A giant jalapeño sprouted from a patch of urban dirt next to our patio in Jakarta. There was little to see and less to hope for when my wife rescued this reject seedling—like Christ’s mustard seed—from my potted pepper garden and propped it up with a dollop of potting soil. Four inches beneath the dark humus, we both knew, lay a hardpan of red clay that bent our spades and twisted our gardening forks. Two papaya trees in succession had died near this spot, stifled by concrete, impermeable soil, and a hidden drainpipe. Amidst these enemies, surely sheer survival was a miracle to be hoped for—our piquant fantasy salsas would have to get their zing from my pampered and potted jalapeño in the driveway. As the weeks proceeded, however, my own precious plant gradually wilted while its rejected brother thrived, throwing out thick shoots of leaves and reminding me uncomfortably of the parable’s mustard tree. Such is gardening.

Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

Robert Pogue Harrison (Author)

University of Chicago Press

262 pages

$31.57

Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer

Tim Stark (Author)

Clarkson Potter

240 pages

$12.75

Like most of my American friends, I did not grow up a gardener. Unlike them, I grew up in God’s own garden, a shadowy and solemn rainforest cathedral choired by birds of paradise and guarded by poisonous vines, stink bugs, and death adders. Power chainsaws have desecrated most of the world’s rainforest temples during my own short youth, opening earth-wounds upon which farmers or palm oil companies smear the fertilizers and pesticides of agroscience, hoping to scab off fuel or a little food, survival or bio-profits, before the hard red clay puckers into dusty, sterile scars. Though many of my friends and acquaintances in Manila and Jakarta were exposed to third-eye levels of farming chemicals in childhood, few are interested in sacrificing the enticements of quick ‘n easy flower boxes for the perilous joy of a garden.

In the midst of a concrete jungle, Tim Stark and Robert Pogue Harrison have been helpful guides as I begin to discover the relationships between my dinner table, my soul, and the soil. Harrison, a professor of Italian literature at Stanford, has written the philosophical Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Stark, a failed freelance writer from New York City, has penned Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer, a juicily written tale of his mad affair with the tomato.

For a still-raw gardener, the particularity of Stark’s Lancaster County tomato patch roots Harrison’s ethereal speculations about Versailles, Zen gardens, and Boccaccio’s Decameron, reminding me that the human condition must be lived amongst my own derelict pots and peppers. Yet without Harrison’s breadth of vision, I would have struggled to articulate the philosophical underpinnings of my own half-understood gardening commitment. Along the way, Harrision introduced me to places like the homeless gardens of New York City, careful arrangements of green plastic, teddy bears, cast-off tires, and water that link a hard-luck man or woman to a particular place, opening a small and personal world for the soul that seems to trump considerations of shelter.

Early in the book, Harrison muses convincingly that gardening must prefigure farming just as poetry precedes prose in human history. He suspects that the enchantment of the garden began with the promise of aesthetic or spiritual refuge for our forebears. Because the success of wheat and the development of garlic, say, could not have been surmised ahead of time, perhaps our meditative ancestors cultivated gardens first and foremost for their own delight, preparing communal and ritual spaces for dreaming, thinking, and worshiping.

Having framed his narrative thus, Harrison traces the role of gardens throughout recorded history, arguing that they have variously represented healthy societies, offered a sane escape from human worlds gone mad (à la the Decameron or the garden of Epicurus), and even demonstrated our vices. In this latter category Harrison includes both the sublime hubris of Versailles and and “the paltry ornamentalization of decorative ‘landscaping’ ” that surrounds our modern office-towers, arguing that such imaginatively barren spaces represent the final triumph of modernism’s maniacal insistence on perfection and commodification.

Stepping back for a sweeping critique of the teleological orientation of Western Christian thought, Harrison alleges that the eternal desire reflected in the always-upturned eyes of Dante’s Beatrice keeps the global West from enjoying the present. The magnetic pull of ecstasy-to-come, Harrison contends, blinds us to the earth beneath our feet. We need to relearn the art of gardening for the cultivation of our own souls—and ultimately for our very survival.

