CHAPTER ONE
The March garden is a simple thing. One moment it is winter; the next it is
not. All at once striding forth from the
endless blur of grays and browns of winter’s night come the dazzling bright
colors of triumphal spring. Even those
of us with no calling to garden stoop and feel the earth, are pulled from their
comfortable fireplace centered favorite chair or plasma screen focused seats to
venture out into the glorious daylight and fresh air of a new season. We do not have to know the names of the
plants in bloom to know that for a moment we are in touch with Paradise –
perhaps, even, we might touch heaven here on earth.
If we stop and take a closer look along
the edges of the landscape and in the cracks of the garden walk, we shall see early
adapters and brave ubiquitous plants popping up with abandonment and in
complete disregard for planning. We may
make a spontaneous choice deciding that some of the species belong and some do
not. And this we do with not too much
aforethought. Those plants that do not
belong are quickly plucked, removed and thrown away. There is a similar reaction for us to the
newly arrived swarms of insects that invade our personal space, moving perhaps
indoors through open windows with broken screens. These flying and crawling species are pests
in our personal space, violators of our little part of heaven. We swat and spray reminding ourselves perhaps
of plagues and ill health that follows these home invaders. There is no time to spend on thinking about
these reflexive actions for Spring is “sprung” in a sudden complete dance of
life in motion
Spring marches in without warning,
unannounced and without a pause. We look
outside one day and there, where the quiet browns of winter’s reign once held
court, now the garden blooms anew. The
cycles of the seasons are heralded by trumpet choirs of daffodils, and a chorus
robed in green. All of us are gardeners
for a moment when spring arrives. The
suddenness of change beckons everyone to step outdoors. In the novelty of the moment, life awakens
and the world is renewed. The garden has
not yet been invaded by competing forces of nature; too new to have been
damaged by time, the landscape is in a state of becoming. The first intimation of a new beginning in
the garden is without blemish, defect or irregularity. In the first moment of spring, there is no
imperfection, no invasion, and no thought of the coming conflict. New harm to be caused by invasive species is
not yet revealed and we have no thoughts of the destructive possibilities in
growth and nature. The garden is filled
with dreams bounded only by the yet unreleased energy of the possible. Every seedling is the actualization of a
shade tree; every flower, the realization of a dream.
Each spring, over and over again through
the ages of human memory, the stories of creation are retold. We are grounded in the universe by our nuanced
sense of place which is found in the garden.
Our common grounding is reinforced by stories and myths of creation that
make up our culture and civilization. And these forces of the past, in turn, guide
our core understandings of our purpose in the cosmos and our place in the world. Like genetic information past on from
generation to generation, the stories of creation and our beginnings guide our dreams
and our designs. The stories of creation
influence our decisions about our homes, our gardens, and our environment. The messages of these first stories reflect
the very essence of our spring seasons, for where a moment ago there was empty nothingness,
there now is a fullness of everything..
The precise moment of renewal is
impossible to establish; there is no absolute point of time when winter ends
and spring begins. We note the day and
try to record the hour. We divide the
hour into minutes and search for the very second; this act of dividing can go
on and on with no end. The closer we
try to see the exact moment of change, the more we see nothing at all. Our attempt at precision delivers only an
unsettling vagueness. The closer we look
the more unclear the moment becomes. To
lessen our discomfort, our creation stories set out to explain this mysterious
beginning that produced this world in which we live. The broadest and most basic ideas flow from
our stories of the beginning. The
creation myths are a collection of ideas that functions as a discrete and
definable enabling concept. These
stories serve as William Sims Bainbridge’s cultural genes. Basic cultural concepts flow from these
genes, becoming dynamic imperatives of civilization. Ideas about the very essence of our world, of
where we came, to where we may be going, are rooted in the garden of creation
myths and stories.
As there are unnumbered gardens so there
are countless stories of creation. As
each garden is an aggregation of form and content, so each story constrains the
infinite into manageable definitions which lead to understanding. As a garden might have an untended wild areas
serving as backdrops to more formal textures, so the legends offer contrasts
and comparisons that help us define our place in the cosmos. Our gardens and our landscapes are a
reflection of the order of the world that is established in our culture’s
creation story. The values we assign to order
and form are supported by the stories of the first spring. We plant in rows and build walls in straight
lines because Western tradition seeks a return to the order of creation’s
garden – an order that brings a sense of certainty or surety in the midst of
chaos.
Our personal Edens, our gardens,
landscapes and our dreams are haunted and informed by our culture and its
stories. The first garden and the first
spring are proclaimed “[i]n the beginning [when] God created the heaven and the
earth”. The stories of the beginning
inflect our ideas of landscape and individual ideas about the world. Western culture is tied to linear the
Abrahamic religions, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic
faith traditions in which received expectations of society dictate the recreation
of the Garden of Eden and in doing so reflect
the story of creation. We move
step by step in a straight and ordered line of decisions from a beginning to an
end. We remember the safety and serenity of that first
garden and that time when “… God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold,
it was very good”. In recalling the
peacefulness and tranquility of that time and place, we desire to return to the
predictability and serenity found within the garden walls. We are deeply drawn to a divine place which
is the ordered landscape of a garden.
