to apply to the views of such peoples, whose ethic of respect, care and responsibility for land is often based on special relationships with particular areas of land via links to kin (Neidje, 1985, 1989 in Plumwood, 1996).  These links to place or with land could also be extended to the attachment of people to gardens and the development of an ethic of respect, care and responsibility for the communities (human and non human) within them.  This could also be the development of care and responsibility by children for nature and gardens.

The concepts of care, respect and responsibility allow for particularity and mostly do not require reciprocity.  They are precisely the sorts of concepts ecofeminist philosophers have argued should be more significant in ethics at the expense of abstract, 'malestream' concepts from the public sphere such as rights and justice (Gilligan 1982, 1987; Benhabib 1987).  The ethic of care and responsibility articulated by Gilligan and Benhabib seems to extend to the nonhuman world.  It also seems an ethic capable of providing an excellent basis for the noninstrumental treatment of nature many environmental philosophers are now calling for (Plumwood 1996).  Such an approach treats ethical relations as an expression of self-in-relationship (Gilligan 1987) rather than as the discarding, containment, or generalisation of a self viewed as self-interested and non-relational, as in the conventional ethics of universalisation.

Plumwood (1996) does not believe that ethics should be abandoned or the universalised approach discarded, but that the centrality of ethics in environmental philosophy needs to be reassessed leading to a different and richer understanding of it that needs to give an:
'important place to ethical concepts owning to emotionality and particularity and that abandons the exclusive focus on the universal and the abstract associated with the nonrelational self and the dualistic and oppositional accounts of the reason / emotion and the universal / particular contrasts as given in rationalist accounts of ethics.' p161 

Within western philosophical tradition, emotions usually have been considered as potentially or actually subversive of knowledge (Jaggar 1989).  So, a claim that emotion is vital to systematic knowledge is only the most obvious contrast between the conception of theoretical investigation and the conception provided by positivism.  The alternative approach emphasises that what we identify as emotion is a conceptual abstraction from a complex process of human activity that involves, acting, sensing, and evaluating.  This proposed account of theoretical construction demonstrates the simultaneous necessity for and interdependence of faculties that our culture has abstracted and separated from each other: emotion and reason, evaluation and perception, observation and action.

Jaggar's (1989) view of knowledge is a nonhierarchical and antifoundationalist model with emotions as neither more basic than observation, reason or action in building theory, nor secondary to them.  Each of these human faculties reflects an aspect of human knowing inseparable from the other aspects.  Marx believed that 'the development of each of these faculties is a necessary condition for the development of all.  The acknowledgement of the importance of emotion for knowledge is not entirely new to the western epistemological tradition: Plato came to accept in the end that knowledge required (a very purified form of) love (Jaggar 1989). 

Ecofeminist philosophy strives to move towards changing and breaking down the conceptual basis of domination whilst challenging western views about knowledge being objective, that the knower is objective, detached and a rational observer.  The Kantian ethical framework that makes strong use of the reason / emotion dichotomy is critiqued by Plumwood, although she does not believe that ethics should be abandoned or the universalised approach discarded.  The importance of the emotionality and particularity need to be acknowledged in order that a different and richer understanding of ethics in environmental philosophy.  The importance of emotion is now examined within the context of feminist aesthetic theory through the work of Kneller (1997).

Feminist Aesthetics: A view of Kantian Autonomy

Kneller (1997) contrasts the ethics of care and an ethic of autonomy which was precipitated by Gilligan's (1982) criticism of Kohlberg's work on moral psychology and the 'Kantian' notion of autonomy within it.  Kohlberg's hierarchy of the stages of moral development placed considerations of care and sympathy below the 'higher' stages of justice, impartiality, and autonomy.  Kantian notions of moral autonomy have often been presumed guilty of masculinist bias and as Gilligan's early work shows the approach to moral thinking based on universal principles and impartial duty is associated with Kant and is empirically associated with men and not women.  

In defending her work to critics Gilligan states:
'In a defining a shift in perspective that changes the meaning of the key terms of moral discourse - such as the concept of self, the idea of relationship, and the notion of responsibility - I described an ethic of care and response that I contrasted with an ethic of justice and rights.  I also cited as an empirical observation the prominence of the care perspective in women's moral thinking and used literary examples to amplify and extend the voices of my interview texts.' Gilligan, (1993) p208

In developing an account of Kantian autonomy that includes a social dimension and goes toward a reconstruction of Kantian autonomy arguing that Kant's concerns with aesthetic theory led him to re-evaluate the role of feelings within it.  The common feminist objection to the concept of autonomy is because the fully developed moral human being is typified by a moral-heroic subject who stands alone is devoid of compassion but committed to principles and the duties that follow therefrom.  This is unappealing to those who see care and sympathy as having an important place in the nature of moral character, but some concept of autonomy is necessary in order for genuine political dialogue to develop.

Hannah Arendt (1982) points out that 'political freedom is defined quite unequivocally and consistently through (Kant's) work as 'to make public use of one's reason at every point.'.  Thus for Arendt, community, is necessary for critical thought, which is definitive of political autonomy.  Onora O'Neill (1989) goes further and makes a link between moral autonomy and the ability to see oneself as a member of a community of agents all working to realise a vision of human political freedom.  The Arts and Crafts movement is one of many examples of a community of agents working to realise a vision, although women were not included in the guilds.

