Literary Gardens – Global Studies Blog

During difficult political times in Rome under Caesar, Cicero, who had just been stripped of his senatorial and legal powers, withdrew to his estate and tended his library, which also comprised a garden, per common  Roman practice, when many schools and libraries included gardens. (See: Gardens of the Roman Empire [electronic resource] / edited by Wilhelmina F. Jashemski, Kathryn L. Gleason, Cornell University, New York, Kim J. Hartswick, City University of New York, Amina-Aïcha Malek, The National Center for Scientific Research CNRS, France.)

In line with his philosophical interests, Cicero named the gardens at his villas after the Platonic Academy and the Aristotelian Lyceum, and chose appropriate artworks and statues to display in them. Later, when he tried to allay his spiritual and physical isolation, and to confront his powerlessness to serve the state through the Senate House as in former times, he sought to arrange a meeting with his friend the polymath Marcus Terentius Varro, who had likewise retired to his estate for political reasons. Finding it difficult to decide where to meet, Cicero wrote to his friend: “If you don’t come to me, I shall take a run to you. If you have a garden in your library, we will want for nothing.” See Cicero’s Letters to Friends (Fam. 9.4): “Si hortum in bibliotheca habes, deerit nihil”, in Philosophical Life in Cicero’s Letters, ed. Sean McConnell. United Kingdom ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2014.

I have always wanted to have a small garden where I could take a break from the fast and unremitting pace of modern urban living, and from New York City’s “madding crowd.” But all I had was my window sill, lined with a few plants craning their frail branches in order to reach the light close to the windowpanes, the fire escape their North Star. Delicate though they were, they still gave me a sense of “the slower rhythms of natural time” and of the ways that “as we cultivate the earth, we cultivate an attitude of care towards the world.” (Sue Stuart Smith, The Well Gardened Mind).

To help me deal better with the special challenges of the past two years, I started visiting the numerous beautiful gardens around campus and the city. I even ventured further away, to Untermyer Gardens in Yonkers, to Innisfree Garden near Poughkeepsie, and to what remains of Emily Dickinson’s garden in the grounds at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA. Dickinson herself was better known at the time as a gardener than as a poet, someone who had trained as a horticulturist and was– as she put it in a letter to Louise Norcross– “reared in the garden.. [and] always attracted to mud”. On my way back from Amherst, I picked up a copy of Judith Farr’s The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, a book about Dickinson’s several gardens ad “the actual spaces where Dickinson cultivated her plants and flowers, the imaginative realm of her poems and letters, and the ideal Garden of Paradise”;which also includes a chapter by a professional gardener offering a catalog of Dickinson’s plants and directions for how to grow them oneself. I think I enjoyed it as much as the visit itself, and it started me on a literary journey.

I now realize that, as much as I enjoy gardens and the occasional planting activity in one of the many community gardens here in the City, what really gives me pleasure in these extremely difficult times for university, country and world are the “imaginary” or “literary gardens” on my bookshelf. I keep adding volumes, marveling at how widely ranging writings around gardens can be. And I relish the “undisciplined reading” that they allow me as I hop from one book chapter to the next and remind myself that gardens are the best teachers we have about the value of process, of shunning of perfection, and of the need to adapt and live in the moment. Michel de Montaigne famously captured one such lesson; “I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening”. In this spirit, I invite you to share in some of my delights through this display in Butler Library, Room 214, where you can check out these works for your reading pleasure as summer draws to an end. (See list here.)

Let me just note a few items that I myself find especially compelling:

David Cooper’s A Philosophy of Gardens stands out among a number of works which explore the relationship between gardens and the good life: it very thoughtfully tries to offer some answers to the question: “Why do gardens have so much significance for human beings?” 

John Lewis-Stempel’s Where Poppies Blow is one variation on the theme of the garden as a place of refuge and solace in moments of hardship. Here the focus is on the ways in which gardens (and nature more generally) importantly figured in the experiences of British soldiers in WWI.

Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature is illustrative of the idea that creating a garden can be an act of life affirmation and defiance in the face of crisis. As he was slowly dying of AIDS, Jarman started and built out an amazing garden against all odds, on the shingle beach of Dungeness, in the shadow of a nuclear power plant on the southeast coast of England, a place inhospitable to gardens, he poignantly speaks of as “the Amen beyond the prayer.” He created sculptures around the garden with scrap materials from abandoned ships, driftwood and cobble stones found on the shingle, and arranged them in stone circles and structures calling resemblances to graveyards.The Garden Prospect Cottage remains a site of pilgrimage for many.

Jamaica Kincaid’ s powerful works My Garden and My Favorite Plant (which Kincaid edited), challenge us to reconsider the idea of the garden as a refuge from the world, and tells an alternative history of gardens and of their hidden connections to colonialism and empires. Kincaid reminds us of the hidden history of violence that gardens can often harbor, embody, and perpetuate, towards native populations (through colonization), as well as to plant species, through the power of human control, profit, greed and capitalism. Both works amplify a sentiment she provocatively expressed in a discussion with Olivia Laing (another avid gardener): “For me the garden is a place of incredible disturbance and violation, which I welcome…It is from disturbance and violation that we get Justice.” 

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass serves as a reminder of the baleful effects of our modern capitalist institutions on natural ecosystems and as a spur to take very seriously the wisdom of indigenous practices and the values that inform them.

Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus treats the diverse ways in which the quincunx (a pattern in the shape of a five-pointed lozenge) appears in nature. Its compelling mysticism and melancholy have been admired and proven inspirational for many important figures, including W.G Sebald, most notably in his marvelous novel The Rings of Saturn.

Finally, I was touched to find that gardens play a part in Nelson Mandela’s inspiring autobiography The Long Road to Freedom: here he describes in very moving terms how it was that gardening helped him to endure during his long imprisonment. “A garden was one of the few things in prison that one could control. To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it and then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction. The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a taste of freedom.”

It is in this spirit of hope and resistance that I invite you to join us on a journey through our literary gardens: Literary Gardens Bibliography

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Kaoukab Chebaro, Head of Global Studies, Columbia University Libraries, [email protected]