This essay is primarily concerned with exploring how Frances Brooke``s The History of Emily Montague (1769) deploys the trope of cultivation in relation to colonial and national discourses. The novel illustrates how English selfhood and nationhood are largely defined and maintained through various Others by setting up systematic contrasts between the landscape and its people in Canada and England in terms of cultivation. The novel, however, simultaneously suggests the failure of imperial ideals by revealing how the landscape or colonial Others resist such British efforts to cultivate them, to the extent the central characters abandon their colonizing project and retreat from Canada. The novel concludes by valorizing the ideals of English country gentlemen as true citizens and reaffirming the values of cultivation. Yet the failure of the colonial project in Canada at the end of the novel implies that such English national identity is tenuous at best, thus underscoring the tensions and contradictions at the heart of national and colonial project.