Roots of Civilization: Robert Pogue Harrison’s ‘Gardens’

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Adam was the original gardener. When God came in the cool of the evening for a chat with his creature, he called out, “Where are you, Adam?” But our first father called back: “In a moment. I’m busy now.”

Gardens need constant attention. Adam had flower beds to water, weeds to pull. The great Czech writer Karel Capek imagined this droll, alternative Eden in his 1929 book “The Gardener’s Year.” The cosmopolitan Capek, a master of whimsy, was intensely modern, if not downright futuristic (he invented the word “robot,” after all). But he was also in love with the soil. He knew how all-absorbing, often obsessive, gardening could be; in working his own garden (which still exists in the Vinohrady district of Prague), Capek was as passionate as Adam himself. For him, to garden was to be fully human.

In “Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition” (University of Chicago Press, 256 pages, $24), Robert Pogue Harrison invokes Capek, along with a host of other writers from antiquity to the present, to show just how central gardens and gardening are to the definition of our humanity. He points out that homo, the Latin word for human being, is related to “humus,” the word for soil (just as in Genesis, Adam’s very name is drawn from ‘adamah, the Hebrew word for earth.) On Ash Wednesday, Christians are told: “Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” Dust is our origin and our end, but in the interval between, as Mr. Harrison eloquently shows, we cultivate that dust for all it’s worth.

In fact, as Mr. Harrison gently suggests, Adam and Eve weren’t expelled from the Garden of Eden for fussing too much with their marigolds when the Lord stopped by for a chat. The fall occurred because they were bone-idle. They were like spoiled brats to whom everything was given. About Eve, he remarks wittily that before the fall, our common mother was “a Stepford wife of sorts, with everything provided for her except the prospect of self-fulfilment.” In his view, Adam and Eve fell into original sin out of “sheer carelessness,” in a quite literal sense. The garden is the realm of care; that is why it is so profound a symbol for human life. To be truly human is to care about, and to care for, things; that care entails hard work, along with an acceptance of pain and death. Human life, like the garden itself, is defined by strict limits. Even so, it is better to toil “in the sweat of one’s brows” than to wander without a care in the “moral oblivion” of Eden.

To illustrate this theme, Mr. Harrison draws on a huge range of references. A professor of Italian at Stanford, he is predictably astute on Dante and Ariosto, Boccaccio and Calvino, whose visions of the garden he presents with great panache. But there is nothing academic about his discussion. When he quotes Homer or Rilke or Wallace Stevens (he is steeped in poetry from antiquity to the present), his references are always both pertinent and quite delightful; he is clearly someone who loves to stroll in verbal gardens as well as in the leafier sort. For him, “gardening is an opening of worlds.”

Mr. Harrison is not a gardener himself; he is more of an inspired loiterer in chosen gardens, whether at the enigmatic little Kingscote Garden at Stanford or amid the geometrical parterres of Versailles or even in the “homeless gardens” of our big cities. On these last he is especially perceptive and moving. He includes a photograph of “Jimmy’s Garden,” where a young black man sits in a discarded armchair amid old tires and scavenged timber. These cast-off objects have been artfully arranged. His pond may be a mere puddle of drainage, but he sits before it with almost regal aplomb. For the homeless, as Mr. Harrison notes, such humble gardens represent “a pocket of repose in the midst of turbulence.”

By contrast, there’s nothing reposeful about Versailles. And Mr. Harrison frankly detests that extravagant monument to the Sun King’s vanity. At Versailles, the delicate balance that must be struck between order and nature has been violently skewed; it is a garden designed “to tame, even humiliate, nature into submission.” Versailles is a “garden of vices,” all the more appalling for being cast in “exquisitely cultivated forms.” This seems a bit unfair. If gardens are the product of human care, as Mr. Harrison argues, has any garden ever been more obsessively, indeed maniacally, cared for than Versailles?

The garden exists not only in space but in time. It follows the calendar of the seasons; its subtle order allows for change even as it seeks to limit it. That is why the appreciation of gardens demands what Mr. Harrison calls “deep time.” Gardens were once “places of self-discovery, of spiritual cultivation, of personal transformation,” he says; and yet, we have lost almost entirely the ancient human yearning for repose. In his poem “The Garden,” which Mr. Harrison includes in an appendix, the 17th-century poet Andrew Marvell portrayed the garden as a sequestered place, a little paradise framed by time. The garden is where we learn to see things whole. It’s the place where, if we’re lucky, we might still realize what Marvell wonderfully called “a green thought in a green shade.”

eormsby@nysun.com


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