Grassroots politics: the secret symbolism of gardens

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The garden is a moral environment. The condition of your garden, like the state of your teeth or the details of your browsing history, is a reasonable indicator of the condition of your soul.

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Anyone who has poured themselves another late-night glass of wine instead of going out to pluck snails from the vegetable patch will know this. Even if you do your duty, rummaging in the dark and peeling little wet bodies from stalks and leaves, the ethical problems keep coming. Do you smash them on the patio? Rehouse them in some unweeded corner? Toss them into your neighbour’s garden under cover of darkness? If only God had thought about such questions when drafting the Ten Commandments.

“The Garden of Earthly Delights”, a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), grows dilemmas that few of us will encounter unless our plot of green contains a ring of nudists going down on a monster strawberry. Everyone in this image seems to be having a great time. The women, the men and the woodpeckers. But Bosch knew that where there were lawns and herbaceous borders, there was work to be done as well as pleasure to be had. Someone had to grow those flowers before the guy on all fours on the right-hand side of the central panel decided to get his kicks by inserting them into his anus.

The Chelsea Flower Show opens in London this week, a hardy perennial of the horticultural landscape shunted from spring to autumn this year by the weight of covid-19. Its organisers are keenly aware of the moral and political dimension of gardening.

In previous years, plots have blossomed to raise awareness about epilepsy, climate change and the women’s education movement in Zimbabwe. This year the show will celebrate the importance of gardens as a source of solace during the pandemic, for those of us lucky enough to have one. Perhaps it will also acknowledge their re-emergence as a marker of privilege. Not the wrong question to raise at an event where visitors can pay £94 ($130) a ticket to see floral displays sponsored by investment funds.

In the beginning The Garden of Eden
“Let the earth bring forth grass,” says the God of Genesis. Sounds a bit casual, doesn’t He? As though potential grass already existed beneath the ground, waiting for divine permission to rise.

William Tyndale, a Protestant scholar, was the first to translate the verse this way, though the original Hebrew contains the same ambiguity – it’s in the jussive mood, through which Semitic languages convey an indirect command.

When we get to the creation of Eden, however, the language changes. “And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden.” That’s more than just declaring an executive decision that something exists. Perhaps God even got soil under His fingernails.

One of the jobs of Western literature has been to clarify such fuzzy biblical details. In “Pearl”, a Middle English poem, the narrator falls asleep in an Earthly garden and awakes in a heavenly one. He has lost a jewel in the grass: we know this represents his dead daughter, who he learns now lives among the streams and bowers of a holy city. God planted here, too. Not so in the other place.

In Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, hell is a realm of barren mountains and turbid sulphurous lakes. It has furnaces, but no light. It has a golden city called Pandemonium, inside which is a council chamber that’s slightly too small to contain its synod of demons. Here, Satan and his allies argue about war. Though all these creatures need to eat like us, nobody discusses horticulture. Only heaven and Earth bring forth fruit.

Deflowered? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
When the malcontented Mrs Richards complains about the view from her room in “Fawlty Towers”, the proprietor is not sympathetic. Torquay is clearly visible through the window. What did she expect? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon?

This joke would have worked at any point in the past 2,000 years. That’s the length of time that the gardens have been a paragon of horticultural grandeur. Elevated, irrigated, busting with pomegranates and cypress trees: one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

But look at the sources and nothing seems to hang together. Josephus, a historian from first-century AD Jerusalem, attributes the garden to King Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled from around 605BC. His information is second-hand, however, derived from a lost text by a Babylonian priest called Berossus.

Berossus suggests that the gardens were “a pensile paradise” laid out on the high walkways of a palace of “prodigious size and magnificence”, and therefore, you’d think, quite hard to miss. Which makes it odd that in 430BC, the Greek historian Herodotus managed to write a description of Babylon without actually mentioning them. Decades of archaeological truffling have yielded nothing.

Stephanie Dalley, a historian, argues that the digging happened in the wrong place. She believes the gardens hung in Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, Babylonia’s rival state, sometimes referred to as the “New Babylon”. Deeply confusing for historians – and anyone hoping to book an ancient room with a view.

