The book takes us on a short garden tour from Eden through Voltaire’s ‘il faut cultiver notre jardin’ to modern poetry. There is a lovely page on Wallace Stevens’s exquisite ‘Sunday Morning’, which I’d never before seen as a garden poem. Along the way, we stroll through Boccaccio’s garden tales and the earthly paradises of classical and Renaissance epic. Harrison keeps asking fascinating, provocative questions. For instance, does Islam’s hostility to western modernity have something to do with the way that the Bible begins with exile from Eden whereas the Qur’an imagines the paradise of death as a return to Eden? As Christianity’s heaven is a new Jerusalem rather than a recovered Eden, so in public and political discourse our desired destination is the city, with all its riches. We are encouraged to regard the garden not as an end in itself, but as a place of temporary retreat and recreation before our return to the cut-and-thrust of commerce and politics, the things that are supposed to matter most. Consider the euphemism ‘gardening leave’ or the central claim of Andrew Marvell’s ode on Oliver Cromwell, in which the man who seeks to make his way in the public world must leave ‘his private gardens, where/ He lived reserved and austere’.
Aristotle said that participation in civic life is what defines the human condition. Late in the fourth century before Christ, Epicurus set up his ‘Garden School’ on the outskirts of Athens with the express purpose of teaching the opposite philosophy. Harrison points out that whereas Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum contained gymnasia that were located on public grounds, Epicurus’ garden was private property and in this it reflected one of the pillars of Epicurean philosophy: the affirmation of what Pericles had called idiocy, by which he meant apoliticism, or keeping to oneself. Epicurus was in fact a militant idiot who thought of his garden as a haven from public life … as a thinker, Epicurus distinguished himself from the mainstream of Greek thought by depoliticising the concept of happiness and dissociating it from its traditional link to citizenship.
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