The creation story tells of the separation
of sky from earth, night from day, land
from water. In doing so the process of
delimiting and categorization begins. Even the very notion of a beginning as a
concrete, tangible start is a form of assigning ideas and things to sets and
boxes. Time has a start and moves
inexorably towards a finish. Time moves
from a beginning to a goal. The gardening
as is in living involves planting a seed that has a beginning, grows, matures
and dies; each stage, a specific quantifiable step on the way to a perfection
found in its finality. Inside the garden
we find the good in life that are the qualities we seek through re-creation to
emulate.
Our gardens are a refuge from nature, the
Other, outside our immediate surroundings.
At the first moment of spring there is a sense of perfection of the
possibilities inherent in the act becoming.
While inside the garden it is peaceful, predictable, serene, safe and
beautiful, the dualistic ideas of western culture lead us inexorably to consider
that which is beyond the garden wall, Eden’s opposite, to be a place we do no
wish to go, a place filled with terror, the unknown, the chaos of randomness
and danger, a place that defines evil and is the very essence of bad outcomes. It is from the forces of random destructive
nature that we will protect our nascent spring garden. We will make our garden safe from the
invasions of unwanted, unknown animals, plants, insects and diseases. We will struggle to oppose the uncertain and
unpredictable forces just outside our garden fence. The garden is our grounding and our center
from which we are protected from and defend against the random chaos of the
outside world. Our Eden is the place
within which we maximize our sense of control over a small piece of an
uncontrollable universe.
We establish control by regulating and
labeling each of the individual parts of the landscape. We give names to each object, species, and
relationship with in the garden. The
daisy and the rose are friends because we know their names. We
choose the color, texture, size and placement of each species with in the
garden. Through this intimate familiarity
of each piece and parcel we form a expectation of the arrangement and the geometry
of the space which gives us a sense of comfort and control. When we plant a line of trees to the garden
gate, we can walk in safety from the starting point to the end of the known and
the familiar. We are guided and
supported by the structures that we create with in the confines of the garden. The
landscape is bounded by the infinite which defies our understanding and while
encouraging flights of our imagination.
The ideas of Eden arise out of the Western
religious traditions. Non Occidental
creation stories are imbued with holistic, cyclical, relativistic, animistic or
illusionary concepts. Some Eastern
traditions are even quite similar to the great garden story of the West. The Pan Ku in China divides the world at the
moment of creation in to light and dark, clear and dense, sky and land. Pan Ku’s egg like the west’s cosmos was
without form or definition. He created
the sky and the earth, and ultimately his body gives rise to the landscapes
with rivers and hills and features familiar to mankind. Both
creation stories tell of a dynamic intervention to shape nothingness into the rational
compressible landscapes. The Western
tradition however separates the divine and spiritual from the natural and
ordinary. In the West perfection of the
garden is a process rather than a realization; it is in motion rather than
stationary; unique and discrete rather than repeating.
The perfect world of Eden is a landscape
which is self contained and without error, blemish, problems or degeneracy. And so the first Garden was without invasive
species - no pests plants or insects or diseases; all species were appropriate,
indigenous and purposeful. The first
awareness of the divine in the West is of God in the guise of a master
gardener. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic
deity is a craftsman, an enabler, an artist, artisan and Creator who moves the
earth, plants the seeds and arranges for the care and cultivation of his
creation. In doing so, he delineates a
time between the winter of nothingness and the spring of the possible. He lays down a template for western
landscaping traditions and the ultimate model of our garden-life plans.
The idea of the Garden of Eden as Paradise
flows through our feeling and ideas about the landscapes which surround us. The walls of a garden, of the Garden, serve
to protect us, and create an oasis against the onslaught and rapaciousness of
nature. A paradise is literally a
forming-around, a making of a perimeter, a word rooted in proto-Indo-European
by way of ancient Iran, as is the word garden which has as one of its root meaning,
an enclosure. Both paradise and garden
are etymologically connected to the idea of an enclosure. The chaos, uncertainty and unpredictable
nature of the Other beyond the wall is kept in abeyance. Our ordinary days are filled with the
complications of the random forces we encounter as we venture out into the
natural world. A sense of peace is
recovered when we return to the safety of the garden. Life is defined as a struggle against nature. We are overwhelmed and over-powered and
retreat to our gardens to find safety and solace, protection and comfort. Our journey through life is a trip from a
definite beginning to a promised end and the garden is our refuge from the infinite
Other that would distract us and detain us.
In the image of God’s garden, we recreate our Edens as sanctuaries of
the divine. The garden is, therefore, a
reflection of divinity in nature.