Mending fences Ryoan-ji temple garden
Nishitani Keiji (1900-90), a Zen philosopher, once met an American friend who had just visited the Ryoan-ji temple garden in Kyoto. “Did you hear it roar?” he asked. It was a moral question.

This plane of dry gravel (raked daily by the resident monks) and those grey boulders are meant to make us think of two things that aren’t actually there – lakes and mountains. And here’s the second challenge: there are 15 larger stones in the arrangement, though no vantage point allows you to see more than 14 at a time. Only those who hit the transcendental sweet spot can see the 15th. Or, as Nishitani put it, you become “part of the enlightenment experience” of the designer who first laid out the garden around 500 years ago.

If this sounds like the sort of thing that a Zen philosopher might be expected to say to an American tourist pondering existence beneath a weeping cherry tree – then it’s worth sketching in some of Nishitani’s history. In the 1930s he went to Nazi Germany to study under Martin Heidegger. His anxiety that Japanese culture was being eroded by nihilism imported from the West was a handy philosophical fit with the views of Tokyo’s Axis-era government.

After the war, he was banned from teaching by the American authorities. Plenty of reason to gaze upon these modest arrangements of rocks and pebbles and think yourself out of your historical moment.

In the weeds The Cottingley fairies
In 1920 two girls led Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, down the garden path. Their names were Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. The garden was in a village near Bradford. There were fairies at the bottom of it. That, at least, was what their photographs indicated.

The first shots were taken in July 1917 with a quarter-plate camera that belonged to Elsie’s father. Four creatures, with long limbs and butterfly wings, going like the Ballets Russes over the West Yorkshire verdure; nine-year-old Frances, gazing past them, beatifically, into the middle distance.

When Conan Doyle saw these images three years later, he did not detect the fairies’ papery qualities, or the hat pins that held them in place, or wonder why ethereal beings would have such modish haircuts. He declared them evidence of the beginning of a new “epoch in human thought”.

He also failed to check out the scene of the action. It was his associate Edward Gardner, general secretary of the Theosophical Society, who carried out a fruitless search for incriminating paraphernalia at the damp end of the girls’ back garden in Cottingley.

But something powerful had happened. A lifelong pact between two cousins had been made. One older and already working for a local photography studio. One younger and overwhelmed by the explosion of a game that was intended only to fool Frances’s mother, who wanted to know why her daughter had ruined her shoes by playing in the stream.

They did not admit to the hoax until the 1980s. Frances always insisted that one of the photographs was genuine. But the real haunting came from the experience of being at the centre of the story, not from the world beyond the veil. “She said it ruined her life,” her daughter recalled in 2019, “because she was looking over her shoulder the whole time.”

Dead wood Memento Park
The human and vegetable population of a garden changes with the seasons. Its stone and bronze inhabitants are more subject to the political weather. In 1991 the post-communist Budapest General Assembly gave an architect, Akos Eleod, the job of rehousing Hungary’s deposed statuary. Its Lenins, Marxes and Stalins. Its Bela Kuns. (Now there was a man who knew a thing or two about being cancelled.)

I was an early visitor and recall its windswept bleakness, the rows of thinly planted shrubs that would never, surely, achieve a size proportionate to the sculpture they surrounded. This didn’t matter: this was a garden where people came to remember ugly history.

Two decades on there’s a different attitude to the past in Viktor Orban’s self-declared “illiberal democracy”. A statue of philosopher and literary theorist Gyorgy Lukacs once stood on a lawn in Szent Istvan Park in the 15th district of Budapest. It depicted him with his hands deep in his pockets, his brow furrowed.

Lukacs was always a controversial figure: an academic giant, in and out of favour with the regime, who, as a commissar in Hungary’s 133-day Soviet Republic of 1919, had court-martialled eight deserters from his battalion and had them shot in the marketplace.

Early on March 28th 2017, the statue was removed from public view. Nobody knows its fate. It is not on display among Hungary’s communist idols and icons in Memento Park but in some other space, where memory is silenced, not preserved.

