Brains with green fingers

‘Life is bristling with thorns,’ Voltaire observed in 1769, ‘and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.’ This is the remedy espoused by Candide at the end of Voltaire’s satirical novel, published ten years earlier, and the literal and metaphorical cultivating of gardens is the subject of Damon Young’s sprightly and stimulating little book. Young examines the relationship between gardening and philosophy in the life and work of 11 writers, from the 18th to the 20th century, topping and tailing these individual essays with a consideration of the Ancient Greeks.

What he calls the ‘plein-air tradition of philosophy’ starts with Aristotle giving lectures in the Lyceum, a park which included not only sports facilities and temples but the world’s first botanical garden. Gardens have always offered a retreat in which to think, often while taking gentle exercise at the same time, but Young argues that one reason they are intellectually stimulating is that they are ‘a fusion of two fundamental philosophical principles: humanity and nature’.

He sees Voltaire’s garden at Ferney as ‘a bold metaphor for compassion, responsibility and pragmatism — a call to improve his immediate surroundings’: ‘Ferney required practical expertise, continual labour and devotion. And likewise for civil institutions: the estate stood for France as a whole, which deserved to be governed wisely, benevolently and tolerantly.’

For Rousseau,  the cultivation of plants was less important than the close study of them. Botany provides ‘a lesson in precise, pleasurable perception. And in this, it is a remedy for the numbed consciousness of civilised life.’ By contrast, the natural world induced visceral distaste in Jean-Paul Sartre. A stroll in the park for the protagonist of Nauséa leads to appalled contemplation of the meaningless vegetable life of a chestnut tree:

I slumped on the bench, dazed, stunned by that profusion of beings without origin: bloomings, blossomings everywhere, my ears were buzzing with existence, my very flesh was throbbing and opening, abandoning itself to the universal burgeoning, it was repulsive.