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Green spaces such as gardens and parks were a distinctive feature of Europe's modernizing cities of the eighteenth century. A great abundance of green was widely regarded as a sign of urban progressiveness. In a popular description of the city of Berlin, Friedrich Nicolai, an influential local Enlightenment figure, proudly wrote of countless private gardens, leafy squares, and promenades that adorned his city alongside a vast public park, a botanical garden, and school gardens, as well as an urban periphery dotted with suburban villas, country estates, market gardens, and scenic walks.1 As Nicolai's account illustrates, green spaces were part of Berlin's carefully crafted image as a modern and Enlightened capital: they were sites of education and scientific pursuit, a means for their owners to build status and influence, as well as an important place of sociability and leisure.2 This integration of green spaces into civic life went hand-in-hand with the popularization of garden discourse in printed media. After garden literature had long been limited to costly publications, in mid-century such texts began to appear in affordable formats like pocket books and specialized magazines, addressing the urban middle classes and their growing appetite for a life lived in union with nature.3 Simultaneously, garden discourse reached beyond specialist literature and began to implicate popular debate, with deliberations on the subject appearing in fiction and local newspapers.4 Eighteenth-century Germany, in other words, was a culture consumed with Gartenlust.
Despite the well documented part played by gardens and parks in the transformation of urban societies, not all historical fields have been able to integrate these findings into their conceptualization of "the modern city." The discipline of gender history, for one, has largely ignored the integral role of green spaces in processes of urban modernization. Instead, the field has long been defined by an understanding of these processes as equating to the segregation of private from public space.5 This notion has held considerable sway over gender history ever since the 1970s when scholars first coined the idea of the "separate spheres" of men and women. They observed that the emergence of the middle classes in the course of the eighteenth century enshrined a particular set of gender norms that revolved around the attribution...