It’s that time again: thank you once more to our sponsor, Everedge (who make cool steel planters as well as edging) for another year of thinkingardens.

And in entirely other news, thanks to Professor John Clarke for this review of Philosophy in the Garden.

When Tim Richardson compared Monmouthshire in the Telegraph to Sussex, with a nod to the Bloomsbury Group, he missed a trick in not mentioning Tintern Philosophy Circle. The county may be full of major garden makers, but not many counties can also add a thriving philosophy group as well. John Clarke runs the group, which meets monthly in the Rose and Crown on the bank of the river Wye in Tintern, famous for an abbey and for a poem. John has always taken a keen interest in the culture and history of gardens, and he kindly agreed to review Philosophy in the Garden for us.

Philosophy in the Garden by Damon Young, reviewed by John Clark.

Don’t be misled. This book is not about the connections between philosophy and the great tradition of landscape garden design from Le Nôtre to Jekyll. It is an engagingly intimate collection of portraits of twelve famous writers and thinkers, not notable for their horticultural exploits, but who have engaged with and reflected on the cultivation of plants and flowers.

Well, even this description might be misleading since the ‘gardens’ in Damon Young’s title are intriguingly diverse, ranging from the bonsai tree in the novelist Proust’s bedroom, to the Alpine track ways of philosopher Nietzsche’s reflective wanderings, and from Jane Austen’s life-giving relationship with horticulture to Jean-Paul Sartre’s nausea at the site of the root of a chestnut tree in the local park.

Jane Austen, though not a philosopher, is well known for her preoccupation with planting and caring in her various gardens during her short wandering life. She adored her writing, as Young notes, but ‘the garden was vital to her well-being. It lifted her spirits, and helped her to write so prolifically’. This close relationship was later echoed in the poet Emily Dickinson for whom ‘the garden was her second language’, and through which she felt an earthly immediacy with the world to which she was ‘irresistibly drawn’.

Alexander Pope was more of a garden designer – a revolutionary one in fact. His interest here, though, was similar to Austen’s in that his involvement with gardens enabled him to ‘converse with the nature of things’, especially the essential goodness and orderliness of nature: ‘Whatever is is right’, he famously wrote. In some ways this was true as well for Rousseau who also found in nature a ‘consoling silence’ against the disturbing intellectual chatter of Parisian cultural life, and a symbol of lost virtue and moral simplicity.

Leonard Woolf found in his almost obsessional dedication to his garden a source of balance with his other obsession, writing, and also a consolation following the suicide of his wife, Virginia. Young gives a nice twist to this very British, somewhat Romantic, tradition of home-and-garden by noting Woolf’s early encounter as a colonial civil servant with nature in the shape of the Ceylonese jungle. The very violence of the latter came to symbolise for him the feeling of life as a ‘continuous struggle’, from which his gardening activities gave relief.

Some of this no doubt has a familiar feeling for readers, especially the idea of the garden as a wild jungle, but Young pursues his narrative further in more exotic directions. The novelist Nikos Kazanzakis – an unlikely inclusion – had studied in Paris with the philosopher Henri Bergson and was drawn to his idea that nature is impelled by a life force, élan vital. This is a concept which Kazanzakis applied to all of nature and human relations, and which rather strangely he identified with the rock gardens of Japan. He believed that the very barrenness of a garden such as that at the Buddhist temple of Ryoan-ji implies energy and rejuvenation.

Another unlikely source of inspiration towards the garden Young identified in the case of Sartre, philosopher and novelist, and his famous chestnut tree. He was drawn to the garden, not so much as an invitation to pick up spade and rake, but in order to contemplate the nature of being itself. Sartre actually loathed parks and gardens, and hated the tedium of country rambles, but his contemplation of the root of a chestnut tree, recounted in his novel Nausea, gave him the inspiration he needed to address fundamental questions about the meaning of being and life.

Another great thinker who confronted the negativities of life was Voltaire who, by sharp contrast with Sartre, was a life-long garden lover. Both were leading advocates of human liberty, but where Sartre saw nature as a limitation on human freedom, and in contrast to his contemporary Rousseau who worshipped nature and all its manifestations, Voltaire saw the care of and attention to one’s estates (he was very wealthy), and especially his love of gardening, as ‘a bold metaphor for compassion, responsibility and pragmatism’. This moral commitment was integral to his political philosophy and to his attitude ‘towards France as a whole, which deserved to be governed wisely, benevolently, tolerantly’ like one’s own garden.

The political and moral implications of the activities of the gardener were later echoed as well in the life of George Orwell for whom gardening was ‘a mania’. His early cultivation of a recalcitrant plot of wilderness on the island of Jura – he called it a ‘virgin jungle’ – became a life-long motif for him’. Often seen as a stereotypical intellectual, remote from nature, he became a dedicated gardener, in spite of debilitating illnesses. He saw his horticultural labours as defining his reaction against a moneyed and class-ridden world, and indeed in contrast with his own privileged education. As Young summarises: ‘gardening was a perfect pursuit for a cultivated pauper’, but also ‘a touchstone of truthfulness’.

Young’s succinctness in phrases such as these is typical of the author’s style. In the space of less than two hundred pages, he succeeds in giving the reader, including those unfamiliar with his subjects, highly readable outlines of the complex lives and beliefs of a selection of leading authors and thinkers, and manages to draw out deep insights into their often private and unsung attitudes towards the natural world. And in spite of this wide range of thinkers and the prolixity of nature itself, he manages to convey a strong feeling of the importance of the ‘fusion of two fundamental philosophical principles: humanity and nature’.

Something to keep your mind busy as you mulch and mow.

Website – Tintern Philosophy Circle