Gardening is our way back to heaven

The Garden: Our 4,000-Year Quest for Paradise, Jonathan Bate, William Collins, £26

God evicted Adam and Eve – and the rest of us – from paradise. How do we return? The answer is simple, though the work might be hard. But Bate is up to it.

‘To garden’, writes Jonathan Bate, ‘is to cultivate a reconnection with the earth from which Adam was taken and to which we will all return.’

Gardens, in his mind, are an expression of global human connection and faith. God’s eviction was crucial, poignant. In the heartbreaking words of Milton, Adam and Eve ‘hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way’. They – or, rather, we – had to look after themselves (ourselves) and, first, they/we had to garden for food, of course, but then came beauty, great art, the will to recreate the paradise we lost.

Gardening is our way back to heaven and this magnificent book shows us the way. Bate is a prolific author and academic and he is, above all, thorough. He covers the gardens of the world and of the past from Epicurus to the Flymo hover mower, Xanadu to Letchworth Garden City, from Shakespeare to Capability Brown and beyond.

The writing is sure, clear and, at times, borders on the ecstatic. He, for example, acknowledges the evanescence of flowers but draws consolation from the seasonal cycle which suggests ‘new life, even beyond the grave’. There are glimpses of paradise and immortality on almost every page. Whether he is a believer or not, he certainly believes in this book.

Gardening is a form of poetry: the two arts have always been closely linked. In the Tang dynasty (seventh- to 10th-century China) young men created gardens and wrote poetry about them. The Romans – notably Virgil and Columella – wrote about the joys and beauty of gardening. In 17th-century England Andrew Marvell found peace among ‘gardens of repose’ though, ‘ensnared with flowers’, he falls flat on his face, perhaps in a kind of ecstasy.

The most remarkable conjunction of gardening and poetry appears in the 19th century with the publication of The Plant-lore and Garden-craft of Shakespeare by a vicar, Henry Nicholson Ellacombe. Shakespeare named 175 different plants and there is certainly a good deal of gardening wisdom in The Winter’s Tale.

Political power and gardening can also be closely related. In Aztec Mesoamerica, the leaders Moctezuma and Nezahualcóyotl created great gardens. The Aztec garden, says Bate, ‘is not so distant from the enduring images of Eden and Arcadia’. As with most imperial powers, their creations became ruins, but excavation has revealed a sense of biodiversity. Modern ecology is thus a ‘rediscovery of a distant heritage’. We hold hands with the Tang dynasts.

At such moments the scope of Bate’s project becomes clear. He is doing more than just showing that humans have always gardened; he is showing that the value of gardens persists from age to age and place to place and it is usually – perhaps always – attached to a religious faith. That faith may now be called ecology or greenery, but these are simply contemporary forms of the religious impulse.

Eden, meanwhile, will never be forgotten. According to the followers of 19th-century prophetess Joanna Southcott, the Garden of Eden is marked by an allotment in Albany Road, Bedford, maintained by the Panacea Society. Silly but, perhaps, not so silly.

The 18th century was when the formal gardens of the French and Dutch gave way to the ideas of two English geniuses – Humphry Repton and Capability Brown. Repton was a classicist and Brown a gardener who designed more than 170 parks. Both created landscape gardens that provided views across fields, churches and pathways.

The – so to speak – full English garden was born of the ‘colossus’ Gertrude Jekyll, an artist whose myopia forced her to look beyond painting and embroidery. She created a naturalistic style: ‘She turned the garden into an impressionist painting in three dimensions.’

To this day English gardening has represented a sharp contrast to the ambitions of, for example, the United States. Bate calls the White House rose garden ‘the controlled deployment of beauty in the service of power’. He does not comment on the ruined reflecting pool.

Ebenezer Howard, an urban planner, then launched the Garden City movement in a successful attempt to overcome the division between town and country. The first was Letchworth Garden City. The idea was the creation of, in Bate’s words, ‘abundant green space and architectural harmony guided by Arts and Crafts principles’. But there’s a problem. Bate points out that the link between town and country has ‘succeeded almost too well’. House prices in garden cities went through the roof, eliminating the effects of Howard’s idealism.

But Bate’s enthusiasm remains undimmed. He writes of the Negro Garden Club, founded in Virginia and populated by formerly enslaved people. In New Zealand, Māori settlers created their own gardens and landscapes. Garden tools have a chapter which includes the revelation that 170,000 years ago Neanderthals used digging sticks. The watering can has remained the same for centuries and the wheelbarrow’s origins go back to the 13th century and, perhaps, beyond. I could go on…

Finally, we have the environment to consider. Judging by our latest summer in Europe, global warming is happening. We are all in this together. Towards the end of the book Bate writes: ‘Gardening has become a form of collective environmental citizenship. One tends a garden not just for personal pleasure, but as a guardian of a tiny piece of Earth.’

If we all garden, then paradise will be round the corner. Maybe one day we will be welcomed back to Eden. Unlikely, I know, but, after reading this book, it seems more than possible to me.