The enclosure of nature in Stanley Spencer’s Hoe Garden Nursery

Abstract

This paper explores Stanley Spencer’s Hoe Garden Nursery (1955) as a constitutive part of the relationship between land, nature and cultural nationalism in the immediate postwar period. Like many of Spencer’s garden landscape paintings, Hoe Garden Nursery appears to be a rather mundane composition. However, as this paper makes clear, there is a complexity of personal, aesthetic, social and moral values that run through Spencer’s landscape art. After examining Hoe Garden Nursery in some detail, I consider Spencer’s preoccupation with two themes, both of which seem central to all his commissioned landscape work: the enclosure of landscape and the importance given to the small, intimate spaces of the garden. I conclude the paper with a discussion of national cultural debates in the 1950s, and particularly those relating to the emergence of gardening as a dominant social activity and the ‘spirit’ of urban reconstruction, which I believe Spencer makes reference to in the painting.