Outdoor pursuits: Spanish gardens, the huerto and Lope de Vega's Novelas a Marcia Leonarda

The imprecision of the early modern lexis for Spanish gardens reflects their liminality and the distinctness of outdoor pursuits shaped by the climate and geography of the Iberian penninsula. Literary evocations of gardens from Lazarillo to Lope de Vega's Novelas a Marcia Leonarda underline this extra-mural nature, the public pleasures and hidden dangers that awaited beyond the city in shady, watery retreats. In his own garden, Lope cultivated flowers, including the fashionable tulip, an activity that served in his poetry as metaphor and synecdoche for the moral ambivalence of his shaping activities as a writer of fiction, in stories that were an explicit part of his own seductions. © 2011 The Author. Renaissance Studies © 2011 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd.