What do we mean when we speak of the connection between fashion and gardens? Nowadays, they are linked by a concern with the seasons. Like gardeners working in their gardens, the modern fashion world follows a seasonal cycle, always looking ahead to the next one, trying to anticipate the changes of light, temperature, mood, and scale that await at each turn of the year. We deck out our gardens, as we do our bodies, to magnify our impressions of the passing year. They bring a sense of occasion to the seasons. Midsummer seems more authentic among muslin and roses; russet velvet and gold-licked chrysanthemums concentrate our sense that autumn has arrived. Both gardens and dress are types of wishfulness.1

In the past, people had fewer clothes. Charles Worth invented the “seasonal” collection in the nineteenth century as a way of selling more dresses. But gardens and costume, arts governed by time and natural forms, have a long tradition of shared concerns. We are so used to them borrowing one another’s clothes, so to speak, that we seldom stop to think what it means, or why it is that it happens at some moments and not at others, or what is borrowed and what discarded. Sometimes we see mirroring: a pyramidal “pincushion” flower bed of 1880 and a fashionable woman of similar date seem both to have been piped from an icing nozzle. In the eighteenth century, though, when gardens were designed to emulate “nature,” a woman’s