While I learned a great deal from Harrison’s book, and while his gloomy ivory-tower meditations on the train-wreck of modernism resonated at points with my own experience, I’m not ready to give up on a hope-driven teleology. Stark’s lively account of his improbable gardening experiments, taken in small doses, is wonderfully diverting, but over the long haul his book reminded me of all too many literary efforts to craft a personal “meaning of life” from a glorified hobby. Either way, something was missing.

I felt the need for a sort of earthy middle ground, where intentional reflection about my own gardening could occur within a teleological framework that emphasizes my place along the span between the duties of cultivation given in Eden and the promised remaking of the earth in the Revelation of John. But the teleological sunlight would dessicate my thinking without the moist soil of present sociopolitical and ecclesial realities, however poisoned such a soil might be! Without a particular church community or a particular human culture, a theology of gardening would forget the humble simplicity of Yahweh’s daily visits to the garden, tending inevitably toward a definite-article theology that fixes God in the firmament, far above the earthy concerns of pepper plants and novice gardeners.

Though perils of telos-overdrive and temptations of hobby glorification loom, robust theologies of gardening are desperately needed. Harrison darkly describes our present lives, where the “visible world” disappears from view, displaced by the image-focused “present frenzy” that obscures our human capacity to look and to create. He is right.

In the global East as well as in the West, the neglectful eyes of Beatrice have marked the land. In the city of Jakarta and across the whole island of Java, natural and built landscapes reflect chaotic collisions of villages and malls or else the perfect uniformity of endless Green Revolution rice paddies. The trees that defined village squares for centuries are increasingly under attack, seen by officials as a lucrative source of income rather than centers of village life.

In the cities, public parks are cultivated increasingly for the Versailles-like purity of their lawns and hedge forms—spaces designed above all to manage and be manageable—and Harrison’s “green shade” is hard to find. The bright greensward seems to be a proud reflection of the nation’s new ability to tame the tropical landscapes of the archipelago, rolling out plantation-carpets on once-forested lands, taming the humble present with enormous and vivid visions of the future.

As globalization spreads the ecstatic promises of perfection-to-come across the world, our collective relationship with the land has been disrupted. Thus, any theology of gardening must be first a project of recovery, exploring the place of the earth in the biblical narrative and the story of God’s people upon the land. Undertaken thoroughly, such an enterprise would remind the church that reading land claims and prophecies post-Adam Smith, we have too often regarded the land as essentially an object of production rather than a creation.

I suggest that a close reading of the first chapters of Genesis yields a very different vision of the earth and our intended relationship to it. Although Harrison prefers to read the first two chapters of Genesis in light of the Western tradition of a perfect paradise, emphasizing by contrast what he sees as the fertile possibilities within Eve’s rebellion for the cultivation of ourselves and the soil, I think both Harrison and his Christian sources have misread the text.

The 8th and 9th verses of Genesis 2 do indeed evoke the image of God as Gardener, as he plants a garden and causes the plants to spring forth from the ground. Furthermore, Genesis 3 memorably describes Adam’s post-Edenic future: “thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken.” These verses evoke a grim morality tale: living in someone else’s garden, our first parents resort to deliberately breaking the rules to get kicked out, prompting a vengeful God to curse his bored vacationers with the divine equivalent of labor camp.

Read as a whole, however, the first chapters of Genesis represent neither an excuse for vacationing in Eden nor an image of a booby-trapping deity intent on making disobedience psychologically irresistible. Although a thorough alternative reading is beyond the scope of this article, a few telling verses point us toward a very different reading of the text, prefiguring the peaceable paradise of Isaiah and envisioning a fulfilled earth in a manner that can be found here and there throughout the Christian tradition but that too often has been obscured or explicitly rejected.