Kneller takes Arendt's account of the social nature of political autonomy and community and O'Neill's community of agents and moves it further to include the aesthetic, the felt dimension of reflective judgement.  An explicit aim of Kant's 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgement' is to show that we have the capacity for publicity of feeling as well as publicity of thought.  If we presuppose no interests in knowing the thing or in its usefulness to us or even in its moral worth in the process of this reflection, the resultant pleasure taken in aesthetic reflection is shareable in principle by all.

In judging aesthetically Kant says:
If we wish to discern whether anything is beautiful or not, we do not refer the representation of it to the Object by means of understanding with a view to cognition, but by means of the imagination (acting perhaps in conjunction with understanding) we refer the representation to the Subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure. (CJ 203)

A judgement of taste is a way of relating to the world that results not in cognitive or moral experience of it, but rather in a special sort of feeling of pleasure (or displeasure).  Kant argues that the feeling expressed in judgements of taste rests on a general human capacity for feeling pleasure in mere imaginative play with the formal aspects of the objects we perceive.  This imaginative play involves the attunement of cognitive powers (imagination and understanding) that are required for cognition in general.  Kant calls this universal feeling of pleasure 'disinterested' because it rests on a kind of relation between the subject and the world that involves no particular concern (cognitive, moral, or even gratificational) on the part of the subject for the existence of the object itself.

Autonomy is a psychological as well as social construction (O'Neill 1989) always in process in the individual as well as in the community.  Kant's aesthetic theory opened up the possibility of feelings that play a positive role in the development of moral subjectivity, claiming that beauty could symbolise morality.  There being a strong analogy between the judgement of beauty and moral judgement, part of which was the analogy between disinterest and impartiality of the two (CJ, 353-54).

Kant never gave his views on the negative impact of desires, wants and needs on morality.  Kant's discussion of aesthetic ideas holds out the possibility that feelings may play a positive role in moral development in conjunction with a creative imagination:
'an aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination which produces much thought…it is in fact precisely in the poetic art that the faculty of aesthetic ideas can show itself to full advantage'. (CJ, 314)

Kant argues that the gifted artist is capable of producing concrete images in words, sounds, or visual images that create feelings in the receiver that neither the artist nor the receiver (nor anyone else) could ever express conceptually.  Nevertheless these feelings are the aesthetic manifestation of moral ideas.  

In the third Critique, Kant in effect changes his mind about the extent to which the imagination may be creative, arguing that it has the power to portray a new reality beyond the one that actually exists:
'The imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.  It affords us entertainment where experience proves too commonplace; and we even use it to remodel experience' (CJ 314)
This is not to say that imagination actually produces another nature but rather that it is capable of expressing or 'making visible' ideas that otherwise are not expressible, (see later section on children and imagination).  But for Kant, the notion of a perfectly self-determining moral agent is ultimately an idea of reason, and hence not expressible cognitively.  It is evident that the imagination may have an important role to play in creating aesthetic images that have an effect on how people feel about themselves, others both the human and the nonhuman.

Although, Kant did not draw out the social or moral implications of an 'empowered' imagination, this concept could be an important part of a theory of autonomy that is sensitive to developmental issues.  Persons (or 'others') in dependent situations need to be able to imagine the possibility of a world in which their particular feelings, desires and fears are not written off as irrational and pathological, and in which they have a hand in making the decisions that affect their lives.  The ability to project even only a dim image of themselves as full members of a society that takes their inarticulable feelings seriously and views them as genuine agents is crucial to the process of becoming articulate, and hence autonomous.  The feminist movement in the Victorian age provides one example of women having to think imaginatively in order to gain autonomy.

Also, imaginative projection ought not to be underestimated in any account of the social construction of autonomy.  This is clear from the importance of 'make-belief' to children's development, wherein whole worlds are invented, worlds within which children imagine themselves operating freely and effectively without adults.  This theme is followed up later through examples of Gertrude Jekyll's work, for example Children and Gardens.  It is also clear from the fact that art, music, literature, and drama have always played important roles in movements for social change, as demonstrated by the philosophies of Ruskin and Morris.  The social force of art - its ability to challenge, uplift, and motivate individuals - must be seen in part as a result of its ability to take concrete 'worldly' materials and imaginatively transform them into realities that expand our abilities to feel what others feel and to envision alternative situations.

Kant came to hold that the pleasure we take in contemplating art and beautiful objects is capable of being shared by everyone, thus opening the possibility that there are other aesthetic experiences that may be shareable, namely, any that are based on conditions of experience shared by all.

Kneller sees an autonomous human subjectivity that is understood as at least in part aesthetic - felt and imaginative in addition to critically rational and social - as part of Kant's final vision of human subjectivity.  She sees that some such account is crucial to a developmental account of autonomy, since such an account contests the view that human feelings and hopes are 'alien' to our moral and political selves.  Developmental accounts also require a notion of how it is possible for nonautonomous subjects to envision possibilities alternative to the actualities that make them feel dependent and incompetent.

Kant's complete account of human subjectivity, far from ending with an isolated superhero, attempts through aesthetic considerations to relocate the moral reasoner in the world of feeling and imaginative anticipation.  This attempt itself is important to feminist conceptions of human freedom, and for this reason the aesthetic dimension of Kantian autonomy ought not to be overlooked.  Thus supporting Plumwood's view that Kantian disinterestedness should not be abandoned, but reassessed and provides one method of gaining a richer view of 'emotionality and particularity'.  This is further supported by Karen Warren through evidence of emotion and emotional intelligence in relation to the ethic of care. 

