William Taylor, an expert in architectural design and history, has had a long-standing interest in John Claudius Loudon and his glasshouses. Melanie Simo's Loudon and the Landscape (New Haven, 1988), which explored the relationship between Loudon's gardening, architectural design and Benthamite political philosophy, inspired Taylor to consider glasshouses as microcosms of human relationships with the environment. In The Vital Landscape Taylor is determined to understand how garden and architectural design were shaped by the ‘order of the natural world’ (p. xiv). He contends that the nineteenth-century shift from natural history to the history of nature had a profound impact on the genesis of the disciplines of architecture and landscape design. The rise of biology within an empiricist epistemological framework meant that the environment – natural and built – became a fundamental aspect of understanding life. Through the language of ‘form and function’, architects and landscape gardeners contemplated the architecture of life.

Taylor contends that glasshouses represented a significant shift in the mechanization of the natural world after the scientific revolution. Whereas Stephen Hales and like-minded natural philosophers pursued a reductionist study of plant morphology and physiology through the use of glass tubes and jars, Loudon and his nineteenth-century contemporaries thought more holistically about the economy of nature. Consequently they sought to replicate a sustainable environment for living plants within glasshouses.

For Taylor, glasshouses become a springboard for a broader spatial history of nineteenth-century domestic architecture. He draws explicitly on the historiography of asylums, ships, mines and factories, but links these to Richard Grove's study of Edenic colonial islands as didactic microcosms of nascent global environmental awareness. Taylor argues that increasing urbanization and urban growth led to greater home-ownership in Victorian Britain. People, therefore, had more opportunities to arrange and maintain flora and fauna within clearly circumscribed spaces. This activity made them increasingly sensitive to the relationships between their animate and inanimate surroundings. Like colonial Edenic islands and botanic gardens, the domestic economy of British homes and gardens provided a microcosm of imperial possessions. Fauna, flora and human inhabitants were rendered orderly and productive; they were subjugated. Moreover, the very act of introducing novelty into home and garden led to moral and social improvement.

Taylor devotes a chapter to an analysis of Robert Kerr's The Gentlemen's House because, he argues, the book spoke to Britain's home-owning class in such a way as to link human perception and experience as spatial. An ‘improved automatic chair fan, 1878’ is among a number of illustrations. The text never refers explicitly to this piece of furniture, but it is provided as one example of the ‘comforts’ with which Victorian home-owners sought to fill their domestic spaces in a burgeoning consumer culture. In many ways this illustration embodies Taylor's historical approach. Although it is quirky and engaging, the improved automatic chair fan remains largely unexplained. It is included in a chapter which focuses upon ‘The gentlemen's house’, but this illustration is from an ‘unknown source’. How illustrative is it of Victorian comforts? Has it been included because it seems indicative of a rational, scientific approach to domestic furnishing? More important, was it a common piece of furnishing for the Victorian gentleman, or simply an unrealized ‘plan’?

Taylor adds the dimension of time to his spatial history through an examination of garden cemeteries. For nineteenth-century moralists, the cemetery offered pedagogical potential through the agencies of memory and commemoration: past lives provided instruction for developing character and they reminded people of the passage of time. Like much of the book, this argument seems eminently sensible, but, ultimately, rather one-dimensional. Once again, Taylor informs us that order, regularity and discipline were reinforced through the management of the external environment. There is no sense of competing ideological visions of this process, and apparent analogy elides seamlessly into overt statement. Thus garden cemeteries were statements of empire: ‘The extension of the British Empire would absorb the energies of this excess in humanity just as the earth of the garden cemetery was intended to absorb their spent bodies’ (p. 186). Similarly, the temporal dimension of the garden cemetery is taken here to reflect the temporalization of nature as promoted by Lamarck and Darwin, and Loudon's writing on educational reform is offered as positive proof for his commitment to the pedagogical value of garden cemeteries when he approached the subject twelve years later.

Admittedly, this is an excitingly vibrant study of the multifarious cultural manifestations of spatial awareness and experience. Ultimately, however, it is suggestive rather than definitively convincing. This is touch – rather than full-contact – history. Taylor covers an impressively large field of scholarship, but depth is rather less apparent. Consequently there is little sense of the cultural importance of his various sources: literary, domestic economy, philosophical, scientific, design, engineering and gardening texts. He rushes to tag each without stopping to consider wider historical context. All, we are told, contain similar cultural elements, but there is little sense of cultural complexity, and there is no evidence that experience of the domestic environment – within homes, glasshouses or gardens – shaped a broader environmental consciousness among nineteenth-century contemporaries.