In the Bible’s second verse, the earth is described as “without form and void.” Such language alerts us to the mystical and relational possibilities of an earth that bears an existential need for fullness. Reading on, we learn that though God fills the earth with living ingredients, this earth-fulfillment seems to be a duty of humanity (1:28). Can it be that we live in a world that God himself yet considers unfulfilled?

The 28th verse of Genesis 1 is a sort of Old Testament Great Commission, God’s triple-verbed blessing and commision to his children. The point of the fruitfulness God gives to the human race is wrapped up in all three verbs in the following command and intimately connected to the emptiness described in the second verse of Genesis. Instead of exercising our dominion to kill off our ecological competitors and replace them with a teeming humanity, we are to fulfill the earth, bringing forth its latent potential and perhaps weaving wild lives and landscapes into a productive and peaceable whole. Certainly, the commission instructs us to lead the creatures of the earth into fulfillment with one another, with ourselves, and with our common Creator. Our first calling, then, is to garden the earth.

The second chapter of Genesis builds upon the fulfillment theme, describing a land that was barren because “there was no man to work the ground.” After creation, Adam is set to work in Eden “to work it and keep it.” Two verbs underline the importance of the gardening task. Read carefully, then, the curse of chapter 3 is not the curse/blessing to cultivate, as Harrison and others might suggest. It is rather the curse of inevitable opposition or enmity toward the creation itself. Instead of conversing with the animals, as suggested by Christian mythology, Adam and his descendants are forever cut off from fully satisfying communion with the natural world. The real curse is that our disobedience breaks our relationships, rendering us unable to fulfill our gardening commission and the Shalom-vision on earth despite our best efforts.

Although the possibility of full restoration cannot be divorced from the regenerative hope of Easter, humanity post-Eden has mostly ignored God’s first instructions. Today, we are increasingly an urban race, clumping into crowded concrete environments while large stretches of the countryside are devoted to the mechanical and chemical production of plant products or the extraction of natural materials. Almost everywhere, land is defined as a commodity and frequently as merely the ground upon which developers can exercise “dominion” in its most twisted and despotic forms.

Living ourselves in tightly defined windows of time and constrained spatial environments, where are the footholds for a garden of revolt? The beginnings of the answer must lie in the cracks, in the narrow windows of time and space that remain marginal to the global economic system and that offer us already shards of quiet and moments to get away. I contend that a vital part of our calling as the church and as individuals is to garden in these cracks, rescuing the literal and temporal spaces around us from the indignity of objecthood and restoring them to relationship with ourselves and others. We must learn to cultivate Harrison’s “green shade” in our own lives, hoping that the mini-gardens of refuge we cultivate will offer ourselves and others desperately needed spaces in which to think, converse, and reflect. Like the garden of Epicurus, such spaces would offer all who enter refuge from the mad polis, saving the seeds of civilization in the eschatological hope of Shalom.

I have seen two peace gardens. Once, I visited the peace garden of Corregidor, a sunny hillside memorializing the Japanese, Filipino, and American war dead who perished fighting to take and re-take a small rocky island at the mouth of Manila Bay. As I remember it, it is morning and the garden is noisy with clicking camera-shutters. The smooth, sloping lawns are dotted and blotted with excited clumps of Japanese and Filipino tourists. The garden itself seems to be nothing but a page tilted toward the bay below, its only concession to three-dimensionality a few artistic sculptures. The land itself lies passively in the golden morning, subdued by an award-winning garden design but still empty. The perfectly-shaved lawns memorialize more the glory of memorialization and the power of the memorializer than the disquieting memories of the dead.

Another time, I visited the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, DC. In my memory, the land itself opens beneath my feet. The perfectly manicured lawns of a superpower sink out of sight and I descend to meet the dead. They lie facelessly behind a hard black wall, all of them. In a blur, it seems I’m walking past the endless face of grief, past pointing little boys, wilted flowers, and pencil flags. No one I know died in Vietnam, but I know I have a place in this garden as well. There is space enough on the small strip of pavement for me to think, and though it is a somber place, conversation and prayer are welcomed. In this giant crack of grief, the nation itself gardens and is healed. Such are the gardens of Shalom. In our own small cracks, we must cultivate more of them.