Emotion and Emotional Intelligence

The moral reasoner being located in the world of feeling and imaginative anticipation as argued by Kneller is supported by scientific evidence.  In a description of why she feels care sensitive ethics is important Karen Warren (2000) uses a personal example and a case of neurosurgery.

During a week spent swimming with bottle nose dolphins, Karen Warren one swim with the dolphins taught her 'that one simply cannot fit the story about selves and others (humans and nonhumans) into the shoe of rights, or duty, or justice, or utility without loss of crucial moral value.  To tell the proper moral story of the matter, attention to and cultivation of human capacities to care and to engage in care practices is needed.'  The provision of that missing moral piece is what Warren terms care-sensitive ethics.

There is also scientific evidence in Daniel Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence (1995) which supports his thesis that there are two minds or brains 'one that thinks and one that feels'; rational minds and emotional minds (this is not Cartesian mind-body dualism).  Goleman's scientific case that there are anatomical centres for reason and emotion are located in different, though connected parts of the brain and for the importance of emotional intelligence to ethics and ethical decision-making is illustrated clearly by the case of Elliot.  

After undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumour Elliot's personality changed, his neurologist wondered whether this was due to the severing of the ties between the lower centres of Elliot's emotional brain during surgery.  After surgery he remained capable of 'dispassionate reasoning', since his rational mind was fully in tact, but Elliot's emotional intelligence was seriously debilitated.  Without the ability to feel or care about any of the options available to him, Elliot became incapable of moral reasoning.

The implications for ethics of research into emotional intelligence are significant.  First, this research shows that the rationalist philosophical tradition that separates reason from emotion, elevates reason to a higher status than emotion, and predicates ethics, ethical knowledge, and ethical action on dictates of reason unencumbered by emotion is mistaken.  Goleman himself makes this implication explicit:  'The old paradigm held an ideal of reason freed of the pull of emotion.  The new paradigm urges us to harmonise head and heart.'

This new paradigm Goleman suggests including emotion is that of feminist thinking and by locating the Kantian moral reasoner in the world of emotion (Kneller, 1997) perhaps we could move toward a female environmental aesthetic. 
Environmental aesthetics 

By building arguments based in the ethical and epistemological framework of ecofeminism and feminist aesthetics the aim is to create an argument supporting the non instrumental and imagination based aesthetic appreciation of nature.  By locating the Kantian moral reasoner in the world of emotion and feeling there is evidence to support the use of ecofeminist ethics as one way of developing environmental aesthetics.  Currently the debate surrounds whether environmental aesthetics should be science-based or imagination-based or whether it is possible to develop an approach with a mixture of both (Fudge 2001), but there is no feminist perspective included in this debate.

Science based or cognitive theory argues that we should turn to the framework and knowledge of sciences such as geology, ecology, botany, geomorphology etc, in order to understand and aesthetically appreciate nature.  Kendall Walton (1970) argues that the aesthetic appreciation of art can only be done using guiding knowledge on the correct category which it falls within.  The perception of Van Gogh's sunflowers in the category of post-impressionism allows appropriate appreciation and only then are we able to decide whether it is a good work of art.  Carlson (1984) agrees with this model and makes the analogy with natural objects and landscapes using the example of categorising a whale as a fish or a mammal, and that understanding the correct category allows appropriate and significant aesthetic appreciation of nature.  Carlson's view combines perceptual qualities with the objectivist epistemology of science, firmly set in a masculinist base and using a scientific framework to move towards being able to correctly perceive nature.  This theory claims to demonstrate that aesthetic judgements of nature are based on some claim to truth not subjective decisions i.e. beauty being in the eye of the beholder.

The cognitive approach to aesthetic appreciation leans towards positivist science in order to gain recognition, yet scientific thinking is based upon verifiable fact which, ironically excludes metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics and religion which are unverifiable in the empirical manner demanded by logical positivism.  The world addressed by positivist science is not the everyday world we experience.  As Husserl (1970) points out, the scientific world is an abstraction from the 'lived' world; it has been distilled from the world of our everyday experiences, distances us from the world of our everyday experiences and takes us further still from the world of immediate experience lying behind our everyday experiences.  Science imposes a very tight grid on the world it observes, removing itself from the 'situated knowledges' of Donna Haraway (in Warren 2000) and not allowing 'a power charged social relation of conversation'.

The problem is not with what positivist science does, it is with the status positivism ascribes to scientific findings (Crotty 1998).  The cognitive model for aesthetic appreciation of nature is striving to achieve this status for aesthetics by using a knowledge based (scientific) framework.  The correct level of knowledge required by Carlson's model provides a difficulty.  This criticism is made by Carroll (1993) and Carlson has recently (2000) weakened the knowledge requirement to knowledge of natural history, but exactly what level is still not clearly given.  Carlson's view has been criticised on the grounds that it is restrictive and reductionist by being grounded in scientific knowledge and critical of the aesthetic experience that would include emotions and imagination.

The non-cognitive models use the basis that scientific knowledge is not essential for aesthetic appreciation of nature and that features of experience such as immediate perceptions, imagination and non-scientific narratives are valid.  These approaches to the aesthetic appreciation of nature are in terms of the context and situation of the appreciator, including subjective aspects like emotion and imagination.  The conceptual, ethical and epistemological interconnections developed within an ecofeminist framework support this approach.

The non-science based approach opens out and broadens the scope of aesthetic experience and is not narrow or reductive.  It is more flexible and free and thus able to cope with the complexity of environmental experience, whilst making room for the subjective (emotion, imagination).  It also has the practical benefit of being less detached and more sensitive to surroundings (local aspects).  Berleant (1993) favours a phenomenological aesthetic perspective, emphasising the immediacy of perception and feeling in the aesthetic response:
'perceiving environment from within, as it were, looking not at it, but in it, nature becomes something quite different; it is transformed into a realm in which we live as participants, not observers….The aesthetic mark of all times is not disinterested contemplation but total engagement, a sensory immersion in the natural world that reaches the still uncommon experience of unity. p236

Some philosophers have argued for the positive value of disinterestedness as not implying detachment, but as simply excluding the utility value of nature, which fits with the ethic of care and respect from a feminist perspective.  Brady (1998b) argues that disinterestedness entails only distance from utility and self-interested concerns, and not from other aspects of our situation as appreciators.  Her view is opposed to particular kinds of interest such as self-interest and practical interest, where we use the object as a means to an end.  Thus we should understand disinterestedness as not involving passive contemplation, but only as valuing the object for its aesthetic qualities rather than how it might serve our ends.  This objection to utility is also reflected in Heidegger’s argument for Care: that we should respect all beings not because they resemble humans, not because they are valued by humans, but because they are what they are (Zimmerman, 1983).

Brady (1998a) views imagination in the aesthetic appreciation of nature as not being restricted to visual images, but needs to include olfactory, tactile, auditory and gustatory images.  She also expands this by using all of these images within either exploratory, projective, ampliative and revelatory imagination.  Exploratory imagination allows free contemplation and exploration of an object or environment beyond initial perception; it is most closely tied to visual images.  Projective imagination uses the projective powers of imagination, by projecting on to the object through adding, replacing or overlaying a projected image, it is associated with deliberate 'seeing as' where we intentionally, not mistakenly, see something as another thing.  Ampliative imagination involves the inventive powers and is marked by heightened creative powers and a special curiosity in response to natural objects.  Brady sees this as more penetrative and resulting in a deeper imaginative treatment of the object.  Revelatory imagination is when the imagination is stretched so far, revealing something new about the object.  This mode of imagination stretches the power of imagination to its limits giving way to new truth or knowledge about the world.

The use of imagination in childhood experience in the natural world provides examples of exploratory imagining, Gertrude Jekyll’s work for children, Children and Gardens provide examples of her childhood experiences with the natural world and imagination.  Dewey (in Evernden, 1978) viewed experience as valuable in a deep, religious way ‘as a way of regulating one’s self with the universe as the totality of conditions with which the self is connected'.  This connection cannot be in knowledge or realised in reflection, involving such totality not as a part of the intellect, but as an imaginative extension of the self.  Experience in childhood is never formal or abstract.  Even the world of nature is not a ‘scene’, or even a landscape.  Nature for the child is sheer sensory experience practice play includes the effort to be something other than what the child actually is, to act out and to dramatise speculation.

Through studies of autobiographies Edith Cobb has found that there are repeated references to the awakening of acute sensory response to the natural world, seen not as intuition or a flash of recognition but as one aspect of perceptual learning, but possessing the potential for creating novelty of meaning.  Childhood’s willing acceptance and power of creating mutual relations with the total environment further empowers understanding at all levels of controlled thought in later life.

This connecting with the environment was seen by Merleau-Ponty who took the view of a reflective standpoint within the natural world, disagreeing with Husserl’s view of a reductionist standpoint from outside the world because this weakens the intentional ties that bind us to the world.  Merleau-Ponty expresses the relation of body and world as 'Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism; it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system'. (PP 203; 205).  These intentional ties binding us to the natural world are often demonstrated by children responding to patterns in nature by copying a tree swaying in the wind, lumbering along like a large animal, using their fingers to be trickling water or mimicking the sounds in nature (Howarth 1995).  Children can easily demonstrate their ability to experience nature through moving or sounding like nature, this method of embracing meaning in nature is important when the more commonly held ‘adult’ view of nature is of it being separate through scientific rationality. A similar experience of participation in nature is used by Cobb (1977) from the autobiography of Bernard Berenson, which gives a clear view of the relationship of the child’s way of ‘knowing by becoming’.  This supports feminist epistemology, as an example of  Donna Haraway’s ‘conversation’ (in Warren, 2000), allowing us to build an alternative way of gaining an understanding of the natural world.
 
A child’s relationship of being in the natural world is basically aesthetic and Evernden (1978) sees the child's world of interactions with nature as drawing from the aesthetic theories of John Dewey.  Where the aesthetic experience, in Dewey’s terminology lies in the relationship between the individual and the environment, not simply the object viewed, nor in the mind of the viewer.  Rather than a subject-object relationship in which the observer parades before the supposedly beautiful view, we have instead a process, an interaction between the viewer and the viewed, and it is in that joint association that the aesthetic experience lies.  Instead of a detachment from the environment, we have subtle diffusion into it.  This concept of aesthetics makes perfect sense if one recognises that strict categories are an abstraction, not a reality.

The framework needed to develop a female environmental aesthetic is supported by much of the work within non-cognitive based environmental aesthetics.  The use of imagination in interpreting the natural world can provide alternative methods of developing a deeper understanding of environments.  This along with an ethic of caring can further develop a female environmental aesthetic.  Through the use of examples of gardens, Gertrude Jekyll’s experience and childhood I hope to support this development.
 
The Garden

'Inside the garden we can construct a country of our own'
						Robert Louis Stephenson

Gardening during the eighteenth century was considered a high art, a full sister to painting and poetry (Ross, 1998).  Just as eighteenth-century gardens performed many of the functions of their sister arts, painting and poetry, so many pieces of environmental art have additional layers of meaning - political messages, allusions to other works of art and to theories of agency and perception.  Ross uses modern examples such as the work of Long, Singer and Irwin to demonstrate that they force us to rethink our place in the landscape, our role as perceivers, enjoyers, consumers, destroyers.  They raise profound metaphysical questions about permanence and change, about human will and agency.  Thus these pieces are every bit as serious as the greatest of the early eighteenth-century gardens, and they make their points in much the same way.  By inhabiting, addressing and altering a site, they call into question our relations to landscape, nature and art. 

Gardens have the potential to be important areas for wildlife.  Suburban gardens cover at least a million acres of England and Wales (Owen & Owen, 1975) and from their study of hoverflies, ichneumonids and butterflies Owen & Owen concluded that if the diversity of insects found in one garden is representative of the situation elsewhere then gardens are collectively the most important nature reserve in the country.  This is ironic when efforts to protect wilderness areas are made whilst further encroaching countryside for building development.  I do not see this as supporting evidence for further development, but I do see gardens as important (potential) environmental space.

Mara Miller (1993) sees every garden is a sign of human caring each one being an attempt to create an ethos of a particular kind, a shared environment where beings of many kinds can grow and flourish.  Supporting many of the ecofeminist interconnections already mentioned such as the ethic of care

Ross (1998) also sees most gardens as making statements about our place in and relation to nature, making us think about wilderness, other species, interdependence, the passage of time and the limits of control.  All gardens have boundaries, but they are not often designed to present a façade, to offer a particular appearance to someone outside looking in.  Inside and outside also get blurred when we consider the views and lines of sight that are meant to be part of the experience of a given garden. All gardens invite us to explore them perceptually and through movement and we take up these invitations by exercising our imagination, our senses and our bodies.

Descartes in his fourth Meditation claimed that our imagination, unlike our understanding, is godlike and unbounded, there is nothing we cannot attempt in our imagination.  In viewing a garden we can engage in all manner of imaginative interactions.
'where we view and metaphorically possess a panoramic scene, this effect stems in part from actions we imagine ourselves performing.  Seeing a path entering the woods, we imagine ourselves following it; seeing a high wall, we imagine ourselves peering over it; seeing a distant temple or folly, we imagine ourselves exploring it; seeing a stream or a lake, we imagine ourselves crossing it; seeing a steep hill, we imagine ourselves climbing it and enjoying the view from the top.'
								p166 Ross (1998)		
Yet these effects aren't confined to actual landscapes and Arnold Berleant stresses the role of such imagined actions in his book Art and Engagement.

The imaginative and actual exploration of gardens is expanded by Ross through another aspect of gardens that she terms 'enclosure'.  The experience of enclosure and being surrounded, appeals to our imagination as well as too our senses.  It redirects us to microcosmic features of our surroundings and encourages us to reflect on our sensory and bodily engagement Brady (1998) supports this.  Ross uses Sissinghurst in Kent, designed by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson, to demonstrate the experience of enclosure.  Sissinghurst is often referred to as a garden divided into a series of rooms: the Rose Garden, the White Garden, the Cottage Garden, the Herb Garden, the Purple border, the Lime Walk, the Moat Walk, the Tower Lawn and the Orchard.  Harold Nicholson described the garden as 'a combination of expectation and surprise,' and a 'succession of intimacies'.  Both phrases indicate the central role played by enclosure in this garden.

Environmental aesthetics explores the possibilities of this more interactive model of art and Berleant proposes a radical reinterpretation of art in terms of an 'occasion for' experience instead of an 'object of' experience.  Berleant's point is that a disinterested approach to art is an inappropriate and ultimately unsuccessful way to approach art.  If the qualities of the work of art cannot be described purely in themselves, independently of the mind that perceives and orders and appreciates them, neither, in this view, does the human subject stand apart from her experiences.  This part of Berleant's theory, is a familiar belief of phenomenology, existentialism, and empirical psychology, yet it is rarely taken seriously within the field of Western aesthetics (Miller, 1993).  This dynamic relation between the work and its human participant forces a dynamic relation between that same human subject and the world.  Because it is the function of the work of art to change all subsequent viewings of our interactions with the world.  This has further implications because art often has as its aim the transformation of our understanding (of self and of the world) and of behaviour, of society and imagination. Miller suggests that art may offer society new ways of understanding itself, its situation, and thus pave the way for political and other changes in the society.  This political view is seen in the work of Arendt and O’Neill as mentioned earlier.