The Persian paradise garden was an
enclosed orchard, a cultivated oasis of greenery in a harsh desert land. The word paradise comes to us from the
reconstructed Old Persian word for a walled enclosure. Behind this wall with its requisite source of
running water could be found all that was needed for life. The dusty sand-winds of the desert would be
muffled, the endless search to quell the parched realities of the desert -
quenched, and the sweet fruits of cultivation - harvested to fill the reach of
hunger. Paradise was a garden which
freed us from the eternal struggle to survive.
Paradise was the place that freed mankind from the uncertainty of
tomorrow and let him truly live.
Hesiod, the 8th century BCE Hellenic
farmer who may have been a contemporary of Homer and was either bored while
tending his sheep or fell asleep counting them, described paradise as a time
and place when mortals: “…lived like gods and no sorrow of heart they
felt. Nothing for toil or pitiful age
they cared, but in strength of hand and foot still unimpaired they feasted
gaily, undarkened by sufferings. They
died as if falling asleep; and all good things were theirs, for the fruitful
earth unstintingly bore unforced her plenty, and they, amid their store enjoyed
their landed ease which nothing stirred, loved by the gods and rich in many of
herd.”[1]
The monotheistic tradition of Eden blends
with and is reinforced by stories of the sky-gods pf the polytheistic
Indo-European transmitted through mythological telling the ancient Greeks and
Romans. As an example, the special
nature and connection with divinity is emphasized in the legend of the Nymphs
of the Evening who tended the garden of Hera, wife of Zeus. The Hesperides gave their name to crystalline glycosides hesperidins, found in
most citrus fruits such as orange peels.
They also gave European civilization their storied golden apples which were
sought after by both men and serpents - apples that came in two varieties; one
of joy and the other of discord, one of good and one of evil. They show up as the fruits of the labor of
Hercules, who was charged with obtaining by any means possible the Hesperidean produce,
those legendary harvests of desire the yields of which of a garden still resonate
through our Western cultural memories.
The idea of a garden of perfect with no
necessity of labor and with endless harvest is used satirically by Athenaeus, a
2nd century common era writer quoting a 5th century BCE
Greek comic poet, Telecleides. The extreme description makes the point of the
impossibility of a garden without labor.
But the ideal remains with us today as the motivating dream of an idealistic landscape: “First, there was peace over all, like water
over hands. The earth produced no terror and no disease; on the other hand,
things needful came of their own accord. Every torrent flowed with wine,
barley-cakes strove with wheat-loaves for men's lips, beseeching that they be
swallowed if men loved the whitest. Fishes would come to the house and bake
themselves, then serve themselves on the tables. A river of broth, whirling hot
slices of meat, would flow by the couches; conduits full of piquant sauces for
the meat were close at hand for the asking, so that there was plenty for
moistening a mouthful and swallowing it tender. On dishes there would be
honey-cakes all spinkled with spices, and roast thrushes served up with
milk-cakes were flying into the gullet. The flat-cakes jostled each other at
the jaws and set up a racket, the slaves would shoot dice with slices of paunch
and tid-bits. Men were fat in those days and every bit mighty giants.”[2]
Seeking safety, mankind is hard-wired in
some sense to want a clearing between the cave and the outside world. The cleared area is a protective area, an
interlude between the predictable and the chaotic. We guard the enclosure around our homes
looking out the doorway to assess movement without and to take action therein
if called for. Hoping to find our own
priapean garden sentinel who will warn and threaten wayfarers and thieves away,
we lay out our landscapes and fence in
our gardens so that if there is any movement we can shoot it. With a wall to protect us, the careful choices of species we permit within
provide a comfort from the randomness beyond.
Each species is known, each contour of the land is planned. Just as the God of the West created his world
one step at a time, so today we too reflectively
plan and garden one step at a time.
In the shaping, design and planting of a
garden sanctuary arises a sense of control over nature and natural processes. The gardener is added who took over the Creator’s
task of naming and classifying all the division and species of the garden. This first human gardener, Adam, was the
master of all within. He took on the
role of classifier, namer and category divider, the value giver, and by
extension the decider of good and not-good.
Adam standing in for all western mankind bequeaths the template of Eden enabling
the establishment of basic catholic, orthodox cultural frames of
reference. Beauty and order within,
disorder and not-beauty is accordingly found without. From its use as a major setting in Milton’s
Paradise Lost, to powerful symbolism in Shakespeare’s Hamlet the Garden of Eden
as Paradise and refuge is restated and reinforced. The special garden is reproduced in paintings
throughout Europe by some of the most renowned masters such as Bosch, Bruegel,
Chagall and Dali. The idea of a garden
in deeply held and ingrained within the Western psyche.
The Garden of Eden is the prototype for
the garden as art. It sets the aesthetic standards and principles; in its significance,
the ordinary is divided from what is beautiful and appealing, and what is not. There is at first no tension or strife in the
Garden of Eden; the animals live together and there is no need for work or war. The ideal of a place of rest, of inactivity,
of a place where there is no discord, no pain, no labor, and no want is planted
strongly within the human soul and depicted in western art. This place of perfection was created to
enable man’s relationship with his personal God. As man is to God so the animals and plants are
to man. As Eden is to God, so a garden
is to man.
