The subtitle: “an essay on the human condition” immediately clarifies that it is not going to discuss about gardens from a botanical or a naturalistic point of view. At the same time I think it is depreciative to call it essay.
Gardens are the perfect metaphor to understand the human evolution until the “madness” of the contemporary age, as some Italian philosophers would define it even starting from other basis. Peace is thus meant as a prelude to death, instead of Eden “felix culpa” is preferred. In the Western part of the world it is necessary to act, compete, overcome, transform, produce, because today the desire only asks for more desire and generates restlessness. Life wants more life, by means of a bulimic greed that moves us away from the nature and from the human nature, from our physiology by promising immortality that is granted by science and medicine: by the technics Umberto Galimberti and Emanuele Serverino would say.
From the garden of Epicurus to the Candide one by Voltaire, from the “hortus conclusus” by Boccaccio to monastic cloisters, from the garden “invisible” to Stanford University’s students to the philosophical Zen garden. This reading is very intense and instructive, even educative and formative for the most part of people not used to the tridimensional world, but comfortably sat in front of the TV or computer, blind to natural phenomena. As Milan Kundera wrote “A European man does not look at the sky anymore, does not know what is the shape of the moon when it comes and goes away”.
It seems that gardens were born before agriculture. They are an expression of the typically human need to transfigure and embellish reality. They are even therapeutic for homeless people who assert creativity with their improvised compositions in open air. They fight not to lose themselves and to fix the “still point of the turning world” as T.S. Eliot writes.
“No revolution could accelerate the time for germination or make lilac bloom before May: at the end the gardener is a wise, mature and paternal man” writes Harrison by quoting Capek “he is someone who gives more than taking (a principle that should be valid in friendship, in a couple and in education as well) submitting himself to the laws of nature, as the ancient Greeks inhabiting the Cosmos suggested. He is not guilty of hybris, does not destroy the earthly and mortal garden where he lives because he would automatically destroy himself.
And the sky and the salvation would be vain.
Robert Pogue Harrison
“Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition”
Paperback
Marco Sandrini, Chief Landscape Designer at Sandrini Green Architecture
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