The examination of gardens and the work of women gardeners in this study supports a view that Kantian aesthetic theory has since the eighteenth century been alienating the human and non-human.  In order to overcome this alienation we need to acknowledge the importance of emotion in our aesthetic encounters with nature and be aware of the world of feeling and imaginative anticipation.  The works of both William Morris and Ruskin influenced Gertrude Jekyll, this is well documented, also through her own work and biographical details there is evidence that from early childhood she was strongly influenced by nature, environment and society.  These factors along with her artistic vision and talent led her to become an influential garden designer and writer.

Case study of Gertrude Jekyll (GJ)

‘If we accept art we must atone for what we have done and pay the cost of it.  We must turn this land from the grimy back-yard of a workshop into a garden….
				William Morris, Art and the Beauty of the Earth

Ruskin, Morris and The Arts & Crafts Movement

The influence Ruskin had on William Morris and the social-aesthetic ideas of  the Arts and Crafts movement was significant, especially his notion of 'environmental determinism' which suggested that the natural environment and material surroundings were capable of determining moral character.

Morris's model of the future of art is lacking because of his relative unconcern with the need for women to develop their abilities as artists, designers and architects.  Whilst concentrating on 'art' as the creation of aesthetic and useful objects this is to the detriment of sister 'arts' such as healthcare and childrearing.  Although there is no evidence that Morris had anything but respect for the female sex from the start women were actively involved in his firm, most of them family or friends.  Yet the only women who received wages were countless employees producing the bulk of the firm's embroideries.  Thus there was a fairly strong form of discrimination in an establishment with radical social aims.  Whilst Morris contributed little to the suffragist movement in England he did respond warmly to 'socialist-feminist' calls for female reproductive independence. (Boos, 1999)

Surprisingly the Art Workers' Guild a key body in this radical movement excluded women from its ranks.  The fact that Gertrude Jekyll's Arts and Crafts role was small is probably due to the Movement's social ethos, a more feminist climate would have seen her taking a more active role.  She practised many crafts: tapestry, embroidery, metalwork, woodwork, painting and later in life photography.  The concept of arts and crafts, as preached by Morris, are apparent in her work and embroidery patterns for the Guild of Needlework shows the elegant sweep of lily petals which are seen repeated in the delineation of garden paths in her plans for wild gardens.

Gertrude Jekyll's Life

Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) was born in London her family moved to Bramley, Surrey when she was 5 and moved to Bedfordshire when she was 20.  Her childhood spent in Surrey influenced her significantly and when she moved back to Surrey, aged 35, she described it as ‘a coming home from exile'.  In 1861, while still living in Surrey she enrolled at South Kensington School of Art, the same year as William Morris founded his company in Red Lion Square, Bloomsbury.  Morris exerted a strong influence on her ideas, his philosophy that expounded the importance of art to life itself, the unity of the aesthetic arts, and the necessity of combining heart, hand and eye in the creative process underlay the Arts and Crafts Movement (Bisgrove 1992).

Gertrude Jekyll (GJ) also attended lectures by Ruskin, who had from his earliest years experienced periods of ecstatic communion with nature.  She  recognised this in her praise of trees and plants (Festing 1991), during her second year at Bramley (aged 7) the sight of a primrose copse brought her an unforgettable mystical experience.
'Looking at the yellow flowers with their green spread of leaves, it seemed suddenly as if they were part of the earth, as if we too are part of a hidden pattern, and both are parts of a work of art.' p28
She demonstrated an acute sensory response to the natural world, seen not as intuition or a flash of recognition but as one aspect of perceptual learning, possessing the potential for creating novelty of meaning.  This supports the work of Cobb (1977) on imagination and children.

Her artistic talent was recognised at an early age and she studied colour theory at South Kensington with many hours spent studying and copying Turner's paintings.  The glowing harmonies and impressionist use of colour made a lasting effect on her and can be seen in her use of colour in the garden.  She also travelled abroad, in the company of a close circle of intellectually gifted friends, increasing her awareness of traditional values and techniques - strengthening her determination to retain these in her own life, writing and designs.  One of these friends was Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827-91) who is recognised today as the leader of the Langham Place Group, which for forty years was the centre of feminist agitation in England.

Artistic and Feminist Influences on Gertrude Jekyll

During her life, Barbara Bodichon led four main campaigns: firstly, that married women should be recognised as independent people in law; secondly, that middle-class women should not be debarred from work; thirdly, that women should gain the vote; fourthly, that women should have the same educational opportunities as men, including university education.  She helped to found the first university college for women in the country, which began with a rented house and five students in 1869 and developed with her help into Girton College, Cambridge.  In her lifetime she was equally well known both as a landscape painter and as the leader of the women's movement, she was as imaginative in her portrayal of landscape and nature as she was in envisioning a full life for women (Hirsch, 1995) 

Barbara Bodichon was probably the strongest and most effective of Gertrude Jekyll's women friends and without sharing Barbara's opinions, it would have been impossible to spend much time with her. The strength of their friendship was shown when she left Gertrude a house, in Cornwall, when she died in 1891. Jekyll was sympathetic to women's rights, she designed and embroidered two huge banners for the Godalming and Guildford branches of the National Association of Women's Suffragette Societies.  The colours used in the banners of the suffragettes held significance and by 1910 feminism and colourism are powerfully connected through the political societies started by women and their banners.  The purple, white and green are 'a new language' that Virginia Woolf uses in her writing (Goldman, 1998).  The purple, white and green have special significance:
The best known suffrage colours are the purple, white and green of the WSPU (the Women's Social and Political Union)…White was for purity, green for hope and purple for dignity…..Purple was sometimes given as 'loyalty' or 'courage' and green as 'youth' or 'regeneration'.
						p68 Goldman, (1998)

The use of colour in the garden could also be interpreted as having political significance, Vita Sackville West's garden, Sissinghurst contains coloured gardens within it: the White Garden, the Purple border, the Lime Walk.

