Philip Robinson (1)

You don’t have to enjoy cooking to appreciate fine food: similarly, mankind, even those with fingers as black as a winter’s frost, has a love for gardens matched only by its need for sustenance, surpassing even that for generation.

Humanity had its genesis in the Garden of Eden, after all, and it was not sex or pride but rather succumbing to the lure of the apple that caused our expulsion from Paradise.

And, it would appear, we have been trying to regain that harmony of man and nature ever since, whether it manifests in a Zen stone garden, a Japanese miniature garden, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or the traditional walled suburban garden.

The Faber Book of Gardens is a collection of writings in every genre – poems, prose, songs and sagas – about gardens, dating from ‘Eden’ – the beginning of time according to the People of the Book – to the present.

Most of the passages are in English [although a fair number are translations] and we can trace a horticultural literary path dating from Homer [ca 800 BC] and winding its way through Bible Times to the Roman Empire and on to England – with occasional side trips to Europe.

A book about gardens, not gardening, so this is hardly the forum in which to search for tips: an essay by Marcus Porcius Cato gives advice on Planting Asparagus which is probably still practical today, but ‘how to’ essays are few and far between.

To say this is an anthology of Inspirational Extracts smacks of Born-Again New-Ageism and Pseudo-Spirituality – yet how else to describe a book that includes a piece on ‘Poison Gardens’, rare, beautiful and deadly plants with a fascinatingly fatal history?

More intriguing still are the pages on ‘Living Roofs’: why use tin, tile or thatch over your garage, sheds or balconies when you could plant an eco-friendly fairy tale moss, lichen or wildflower roof, making you the most popular home-owner in your suburb with all the birds, bees and butterflies?

Then there is the charmingly innocent section on Garden Nuisances in which an English gardener in the 1940s bemoans the hares, rabbits, badgers, moles, mice, rats, adders, slugs, ants, snails and rose beetles that threaten his plants.

For the most part however this book contains elements from plays, poems and popular fictional prose which are motivated or inspired by gardens and everything they represent.

Shakespeare, in King Richard II, compares a Kingdom to a garden in that both need to be nurtured and governed: DH Lawrence is sexual in his metaphors involving cultivated landscapes – references to a bush might not necessarily mean a leafy shrub...

Tennyson’s Marianna in her lonely moated grange, Keats Ode to Melancholy, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden, Pope and his Essays, Lewis Carroll with his Garden of Live Flowers from Through the Looking Glass, Bronte’s description of a stroll through the grounds in Jane Eyre…

Pliny, Shelly, Flaubert, Homer, Browning, Yeats, Virgil, Hans Christian Andersen, Thomas Hardy – all famous, all wrote fairly extensively on the delights of the garden, yet none of them come close to the heartfelt lines by an obscure Victorian which, unaccountably, are missing from this book.

A Garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!
Rose plot
Fringed pool
Fern’d grot –
The veriest school
Of peace: and yet the fool
Contends that God is not –
Not God! In gardens! When eve is cool?
Nay, but I have a sign;
‘Tis very sure God walks in mine.

Thomas Edward Browne
1830 – 1897

Browne found the proof of God’s existence in a garden and indeed literature and scripture are determined to intertwine Godhead and humanity – like bindweed and honeysuckle – in a symbolic spiritual/horticultural sacrament.

Atheists, agriculturalists and agnostics, anyone soothed by fragrance, perfume, greenery – or merely organised aesthetics – will love the Faber Book of Gardens, a charming compilation and inspiration aesthetic instruction all in one.… (mere)

This book is the child of the author’s depression when, as a result of a back injury he could no longer work at his chosen profession. The depression is reflected in the curious purple brown dust jacket, in the introduction and epitome, and in the inclusion of a sado-masochistic description of pig killing (presumably this is justified by the pig sty being in the garden).

However this is the bad news. The good news is that it includes, along with literary and poetical gardens, pieces not widely anthologised elsewhere. The lengthy excerpts from the influential garden designers of the past make for thoughtful, and very enjoyable, reading; it is nice to see Sir George Sitwell in full Edwardian Baroque flow. This is a book compiled by a real professional.

The excerpt from “The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon” describing a Japanese garden after a storm is magical; and is a refreshing reminder that gardens do not only exist in Europe. It would have been nice to have an excerpt from Cao Xueqin's “Dream of the Red Chamber”, but let us leave the anthologist with Po Chü-I, sitting on the terrace in Suzhou surrounded by almonds, cherries and plums, all in bloom

“The people of Pa do not care for the flowers;
All the spring no one has come to look
But their Governor General, alone with his cup of wine
Sits till evening and will not move from this place”

A sort of contentment in resignation…… (mere)