The Fall from Grace, a separation of the
divine the from natural that is reinforced by art has dramatic implications. The
division of time into discrete components of a linear journey and the
demarcation of nature from the divine are key concepts found in the Western
story of creation and affect our ideas of gardens and landscapes as well as our
perception of our place and role within the greater scheme of the universe. A garden
has a beginning formed out of the nothingness of nature and through time and
effort is transformed into a divine reflection of paradise, a sanctuary from
evil of chaos. At the core of the
Western religious tradition recalled by art is the sense that the world was
created for mankind’s use.
Unlike animanistic belief traditions or
even those ancient teachings of Eastern faiths with holistic underpinnings,
nature in the West is assigned a supporting role. Nature and the natural world outside the garden
are not a part of Eden, but a wilderness to be brought under control. And that control is assigned to western Man
when his God spoke and said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:
and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the
air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing
that creepeth upon the earth.”[3] The
drive to fill the bogs and wetlands, level the mountains and clear the woods is
ingrained in Western culture. With the recent
advent of secularism, the concepts of man’s obligation to the divine as a check
on unlimited personal exploitation are folded into the idea of the land shaped
for and by mankind. The drive to control
is reinforced by the memories and actions of the asymmetrical struggles of
nomadic humans in harsh desert reaches or river-tied early farming communities
recorded in myths and legend. These
remembrances of the struggle against the ebb and flow of the natural energy and
dynamics of annual river floods would return in the many stories of the garden
as paradise.
We daydream of walking barefoot in a
garden where there is no need to worry about bites and tears and pain. We want to be surrounded by animals that are
not a threat and pose no danger. All the
flowers will be fragrant and none will cause us harm. We long to reach for any fruit and find it
sweet and refreshing, and sip the cool clean running water when our fancy
strikes. The cultivated Persian
paradise combines with idyllic Hellenic notions of a garden to give us a
landscape template such as seen in the paintings of Nicolas Poussin: The Spring; Adam and Eve in Paradise, 1660-1664 It is worth juxtaposing the Poussin painting
of Spring with his painting of Winter; The Deluge. The stark bleakness of winter divides us from
the invitation of spring. The desolate
bleakness of Winter stands in opposition to the full possibilities of Spring.
There is a snake in paradise, however, an invader,
a species destined to turn the perfect Eden into a flower-bed of strife. The very notion of division is an invasion of
paradise. At the beginning there was no partition, no
motion, and no movement in Eden. After
the moment of creation nothing happens, and mankind exists unaware of the
static blissful state in which he lives without needs, demands or wants. In Eden, moreover, were two special trees, native
perhaps by definition as wel as a snake which was alien and exotic - an
invasive species, likely to cause harm. The Bible informs us that “[i]n the middle of
the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil.”[4]
The serpent’s gift is the knowledge of
good and evil that includes the tool of valuation. The division of good and evil drives our
incessant human categorizations of the world.
Once we imbue each action, object or place with a value, we become part
of a world of continuously diverging possibilities. If this place is good then it follows that
there is one that is not; if this plant is good, then this one is not. The serpent tempted Adam and Eve with
information wrapped in desire surrounded by beauty – an apple. The landlord on the other hand was not
amused, and after quick consideration, decided that the two were in violation
of the lease. As the two wayward tenants
were ushered to the gate, the landlord had an apparent bad hair moment and left
them with their former charge of dominion over the flora and fauna of the
earth. All our current landscape
challenges and questions of sustainability are imbedded with in this received Biblical
imperative.
The analogy of God as gardener creating
perfection and the snake as invasive species causing disruption to the world is
appropriate, concise and prophetic. For metaphysical
reasons the serpent changed from peaceful indigenous denizen of the tranquil
garden into a foreign exotic alien with a mission incompatible with the
ecosystem services of Eden. The
serpent’s actions upset the balance of Eden’s ecological system. From both Mankind’s and God’s point of view
the harm caused to the system was dynamic, irreversable and unsustainable. The garden as it was could not go on; instead
of etrnal permanence, instantaneous change
was the permanent recognized feature of gardening, landscapes, life and the biological systems in this world. Mankind had gained the knowledge of life which
was to know death and to wage eternal, fruitless war upon it.
Mankind had also acquired the knowledge of
good and evil which is to say mankind now knew how to categorize, name, label
and assign values to everything. This
valuation of the world and the categorization that is integral to gardening,
landscaping and decision making within our human biological systems. That is to say, we decide each moment of every
day whether some part of the physical work or species is good, has value and
belongs in our garden or is bad, has no value, and must be removed. In the process we sometimes get the
boundaries of the physical world confused with the world of values for the
dandelion in the lawn has no intrinsic good or bad value until we assign it
one. We describe the world of our garden
and even the whole of the natural world by using material principles such as
mass and energy and physical-chemical properties to which we layer our human
judgments attaching metaphysical value tags.