Nate Jones was born and raised in Indonesia and also lived in the Philippines before attending Wheaton College. After a stint in Jakarta, he and his wife Charity were recently transferred to Bangkok, where he is going to try gardening atop two shady window ledges.

Copyright © 2009 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

Just in the center of Richard II, Shakespeare’s most geometrically designed play, and the only one written wholly in verse, we are presented with a scene in a garden. Richard’s Queen and her ladies stroll in it, but are heavy of heart—the King’s grip on the throne is quickly loosening—and when the gardener and his servant arrive to do some work, they hide themselves and listen. The gardener offers these instructions:

The Arcadian Friends

Tim Richardson (Author)

Bantam Press

359 pages

$19.99

Go thou, and like an executioner,
Cut off the heads of too fast growing sprays,
That look too lofty in our commonwealth:
All must be even in our government.

And if this political allegory were not explicit enough, the servant dispenses with it and makes his commentary direct:

Why should we in the compass of a pale
Keep law and form and due proportion,
Showing, as in a model, our firm estate,
When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,
Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,
Her fruit-trees all upturned, her hedges ruin’d,
Her knots disorder’d and her wholesome herbs
Swarming with caterpillars?

At this point the gardener reveals that “the wasteful king” has been “seized” by Henry Bolingbroke. He exclaims, “O, what pity is it / That he had not so trimm’d and dress’d his land / As we this garden!”

The link between gardening and ruling was not first forged here, but rarely had it been made so strong; and Shakespeare offers the added lovely complication of placing this scene centrally, like a sculpture or tableau at the heart of a formal garden, thereby exhibiting his own skills at design, his own mastery of the available resources.

Gardening marks, as clearly as any activity, the joining of nature and culture. The gardener makes nothing, but rather gathers what God has made and shapes it into new and pleasing forms. The well-designed garden shows nature more clearly and beautifully than nature can show itself. And this can be a model of politics: people left to their own devices can run riot, make themselves and their environment “ruin’d” and “disorder’d”; properly governed, though, they can flourish, they can become their best selves and make the most of their environment.

But the governor’s hand, like the gardener’s, can fall too heavy. If we grant that Richard has been careless and thoughtless, has failed to govern, has allowed weeds to overwhelm “our sea-walled garden,” we may also suspect this gardener, who is quick to appoint an “executioner” and is perhaps overly enamored with “evenness” in his realm. We need governors as we need gardeners; but not all forms of government are equally wise or equally beautiful.

These are among the themes of Tim Richardson’s delightfully expansive book The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden. Richardson explores in apt detail the most eventful and meaning-rich period of English landscape gardening, from the Glorious Revolution of 1688—during which the English and the Dutch collaborated in governing and gardening alike—to the middle of the next century, when Lancelot “Capability” Brown strode onto the scene and made an impression that still dominates our sense of the English made landscape.

Brown’s nickname came from his habit of scanning a rich man’s estate and proclaiming that the place had “capabilities.” This was Brown’s way of announcing that his task was to work with the existing character of a place, to take advantage of the capabilities it already and natively possessed rather than imposing a purely human vision upon it. Brown’s landscapes are cunningly and carefully designed, above all in their apparent lack of design. The visitor to, say, Blenheim Palace who is unaware of these matters is likely to look from the house over the vast rolling grounds and think, “Yes, I can see why someone decided to build a great house here.” But the house was built fifty years before Brown showed up; and when he did show up, he planted trees, created hills and valleys, and even dammed a stream to create a little lake, which had the effect of lowering a stone bridge that Brown (rightly) thought was too prominent, distracting from the “natural” beauty of the place. One rival commented that Brown’s designs “differ very little from common fields, so closely is nature copied in most of them,” which was not meant as a compliment, but Brown surely would have taken it as one.