Gertrude Jekyll saw garden making as a fine art, ranking, as it had done in the eighteenth century, with painting, poetry, music and sculpture.  To her garden planning, plant knowledge and plant cultivation were as interdependent in the making of gardens as were picture composition, familiarity with pigments and canvas, and skill in applying paint to canvas in the production of a major painting.  Her books are full of comparisons between plant textures and fabrics and between the painter's and the gardener's use of colour.  'In setting a garden we are painting a picture'.  And when making her first hardy flower borders she largely developed her colour theories based on her studies of Turner and influenced by Herbert Brabazon.

Her significance as a garden maker is the universal application of her ideas, she did not set out to create a particular style of garden - woodland walks, rose gardens, borders (colour themes), rock gardens, rides.  She was aiming towards perfection in the garden yet understanding that this would never be achieved, she was also aware of the influence of the owner 'The size of the garden has very little to do with its merit.  It is the size of the owner's heart and brain and goodwill that will make his garden either delightful or dull.'  She acknowledged the importance of feeling and emotion in creating a garden.

William Robinson and the Wild Garden

Many of the most famous gardeners earned their initial fame as a result of important breaks they made with their gardening traditions (Miller 1993).  Jekyll's breaks with traditional Victorian bedding and formal plantings were a significant contribution to changing garden design.  In 1894, The Wild Garden was published by William Robinson whose Ruskinian thesis GJ entirely concurred with.  This book condemned the insensitive, showy and expensive bedding system causing the decline of hardy plants.  Advocating instead the naturalisation of native and exotic plants from the temperate regions in fields, woods and copses and neglected places as well as in almost every kind of park and garden.  Robinson's book had sympathy for 'half-wild places' and 'a pretty plant in the wild state' (Robinson 1894)

Miller (1993) sees an important difference between formal and informal gardens.  Formal gardens are designed with nonintuitive, usually mathematical principles, they may or may not be symmetrical but usually geometric, Versailles being a good obvious example.  Formal gardens embody a denial of time and of the value of the variability of experience.  The informal garden is designed intuitively, in accordance with poetic or picturesque principles, or to imitate the natural landscape.  'Country gardens', landscape and picturesque gardens are in this category, essentially temporal, recognising change and impermanence. Monet's garden at Giverny is a good example of this building on the structures of seasonal change.  The formal garden follows a positivist, scientific approach demonstrating trust in absolute or universal principles and law and the informal garden an imaginative and changing approach.  Gertrude Jekyll’s designs demonstrate the latter approach.

Much of GJ's enduring popularity can be attributed to her designs for the informal setting, real designs giving substance to the notions of the 'wild garden' of William Robinson. Monkswood, near Godalming, Surrey is a good example of GJ's use of native plants.  Thorn and bramble, oak, birch and rowan, and direct seeding of gorse and broom, demonstrate 'ecological planting'.  GJ planted a wild garden at Little Aston, near Birmingham, using a quarry garden as a haven for birds.  Dense hollies, thorn and oak, and tangles of roses both wild and cultivated support a rich insect life and offer sheltered nesting sites for many birds.  Fruits from the amelanchier and mountain ash supplement those of holly, thorn, rose and viburnum, while the smaller seeds of birch and hogweed support other species of birds.  Bird song and the movement of birds and insects add a dimension to a wild garden of great visual beauty, along with its colours and fragrance. (Bisgrove, 1992)

These examples of wild gardening provide evidence that Jekyll was not severing connections between gardens and the natural world.  Ross (1999) believes that Victorian gardening represents a falling off from earlier gardening styles and due to the bedding system gardeners were allowed to trump nature by presenting flowers always at the peak of their bloom, and by cultivating species that wouldn't naturally flourish in their locale.  Jekyll was sensitive to this although colour was important, she was aware of hardy native plants and sensitive to location and consulted 'the genius of the place'.

She managed to successfully overcome the debate that raged between William Robinson and Reginald Blomfield as to whether a garden should either be natural or formal in design.  There are many examples of Jekyll and Lutyens work that successfully demonstrate that it is possible to work with a combination of both such as The Deanery at Sonning in Berkshire where according to Christopher Hussey, Jekyll's naturalistic planting, wedded with Lutyens's geometry in a balanced union of principles.  At Greywalls, Gullane, in East Lothian the curves of Lutyens's stonework merge with the planting and distinctions between formal and naturalistic garden are blurred.  A part of the boundary wall in this garden includes an elliptical 'eye' shape encouraging you to look out from the garden to the hills in the landscape beyond.  Thomas Heyd (2001) uses a similar example of a dolmen in Spain the view from which led him to attend imaginatively to a feature in the landscape.

