Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

What holds true for the soil—that you must give it more than you take away—also holds true for nations, institutions, marriage, friendship, education, in short for human culture as a whole, which comes into being and maintains itself in time only as long as its cultivators overgive of themselves.

In the garden, appearances are lush. Everything seems as if it is freely given, originating from some hidden, mysterious source. That is why in literature, they are often sites of epiphanies – spiritual or erotic or otherwise – gateways to other worlds or orders of being.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin – we must cultivate our garden – he said at the end of his satire Candide (1759). Notre jardin is that plot of soil on the earth, within the self, or amid the social collective, where “the cultural, ethical, and civic virtues that save reality from its own worst impulses are cultivated. Those virtues are always ours.”

Gardens are a mechanism by which we make life bearable. They protect us from the frenzy and tumult unleashed by history. They counter annihilating and anarchic forces. Gardens have been with us – or we have been with gardens – forever. Some say they emerged after agriculture. But if gardens are to agriculture what poetry is to prose, who knows, gar