Brown’s designs take us a long, long way from the gardens of the Italian and French Renaissance, which by contrast seem overwhelmingly geometrical and symmetrical—like Richard II—and which emphasize the power of art to transform nature. Thus their great reliance on topiary (than which nothing could be more repulsive to Capability Brown). Richardson’s purpose is to explain how, in a period of about sixty years, English landscaping got from the old French-Italian model to its opposite. And that explanation begins in the years following the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660.

When Parliament invited Charles II to assume the throne that he had always thought was rightfully his anyway, they meant for him to understand that the role of king was, from then on, a circumscribed one. Charles got the message—as long as he had his money and his mistresses he was happy enough, and willing to keep his Catholicism under wraps—but his brother and successor James II was somewhat pricklier and more ambitious, and more devoted to his religion. This led leaders of Parliament to begin the negotiations with William of Orange that would lead to James evacuating the throne in 1688 and his being replaced by William and his wife Mary. Among the consequences of this event was a cross-pollination of English and Dutch landscaping styles. Members of the emerging pro-Parliament party, the Whigs, were especially eager to show their support for the alliance with Holland by mimicking the less formal, less elaborate landscapes preferred by the leading lights of that nation.

Moreover, it did not take people long to discern obvious links between styles of governance and styles of gardening. The French and Italian style of shaping nature to art’s needs struck many English observers as perfectly consonant with authoritarian monarchial government and the rigid hierarchies of Catholicism. They saw, by contrast, the humbler and more naturalistic style of the Dutch as an echo of deliberative republicanism and the relative egalitarianism of the Protestant faith. So for many aristocrats, gentlemen, and rising merchants, the design of one’s garden became a primary way to indicate one’s political allegiances.

The Whigs, Richardson demonstrates, were the first to get on board with this program; it took the Tories a while to start playing the game, and even longer to figure out styles of landscaping that would distinguish them from the Whigs without making them seem unpatriotically attached to the ways of England’s old enemy France. (They decided to copy the newfangled preference for “wiggling walks” and groves rather than the straight lines and formal parterres of old.) But gradually the rival styles began to emerge. Richardson is quick to say that few of the differences would be apparent to modern eyes, since none of the estates and gardens of that time went nearly as far in the naturalistic direction as Capability Brown would later go; but they were quite evident to people of the time.

Richardson also gives a vivid picture of just how important landscaping became in the aesthetics of 18th-century Europe. Describing the first decade of that century, he writes, “It probably sounds absurd to twenty-first-century ears, attuned to the concept of gardens and gardening as a simple-minded, outdoor version of diy, but for four decades from this point garden design constituted the cutting edge of international avant-garde art, with Britain leading the way.” Thus it makes sense that gardens and landscapes would be the continual objects of attention by the literati of the time. Indeed, the essayist and poet Joseph Addison became something like the Minister of Propaganda, Gardening Division for the Whigs, just as (a little later) Alexander Pope came to perform a similar function for the Tories. They were the great theorists of landscape of their time.

And they were also gardeners themselves, Addison in a belated and offhand way, Pope in a passionate and even obsessive one. Pope’s little estate on the Thames in Twickenham—he managed to buy it thanks to subscriptions to his translation of Homer, which made him rich—became the poet’s laboratory of design, featuring a tunnel under a road, a little temple, statues with classical verses attached to them, and (wonder of wonders) a mineral-encrusted grotto featuring a camera obscura. Pope dearly loved his grotto, and though only a fragment of his design remains, he would be comforted by the knowledge that the grotto is that fragment. Richardson argues that in his over-exuberance Pope tried to cram too much into too little space, and that the resultant busyness compromised the aesthetic effect of the garden, but he is also ready to forgive Pope for that because the Twickenham garden achieved what Richardson believes to be the two great virtues of a garden: variety and individuality.