Lutyens influence, childhood and imagination

In Lutyens, who had been a delicate, impressionable child who spent a great deal of his youth wandering through woods and along lanes, 'imagining'.  She found a kindred spirit.  Lutyens was aesthetic and sensitive, with a wonderful humour; he retained an attractive child-like side to his nature.  So much of his early experience was like Gertrude's and this collaboration with their world of childhood that added to the success of their work together.

GJ wrote Children and Gardens through the encouragement of Lutyens and due to the emotional significance of her own childhood.  At sixty four she owned, 'I can still - when no one is looking - climb over a five-barred gate or jump a ditch.'  Well did she remember the time when she thought 'the world really belonged to….children'.  Ruskin had written, 'The whole difference between the man of genius and other men….is that the first remains in great part a child, seeing with the large eyes of children, in perpetual wonder.'  Childhood was the source of an enduring optimism and Gertrude wrote for the child in herself.  She used mystery, imagination and an enquiring attitude in her writing for children with a secret natural world teaming with life, demonstrating her ability to embrace and experience nature through caring.  When writing about plants for children: 
‘Now if you will take any flower you please and look at it carefully all over and turn it about, and smell it and feel it and try and find out all its little secrets; not of flower only but of leaf, bud, and stem as well, you will discover many wonderful things.  This is how to make good friends with plants, and very good friends you will find them to the end of your lives.’ p54 Children and Gardens

Gertrude Jekyll’s life and work provides an example of that could help to towards the development of a female environmental aesthetic:

•	Her use of imagination in the approach to garden design for natural / wild gardens – Ruskinian thinking and William Robinson’s influence, demonstrated in her gardens, designs and Wood and Garden
•	The influence of suffrage (Barbara Bodichon), she believed strongly in the feminist movement, through her association with influential members of this group.  Her life and work demonstrates a belief in autonomy for female ‘others’.
•	Her childhood influences / empathy with nature / place demonstrating the importance of imagination and caring, in her book Children and Gardens
•	Her artistic training and colour theory.
•	Her belief in the work of the Arts and Crafts movement, although her involvement was small owing to the female role not being actively encouraged, she was active in practising much of their philosophy.

Conclusion

Can environmental aesthetics benefit from a feminist perspective?  This work demonstrates that through development and application of the ecofeminist ethic of care and the inclusion of emotion within our approach to women-other human Others-nature interconnections it is possible to move towards a feminist basis of environmental aesthetics. Ecofeminist philosophy helps develop our understanding of how mainstream environmental practices and policies often reflect, reinforce, or create practices and policies that devalue, subvert, or make invisible the actual needs and contributions of women, people of colour, the underclass and children.  This work explores conceptual, epistemological and ethical ecofeminist interconnections in order to argue that the Kantian ethical framework that makes strong use of the reason / emotion dichotomy needs to be explored further in order to strengthen the place of emotionality within an ethic of respect, care and responsibility.

Plumwood’s (1996) ecofeminist critique of Kantian autonomy shows she believes it should not be abandoned but reassessed.  In order to reassess this, a richer understanding of 'emotionality and particularity' is needed.  Jaggar (1989) supports this view and Kneller (1997) provides one way of exploring this reassessment.  By going beyond the work of Arendt (1982) and O'Neill (1989), Kneller comes to the conclusion that an 'empowered' imagination could be an important part of a theory where persons ('others') could imagine the possibility of a world where their particular feelings, desires and fears are not written off as irrational.

Although, Kneller is looking from a feminist perspective, not from environmental aesthetics, her work explores through imagination that the emotions are valid to aesthetic theory.  I see this as supporting the ecofeminist argument for the ethic of care and as a useful way of developing an environmental aesthetic that includes 'emotionality and particularity'.  This theme is further explored through work on emotional intelligence (Warren 2000).

The development of environmental aesthetics in the twentieth century has resulted in a dualism between the cognitive approach (Carlson 1993) and the non-cognitive approaches such as the aesthetics of engagement (Berleant 1990) and imagination (Brady 1998).  These have been considered within a  feminist framework in order to develop an environmental aesthetics that includes emotionality and imagination.  This is in order that the utility and self-interested value of nature is excluded from environmental aesthetics and a move towards an imaginative alternative caring can be developed. These approaches to the aesthetic appreciation of nature are in terms of the context and situation of the appreciator, including subjective aspects like emotion and imagination.  The conceptual, ethical and epistemological interconnections developed within an ecofeminist framework support this approach.

The examination of gardens and the work of women gardeners in this study supports a view that Kantian aesthetic theory has since the eighteenth century been alienating the human and non-human.  In order to overcome this alienation we need to acknowledge the importance of emotion in our aesthetic encounters with nature and be aware of the world of feeling and imaginative anticipation.  The experiences of nature in childhood are important to developing this approach, as children naturally use their imagination and do not distance themselves from the world.  The work of Gertrude Jekyll demonstrates the importance of childhood experience and her book Children and Gardens is an example of using a garden to encourage children to appreciate nature.

The use of gardens and female gardeners provide examples of created environments with the potential to be important areas for wildlife.  The garden as an environment and a work of art has been examined (Ross 1998; Miller 1993) through the work of female gardeners.  Women have created and tended gardens since early history and this study focussed on the work of Gertrude Jekyll.  Her view of nature, the cultural and feminist influences of her time, her imagination and view of nature and gardens for children could be interpreted as providing an example of a female garden designer and artist supporting a move towards female environmental aesthetics.

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