The eviction from the Garden becomes symbolic
of a degeneracy that takes place when cultivation does not keep the evil
invaders at bay. The exit from Paradise
initiates the journey through life and the remembrance of things that might
have been. The frozen state of, the
stationary perfection of Eden is lost in the motion of change. And the desire to find this perfect moment,
this unchanging simplicity compels the completion og our dreams and our plans.
And the infamous invasive species gets the blame for bringing the
blissful state of creation to an end.
When the garden and landscape is disturbed
by the action of a non native alien, the role of garden steward is brought to
the forefront, as we try to recreate the ease of existence that once was ours. We of the Occident, created with free-will,
chose to know and in doing so began the process of division requiring a form of
thinking. The thinking itself is very
upsetting for it tells us things we does not want to know. For now we know that inside the garden is
good; outside the landscape is bad. The
wild, chaotic, diverse, untamed, scary Other which lies beyond the garden’s
wall is, moreover, a source of evil that must be tamed through culture and
cultivation.
The wilderness harbors historic phantoms
of unimaginable evil. The Bible uses the
word wilderness some 300 times in the sense of a wasteland or desert bereft of
life. The biblical wilderness was
uninhabited, vast and human survival was a problematic challenge at best. While Eden, the Hebrew word for delight, was
fruitful, the wilderness was desolate and unproductive. Paradise and nature became physical and
spiritual opposites. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic
teaching blended with the folk lore of antiquity to produce the stories of
supernatural habitation outside of the garden wall. Beyond the light of the cared-for garden in
the shadows of the darkening forest slithered beastly monsters and horrific
visions of cruelty and death. The woods
were full of inhuman terror for the unwary.
In the dark and foreboding gloom of Europe lived the wights and trolls, ogres
and elves, magical denizens perhaps enthralled by Satan himself. Wild beasts hunted among deadly flowers on
unsuspecting or unwary travelers. Myth
and rumor surrounded the woman who lived beyond the village wall, who knew too
much about cures and poisons, herbs and potions, to wit: a witch, one whom
everyone knew knows. The Other, the
wilderness, nature itself was a vast storehouse of potential and uncontrollable
trouble. Nature was to be tamed by
constant vigil. Nature would strike down
the unprepared and bring all to ruin if left unchecked.
The invasion of the garden is a second
beginning, a new creation. Many myths
speak of the power of the snake in the processes of creation. The Rainbow Snake of Australia controls the
water and therefore life, its impact unpredictable and in this uncertainty is
found the novelty of creation. In India
the drought-serpent and the world-serpent both play roles in the creation of
the world. The ancient Greeks symbolism
of eternal cycles in a snake eating its own tail is recast as the story of
Ophion, the Hellenic serpent-king and first of the rulers of the cosmos, impregnating
a daughter of a Titan who lays a golden egg from which the earth is hatched, .provides
a countermelody to the Biblical tale, for eventually Ophion is overthrown by
Chronos, the god of time who casts out the serpent from Olympus
Gardeners today are guided by several mythologically
driven premises. These premises are
deeply rooted templates used in the design and evaluation of our landscapes. Valuation forms our reaction to the
relationships of form, texture, color and variety. Deciding what belongs in the garden is a by-product
of the serpent’s gift. The snake itself
is summarily imbued with an aura of evil and otherness. A visceral fear of the reptile is intertwined
with the memory of the invader’s impact on the perfection of the moment of
creation. The snake becomes a native of
the world outside the garden gate, its origins as a member of creation
forgotten in the memory of the destruction of Paradise. A set of ideas, places and things is created
to contain everything that is not labeled good and therefore accordingly stands
outside the garden boundary.
From the dawn of human memory in the West
comes the dualistic world view that works like a two cycle engine propelling the
civilization forward one decision at a time. Right or wrong, good or bad, the choices
influence our landscapes, our views and our perceptions. The value of good results in acceptance or
inclusion in the landscape and, therefore,
a culturally inferred usefulness to the garden and to the gardener. From the concepts of good come the ideas
about beauty. Mankind through the
choices and decisions of the gardener is informed by the inclusion in the set
he calls serenity, goodness, light, peace, security and certainty. This is the set of things that belong in a
garden and are good.
The ideas of the perfect garden are
branded into our collective consciousness.
Like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, we plan our landscapes based on remembered
reflections of Eden that are burned into our collective cultural imaginations
by the brilliant heat of the stories of creation. The reality is that we are bound by our
culture. Our reality is a shadow garden
that is built upon values reflected by the light of our mythologies. Our landscapes are enveloped by values handed
down through time and the lenses of our culture and civilizations. The
snake is out, the flower is in and so we make eternal choices of what belongs
and what does not based on the patterns that are reflected by our cultural
stories.
These creation stories so powerfully
reflected are reinforced through the generations by artists. Milton
set the eternal theme when he writes in book 3 of Paradise Lost that
mankind was placed in the “happie Garden” where mankind reaped “…immortal
fruits of joy and love.” From the
garden as an earthly mirror of heaven and the divine to the evil impact of
Satin’s invasion of Eden, Milton cast the brilliant light of art upon the
guiding principles of a paradise lost.