What Richardson loves above all about the gardens of this period is the way that their owners strove to create botanical and arboreal mirrors of themselves and their interests. In some cases those interests were strongly political, usually represented in statuary: Richardson offers a detailed description of Stowe House in Buckinghamshire, where Lord Cobham built a Temple of British Worthies to identify his heroes, and to mark his villains by omission. But in other cases—notably the magnificent Stourhead in Wiltshire, owned by the Hoares, a banking family—the impulse was thoroughly non-political, rather aesthetic or narrative: the visitor to Stourhead was (and still is) guided through a sequence of widely varying and constantly surprising sights. Statues are hidden in dark grottoes, overhung by dense evergreens; then the visitor emerges from a close tunnel of greenery onto a sudden vista of a lake and, wonderfully, the Pantheon on the far bank, half-encircled by trees. It’s like a painting by Poussin, and indeed was designed to give just that effect.

Classical—or more specifically Palladian—buildings like Stourhead’s Pantheon were common features on the larger estates, but there were also many kinds of pseudo-temple, the aforementioned grottoes, and, increasingly as the century wore on, hermitages. Usually the hermitages would contain statues or books, but it was sometimes thought that hermitages should be inhabited. Curiously, this becomes a major theme in Tom Stoppard’s magnificent 1995 play Arcadia, during which Lady Croom hires a bumbling landscape designer named Noakes, whom she comes to refer to as “Culpability” Noakes. When Noakes tells her that he is building a hermitage, and she inquires where he plans to get a hermit, he stammers—not having considered this point—that he could perhaps advertise in the newspaper for one. To this Lady Croom replies, “But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence.”

A wonderful scene, and we learn from Richardson that it’s not wholly fictional. The Hon. Charles Hamilton, in the course of creating what would become one of the masterpieces of the age at his estate Painshill, in Surrey, actually did advertise in the newspapers for a hermit to live in his hermitage. He offered said hermit not only (a very small) room and (meager) board but the princely sum of 700 guineas—about $50,000—upon certain strict conditions: for seven years the hermit could not shave, cut his hair, trim his fingernails, or speak to anyone. On the plus side, he would receive a hermit’s cloak, a human skull, and a Bible. Hamilton got a taker soon enough, and was quite pleased until—just three weeks into the experiment—the hermit was found carousing in a nearby pub and was fired on the spot. Thus confirming the wisdom of Lady Croom’s suspicions.

In the great variety of design and ornamentation in the gardens of this age, one notable absence was religion. This led many pious believers to see the increasing popularity among the wealthy of landscape gardening as a sign of encroaching paganism. But Richardson offers a more plausible explanation: the scars of the previous century’s religious wars were still fresh enough that few if any landowners were willing to risk the creation of religious symbols that could be misinterpreted, could become flashpoints for anger or resentment. Better to stay on the safe (secular) side.

Richardson gives vivid portraits of these gardens and of the personalities that made or commissioned them: above all Pope, but also Henrietta Howard, the resourceful and charming mistress of George II; the self-effacing genius William Kent, the greatest designer of his age; the energetic Lord Burlington, to whom Pope wrote a great verse epistle; and many more. Almost all of these figures died in the decade or so around 1750, and for Richardson, this date marked the end of the most vivid and exciting period of English landscape design—in part because it also marks the rise of Capability Brown. Brown, Richardson acknowledges, was a great genius, but he employed the same naturalistic ideas—the same irregularly shaped lakes, the same artlessly scattered clumps of trees, the same ha-ha’s, the same pastures that came right up to the houses themselves—pretty much everywhere, and the overwhelming popularity of those ideas tended to dampen, if not eliminate, the variety and individuality that had reigned in the first half of the century. Brown’s designs were impeccably and subtly tasteful, but Richardson makes a compelling case that impeccable taste isn’t everything. The age of the Arcadian Friends was one in which a landscape garden could look like almost anything and have almost anything in it. Richardson misses that age—especially since so few traces of it remain today—and he causes the reader to miss it too.

Alan Jacobs is professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of Original Sin: A Cultural History (HarperOne) and Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life (Eerdmans). He’s at work on a book about trees.

Copyright © 2009 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.