Gone to seed The White House Rose Garden
The name Roosevelt means “rose field”. When Edith, First Lady of the United States from 1901 to 1909, decided to demolish a stable block and fill it with flowers, she planted her name and that of the 26th and 32nd presidents in the grounds of the White House. One Republican, one Democrat.

When Melania Trump redesigned the garden in 2020, the new scheme – limestone path, banks of white roses – was widely read as an act of destructive vulgarity, the horticultural equivalent of her husband’s gold elevator, his attacks on the national-park system and his contempt for the abilities of his predecessors.

Social-media posts condemned Melania for uprooting roses cultivated by all the previous First Ladies and a row of crab-apple trees planted by Jackie Kennedy. Michael Beschloss, a historian, tweeted that “Decades of American history [had been] made to disappear.” But he was wrong and so was Twitter. Critics of Melania Trump had been seduced by a metaphor too perfect to be true.

The limestone path was installed to improve access (it complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act). Jackie Kennedy’s original crab-apple trees had gone long before the Trumps arrived. The garden did not contain roses planted by all previous First Ladies.

Irony flowered most vividly around that last fact. In 1961 the Kennedys, after having received hospitality in pretty gardens appending the residences of European heads of state, decided that they needed one of their own. Jackie called in Bunny Mellon, a designer, who walked into the Rose Garden with a team of assistants and took it down to the dirt.

How to dig a hole No 10 Downing Street
For the season when Dominic Cummings was one of the most powerful players in Britain, it was rare for the former aide to Boris Johnson and architect of Brexit to make public performances. Reporters outside his house were sometimes treated to brief moments of his edgy street theatre, which involved cryptic remarks about his children’s favourite TV shows, or zingers about how people beyond London weren’t really interested in this kind of thing. But in May 2020 Cummings succumbed to popular demand and put on a one-man garden show.

The venue he chose was the rose garden of No 10 Downing Street, best known as the fragrant space where, ten years previously, Nick Clegg and David Cameron had made their coalition vows before the cameras.

The Cummings gig was a sparse and apparently serious production. Like “Krapp’s Last Tape”, it required a table, a chair, a microphone and a single charismatic performer. Why did its star choose to address his public from a lawn? The necessities of covid-19, doubtless. Perhaps he also thought the presence of spring flowers suggested cleanliness, as they do when you see them on a box of laundry capsules.

The reviews weren’t great, but nobody thought the performance space was the problem. These days Cummings works in strings of tweets numbered like the clauses in a Beverly Hills prenup. It’s not the kind of art that often yields bouquets. But if he does receive any, it’s safe to assume that none of them will have been tossed from No 10.

A new leaf Space Garden
In the early 21st century depicted in the film “Silent Running” (1972), Earth is defoliated and the last green remnants are housed under the geodesic domes of the American Airlines spaceship Valley Forge. (The hero is a crewman who resists a commercial decision to abandon the project and jettison the domes into the rings of Saturn.) In actual early 21st century, Earth still has some trees and there is nothing in space quite so spectacular as a forest through which you could take a jog.

Instead, there is Veggie, the Vegetable Production System, a suitcase-sized greenhouse in which astronauts on the International Space Station have successfully raised tiny crops of lettuce, Chinese cabbage, mizuna mustard and kale – and this, the Advanced Plant Habitat, a slightly bigger chamber equipped with 180-odd sensors that allow the ground crew at Cape Kennedy to tend the garden by remote control.

If humanity is to conquer space, it must first discover whether it’s possible to grow food in a microgravity environment. More than food, perhaps. The European Space Agency and NASA have funded a study into the feasibility of using live fungi to grow bases for the first human inhabitants of Mars: “A mycotectural building envelope could significantly reduce the energy required for building because in the presence of food stock and water it would grow itself.” This is a vision of a future in which there is no distinction between house and garden.

Matthew Sweet is a regular contributor to 1843 magazine, and a writer and broadcaster in London

IMAGES: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES, ALAMY, GETTY, NASA