This is a great review of a wonderful book, with much to say about nature, humans and the relation; here is a quote: “If human beings are themselves part of the natural world, then our efforts to modify that world are not interference, but a higher expression of its energy and order. The garden is the point where nature and human nature intersect and interact, producing something that is natural and artificial, intelligent and inanimate, all at once.”
An excerpt.
Gardening As Spirituality
Books
BY ADAM KIRSCHJuly 19, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/36328
Hobbyists beware: "The Passionate Gardener" (McPherson and Company,340 pages,$30) is a guide to raising flowers in the same way that "Moby Dick" is an instruction manual for hunting whales.
Yes, there is plenty of botanical knowledge packed into this teeming, rhapsodic, deeply humane book. Rudolf Borchardt, a German novelist, dramatist, and translator who died in 1945, was clearly an expert gardener, and his pages are strewn with practical advice: what type of soil a rhododendron needs ("free from chalk, and decidedly acidic"); what kinds of leaves should never be used as compost ("All remains from conifers, which are saturated with tannin, and poplar and plane-tree leaves ... are excluded"); how to separate weeds from seedlings ("two of the fingers of the left hand gently hold the plant itself to the ground").
But Borchardt is more than a gardener: He has that love for the mere names of flowers that betrays the obsessive and the poet. He lists breeds in Homeric catalogs, as though naming were a form of possession: "Aster gracilis, with the light of the face of a child, Salvia carduacca, the phantom sage, sand phlox and lily bushes build flickering groups and lead the way to white and yellow prickly poppies, to the yellow horned poppy, to the horned poppy in dark ochre, the sand thistle which ripens blue, the ragwort that ripens white ..." One does not need to be able to recognize all these flowers to share Borchardt's verbal intoxication. Blossoms transmuted into language have a seductive power of their own, as poets have known since Shakespeare wrote Perdita's speech in "The Winter's Tale":
daffodils,That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength — a malady
Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and
The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The flower-de-luce being one!
It is in the same scene that Shakespeare proposes the paradox that "The Passionate Gardener" sets out to explore.
For the flowers we tend to see as the jewels of nature are in fact the product of human cunning: They are the result of hundreds or thousands of years of deliberate, selective interference with nature.
Breeding flowers, as Shakespeare says, "is an art / Which does mend nature, change it rather."
Yet as he goes to insist, "the art itself is nature."
If human beings are themselves part of the natural world, then our efforts to modify that world are not interference, but a higher expression of its energy and order. The garden is the point where nature and human nature intersect and interact, producing something that is natural and artificial, intelligent and inanimate, all at once.
