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Thursday 20 November 2008

And Another Thing

A gardener must be a philosopher but never an atheist

Gardens, especially small ones tended by one person, reflect character, and express aesthetic temperament, even a philosophy of life. I was particularly taken by one delicately composed of pale shades, which put me in mind of Milton’s Lycidas:

Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,
The glowing violet,
The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears.

By contrast, there was the blazing border based upon what Bacon calls the ‘French marigold’, but composed of many other fierce orange and yellow blooms, and a few furnace-reds. It sounds a horror but was actually, in its own bold way, a masterpiece of taste and vivacity, as though van Gogh, wisely advised by Fantin-Latour, had designed it in an inspired moment. But as the lady who created it said: ‘Oh, a lot of it was sheer luck, you know. Never happen again, most likely. But then, you don’t want too many repeats in gardening do you? I’m all for changing each year.’

I admired, too, the lady who had created a neat, spruce, serpentine path leading into the heart of her garden, with variegated mosses and plants of many shades of green, punctuating the granite squares — a miniature work of grand art, worthy of Vermeer. Gardens display tidy minds and tempestuous ones, the energies of the adventurous spirit and the cosy conservation of the virtuous one. Odd that Freud took no interest in the gardener’s mind; but then he was a city Herr, all parterres and privets. As well as all kinds of primitive instincts and irrational skills, there is a strong intellectual and spiritual element in raising plants, which both reflects personality and helps to shape it. All gardeners are economists, but of various kinds: expansionists and gradualists, exuberant or cautious. As Keynes said, gardeners can be bulls and bears, too. There is the kind, for instance, who can make perfectionist use of the daisy, recognising the truth of Chaucer’s point in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women:

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