Even the very idea of an inherent goodness to be found in certain
species is recalled when Milton reveals that there once was a species known as the ”… Immortal
Amarant, a Flour which once [i]n Paradise…”
This idea of inclusion is key to gardening and to landscape use
decisions. Milton provides an example of
art building on the original theme reinforcing the mythis-based cultural
paradigm.
In book 4 of Paradise Lost
Milton compares the garden edge, the boundary between the luxuriant goodness of
the Eden as a “…circling row [o]f goodliest Trees loaden with fairest Fruit, Blossoms
and Fruits at once of golden hue…” with the other outside uncertain “...steep
wilderness, whose hairie sides…[w]ith thicket overgrown, grottesque and wilde…”. Milton repeats the dynamic western cultural
imperative that drives society to view the managed landscape as good and
therefore inherently beautiful. The
transmission of values infects and inflects our decisions about landscape use and
the values we assign to various states of nature.
There is ambivalence in Western
culture’s definition of the garden and its relationship to the landscape. In some sense we see the natural world as
fallen with mankind from a state of perfect.
This descent from Eden and perfection requires humanity to right the
wrongs and to work towards Eden in a continuo’s struggle against the wilderness
which is in a state of sin with it. On
the other hand, Acadia, the mythological story of a pastoral garden where there
was no fear or danger, no possibility of harm describes the golden age of a
pastoral woodland setting also llonged for by man. Virgil in the 4th Eclogue
describes the possible return to a perfect nature as a time when “[t]he earth
shall not feel the harrow, nor the vine the pruning hook; the sturdy ploughman,
too, shall now loose his oxen from the yoke.”[5]
The ideals of beauty and serenity
are held up in utopian models as goals to be obtained by design and work. Man shall labor tilling the land and bring it
back into a state of unchanging balance.
The ideas of loss, degeneracy and a falling away from perfection in the
curse of eternal work in order to live is found when the first man is told that “[b]ecause thou
hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which
I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed [is] the ground for
thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat [of] it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth
to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,
till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou
[art], and unto dust shalt thou return.” [6] Yet there is on the other hand the promise of
return to the dream of utopia offered by the prophet Isaiah recording the
Creator words: “…For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the
former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind…There shall be no more
thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the
child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old
shall be accursed… And they shall build houses, and inhabit
them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them The wolf and
the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock:
and dust shall be the serpent's meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my
holy mountain, saith the Lord.”[7] So what is lost can be regained when the Garden
of Eden is transmuted in Utopia, a noble cause towards which the best efforts
of mankind must be directed.
Utopias and the drive to move
towards them arise logically out of the western linear solution to the
philosophic exigencies of life. Given a
rational sense of a logical movement towards a goal of perfection understood to
be good by definition, the western belief system long held that work was part
of the curse imposed when man chose to know the difference between good and
evil. The lot of mankind was to work and
die, with the added penalty according to the Romans and Greeks of poenia or ponos - sorrow. The goal in
life was to make a journey away from work and towards a human independence of
external things, self-sufficiency, and satisfaction.[8] In
other words mankind’s highest pursuit was to return to a state of perfectly
held inactivity remembered with in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions as
the Garden of Eden.
By the time of the Protestant
Reformation in Western Europe, work had become divinely inspired. Work which once had been viewed as the
punishment for mankind’s a-cursed action was now the tool by which man would
recover Paradise. Work had become an
antidote to inactivity which was viewed a sin, something that happened outside
of the garden perhaps in the wilderness.
The stewardship of the garden was emphasized rather than the inactivity
implied in Eden. John Calvin building on
Luther’s thinking notes that a “…person who was indifferent and displayed
idleness was most certainly one of the damned, but a person who was active,
austere, and hard-working gave evidence to himself and to others that he was one
of God's chosen ones.”[9]
A unsettling vagueness results from
the fuzzy cultural bifurcation of nature from the garden. The creation story divides the landscape of
nature from the gardens of God’s design.
The unplanned uncertain nature of the world outside the garden is
highlighted by the planned divine design of Eden and as there is an uncertainty as to nature,
so there is a corresponding vagueness as to the concept of work. The perfection of a garden is lost because of
the work of man and degenerates into a wilderness full of death which may be
regained by the work of man struggling to recover by wisely using the resources
of nature. The works of man and nature
are intertwined like the rose and the wisteria each affecting the other in an
eternal dynamic braid.
The symmetry of the cultural
imperatives is powerful. We go from
nothing to the stillness of perfection to the motion of degeneracy in which the
seeds of redemption through work are found.
Designed perfection is impacted by invasion and is changed. The imperfection of the change is corrected
by design that leads back to perfection.
