THIS BOOK, focusing on the ways in which a female-coded idea and image of the enclosed garden took up its position at the forefront of the medieval religious imaginary, was completed in the early summer of 2020, at the height of a global lock-down enforced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The microscopic pathogen involved, known as SARS-CoV-2, has, at the date of writing this afterword, all but closed down the day-to-day workings of the entire world, turning millions of us into social recluses. Conventional social contact has been disrupted and, in many cases, severed altogether. Virtual existences, lived out via anodyne glass screens or the written word, are held onto tightly, necessary substitutes for the energies and endorphins generated by more direct interactions with colleagues, friends, lovers, family and strangers. And, significantly, people have turned once more to the natural world and its gardens in search of recompense for their lost freedoms, or for greater understanding of life's fundamentals, or to help articulate the often inarticulable via those gardens’ inexorably reliable rhythms of growth, flourishing and what Kristeva has termed their belle fanaison, on which vital regeneration is predicated.

Such a turning or re-turning to the image, idea or materiality of the garden as recompense or articulation was, as we have seen, also a preoccupation of the women at the heart of this present book – the betrayed Eve and Susanna; the creative women of Hohenbourg, Rupertsberg, Helfta and Mechelen; the transcendent Pearl-Maiden. In both cases too – medieval and modern – this turning has sometimes proved problematic, with access to gardens and their concomitant social hermeneutics becoming a lens through which to view social privilege and the inequalities and deprivations it generates.

In Yono Park just north of Tokyo, for instance, at the peak of the current pandemic, 180 varieties of flourishing rose blossoms, all blooming in their prime, were extirpated by the authorities to discourage the city's residents, largely without gardens of their own, from congregating there; at the same time the Welsh National Park of Snowdonia was closed off to all visitors, its coastlines also out of bounds to all but local residents;