And in the center of the story is man, the eternal gardener whose
actions both allowed the invasion and returns the system to the ordered design
of the original. The gardener prepares
the ground and in doing so enables the inevitable invasion of unwanted species
that destroy the order and interrelationships of the garden. Through his efforts the gardener removes the unwanted
invaders and returns the garden to a state of order and balance.
The archetype of the perfect garden
has supplied western culture with the dream of the return to Paradise. The dream consists of an idyllic landscape
where everything has an identifiable place and relationship with everything else. Order reigns supreme in Paradise. Order achieved by placing and categorizing
things each into its own prescriptive set; to everything a name, to everything
a value. The first set is the set of
good or evil; the second is that of known or unknown. If we do not know its place in the garden its status defaults to evil. Therefore something is good if it has
purpose, and bad if it has none. The
archetypical Aristotelian sorting assures us that any division is finite and
absolute; that something either is in the garden of the divine or of the alien
other. The dualism of the West leaves no
room for something grey and vague and uncertain, for uncertainty itself is
outside the walls of Paradisium.
From this acute division flow two
ideas. The first concept is that evil flows
in from without; the second that the natural world is without order. And moreover, the chaos and disorder are
arrayed against the work of God and man.
The awesome power of uncontrollable nature was pitted against the works
of man. The chaos, uncertainty, disorder
are unpredictable and so replete with
danger and death. Only in the controlled
space where mankind works to select beneficial companion species can he find a
respite from the ravages of the natural world.
It is constant work to maintain the order and balance of a garden
against the swirling randomness and unknown of nature. And it is a labor of love, for in bringing
order to the landscape mankind finds a respite from the chaos of the cosmos. Labeling, valuing, and ordering are the first
tasks of the gardener. We find a fact
and give it a value, and then set it in our ordered landscape so that it may
bring beauty and harvest.
Since ancient times these
archetypical directions have been the constraints that bind our landscapes. In creating boundaries and restrictions by
narrowing the universal set of all that is possible, our gardens become engines
that produce food, clothing, shelter and energy as well as beauty, safety and a
place of leisure. The wall of the
garden in the Islamic world enclosed an ordered sanctuary that according to the
Qu’ran contained “…clustered plantains, and spreading shade, water gushing, and
fruit in plenty; Neither out of reach nor yet forbidden”.
The division of the world into a
garden and everything else creates a relationship between the division of a
whole and its parts and a model for further divisions. The delineation of space into predictable and
replicable shapes provides order within a predefined landscape. Geometry brings order to chaos. The poetry and art of Islam reflect the
divine in its garden patterns and a sense of peace arising from repetitions of
simple patterns. The sense of security
that comes from geometry and its relationship to numbers provides a connection
in the garden to the safety found in an unchanging eternity. The simplicity of patterns repeated
throughout a design reinforces a surety and certainty within the walls. A garden wall enclosing a square is divided
into four squares each a reflection of the greater whole. From the regularity of the repletion comes a
sense of control. With control come the
possibilities however fleeting of a suspension of time and a restraint of change.
The garden and its patterns bind
time through the relationships of forms to one another. The square bisected diagonally produces
triangles; together, square and triangle, create stars. Golestan Palace also known as the Rose Garden
Palace in Iran is an endless variation on a theme of controlled geometry. Carefully constructed geometric repeated patterns
recede into infinity are reflected in a central pool, Eden’s mirror. The relationship of numbers one to another
brings order to the whirling winds of continuous, constant change. The lines and shapes enclose and arrest
random movement. They guide our eye and
control our walk. The garden path and
walk ways direct our vision and constrain our passions moving us in a controlled
fashion from place to place within the landscape. Lines of sight through arches become gateways
towards the endless horizon leading to perspectives and controlled
illusions. Control of nature is enforced
by the imposition of order.
So the stories of creation give us
three tools to use to understand our place in the world and the purpose of our
work. Naming, valuing and ordering are
the spade, rake and hoe of Paradise.
With these three tools we recreate that longed-for moment of perfection
before change shatters Eden’s looking-glass reminding us of the struggles of
life. The very idea of time is wrapped
in our ideas of motion. Creation’s
garden held time at arms length in a changeless landscape. Like the first moment of spring Eden stands
forever between two events - eternity captured in an instance.
The undifferentiated nothingness from
whence the garden arose remains just beyond the walls. The outside alien Other haunts our sleep and
complicates our days. Outside the wall
night-mares and the day-mares lurk in our dreams and words. Thrown out into the terror of the Other, and
denied the fruit of the Tree of Life we come face to face with morbid
landscapes and mordant realizations of our own mortality. When nothing changed and time stood captive,
mankind had no appointment with death. The invasive Other outside the wall exists in
opposition to the stillness and the certainty of perfection of the garden. The Other, without, is about change and
movement; about not-knowing and not-valuing, and most certainly not about order
or control.
The lighthouse of Eden guides our
perceptions of a perfect world frozen forever in blink of an memory. Build in our deepest, distant dreams, Eden
fires up our present imagination manipulating dreams of an eternal, timeless
paradise. To get there we venture
through the undefined natural world carrying lanterns at night fearing Will
o’wisps. Our daytimes are spent struggling against the
unpredictable forces of nature. We
protect ourselves against the unknown that is incomprehensible and in its
nameless state terrorizing. The untamed Other
does not provide dependable sustenance, energy, or shelter. It can however provide sudden death.
The wilderness is the antithesis of
the grounding that is the garden. We are
awe-struck by the idea of the Other, the not-garden as a philosophic ground
state. When the ground poetically rises
up from the wilds of our dreams we are confronted etymologically by Grendel,
the monster, a creature completely of
the bottom of all-being, a lone-walker, with no interconnect or relationship to
the known world. Literally invading the
mead-hall, Grendel is the Anglo-Saxon incarnation of an invasive species
replete with all the negative descriptions.
“Creeping cunning slinking through the night…Dressed in God’s
anger…Grendel came slinking over the moors and beneath the mist-filled mounds.”[10] It is hard to imagine better imagery for invasive
species that mar the perfection of Paradise.
Even the description of the invader’s home is fearful when the poet
speaks of “…haunted wolf-cliffs and windy head-lands unvisited by mortal feet
filled with fearful fens-ways.”[11] From such places come the attackers of our
gardens, our landscapes and our efforts aspiring towards a higher culture. But the reader must beware of over
simplification in Old English poetry and in invasive species issues for there
is a strange doppelganger quality to the description of the fight between
Beowulf, the gardener and Grendel, the invasive species, as whence comes the
invader and whither goes the invasion.[12]
Amidst the dark sudden unexpected
possibilities slinks the invading species, the snake of western creation
myth. The antithesis of all our efforts
to bring order to the chaos of the unnamed Other is embodied in the unwelcomed
force of nature. Into our simple
recreations of the perfection of Eden come the slippery secretive invasive
species, the landscape and garden invader.
In a thrice it can undoes a season’s labor, it destroys the harvests, it
undermines well-considered efforts of control and brings disorder to our
structured patterns. When the unwelcomed
invaders come into our garden, they undo our work and leave us not only with a
lessening of productivity, but subconsciously afraid, disconcerted by a lack of
control. The eye sees a fragment, a
flicker of motion in the shade of the hedge-row; the mind fills in the missing
pieces. Swirling tales, legends, myths, mistaken identities and resonant
cultural symbols combine telling more about the minds of the imaginers than
they do about the natural world. But the
telling-stories around the camp fire leave a deep and dark impression, a memory
that comes alive to fill in the unknown with impossible evil. We need look no further than the krakens and
dragons which live on the edges of ancient map-makers imaginations. The very word monster from the Latin
words: monstrare - to show, to point out; monstrum – a significant super natural event; monere
– to remind, to warn to admonish; mens
– a mind, understanding or judgment.
We live in fear of the unknown, of
those things that come into Paradise un-summoned and like the Serpent wreak
havoc on our life and work. Venomous
snakes and poisonous spiders, ticks and flies that bring pain and death,
disease and pestilence, locusts and the plagues that destroy the food supply
are ready to attack our gardens and our way of life.
The world around us is described
from the point of view of the garden as a reflection of Paradise. The area between our controllable personal
space and the fluctuating unpredictable universe is the garden. The garden is the moment through which we pass
each day in our continues travels through nature and constant travails against
the unknown. And it is to our gardens
that we return on our way from the battlefields of life. We see, we know, we understand the world
through the lens of the garden, through the choices we make based upon the
values we applied. There is an informational
reference upon which we depend. Our
gardens and our landscapes are the eye of the storm we call life. Only in the last 150 years have they sounded
discordant to a few.
[1] The Oxford Book
of Greek Verse in Translation. 1938
[2] The Deipnosophists of Athenaeus of Naucratis.
Athenaeus translated by Charles Burton Gulick. 1929
[3] Genesis
1:26
[4] Genesis 2:9
[5] Virgil’s Works.
1916. Translated by Henry Rushton Fairclough
[6] Genesis 3:17 -
19
[7] Isaiah 65:
17,20,21,25
[8] Adriano Tilgher.
1930
[9] Historical
Context of the Work Ethic. © 1992, 1996.
Roger B. Hill, Ph.D
[10] “Com on wanre
niht scriðan sceadugenga702 - 703…ða com of more under misthleoþum, Grendel
gongan, godes yrre bær “ 710 - 711
[11] “Hie dygel lond
warigeað, wulfhleoþu, windige næssas, frecne fengelad” 1357 - 1359
[12] Pronominal
confusion as to whose hand or arm or thumb or claw is grabbing oe clawing whose
is a key ambivalence in the story “…nam þa mid handa higeþihtigne rinc on ræste,
ræhte ongean” 746 -747
Musings on Invasive Species - Chapter 1: "The March garden is a simple thing" by John Peter Thompson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Musings on Invasive Species - Chapter 1: "The March garden is a simple thing" by John Peter Thompson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
