Gardening - Philosophy for Everyone E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Philosophy for Everyone
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 469

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Philosophy and gardens have been closely connected from the dawn of philosophy, with many drawing on their beauty and peace for philosophical inspiration. Gardens in turn give rise to a broad spectrum of philosophical questions. For the green-fingered thinker, this book reflects on a whole host of fascinating philosophical themes. * Gardens and philosophy present a fascinating combination of subjects, historically important, and yet scarcely covered within the realms of philosophy * Contributions come from a wide range of authors, ranging from garden writers and gardeners, to those working in architecture, archaeology, archival studies, art history, anthropology, classics and philosophy * Essays cover a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from Epicurus and Confucius to the aesthetics and philosophy of Central Park * Offers new perspectives on the experience and evaluation of gardens

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Foreword

David E. Cooper

Acknowledgments

Dan O’Brien

Planting the Seed: An Introduction to Gardening – Philosophy for Everyone

Dan O’Brien

PART I THE GOOD LIFE

1 The Virtues of Gardening

Isis Brook

2 Cultivating the Soul: The Ethics of Gardening in Ancient Greece and Rome

Meghan T. Ray

3 Escaping Eden: Plant Ethics in a Gardener’s World

Matthew Hall

4 Food Glorious Food

Helene Gammack

PART II FLOWER POWER

5 Plants, Prayers, and Power: The Story of the First Mediterranean Gardens

Jo Day

6 Brussels Sprouts and Empire: Putting Down Roots

Michael Moss

7 Transplanting Liberty: Lafayette’s American Garden

Laura Auricchio

8 Cockney Plots: Allotments and Grassroots Political Activism

Elizabeth A. Scott

PART III THE FLOWER SHOW

9 Hortus Incantans: Gardening as an Art of Enchantment

Eric MacDonald

10 Gardens, Music, and Time

Ismay Barwell and John Powell

11 The Pragmatic Picturesque: The Philosophyof Central Park

Gary Shapiro

PART IV THE COSMIC GARDEN

12 Illusions of Grandeur: A Harmonious Garden for the Sun King

Robert Neuman

13 Time and Temporality in the Garden

Mara Miller

14 Cultivating Our Garden: David Hume and Gardening as Therapy

Dan O’Brien

PART V PHILOSOPHERS’ GARDENS

15 The Garden of the Aztec Philosopher-King

Susan Toby Evans

16 Epicurus, the Garden, and the Golden Age

Gordon Campbell

17 Gardener of Souls: Philosophical Education in Plato’s Phaedrus

Anne Cotton

Notes on Contributors

VOLUME EDITOR

DAN O’BRIEN is a Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University,an Honorary Research Fellow at Birmingham University, and anAssociate Lecturer with the Open University. He is the author ofAn Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (2006) and Hume’s“Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding”: A Reader’s Guide(with Alan Bailey, 2006). In addition, he has recently edited a specialvolume of Philosophica on the epistemology of testimony.

SERIES EDITOR

FRITZ ALLHOFF is an Assistant Professor in the PhilosophyDepartment at Western Michigan University, as well as a SeniorResearch Fellow at the Australian National University’s Centre forApplied Philosophy and Public Ethics. In addition to editing thePhilosophy for Everyone series, Allhoff is the volume editor or co-editorfor several titles, including Wine & Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007),Whiskey & Philosophy (with Marcus P. Adams, Wiley, 2009), andFood & Philosophy (with Dave Monroe, Wiley-Blackwell, 2007).

PHILOSOPHY FOR EVERYONE

Series editor: Fritz Allhoff

Not so much a subject matter, philosophy is a way of thinking. Thinking not just about the Big Questions, but about little ones too. This series invites everyone to ponder things they care about, big or small, significant, serious … or just curious.

Running & Philosophy: A Marathon for the MindEdited by Michael W. Austin

Wine & Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and DrinkingEdited by Fritz Allhoff

Food & Philosophy: Eat, Think and Be MerryEdited by Fritz Allhoff and Dave Monroe

Beer & Philosophy: The Unexamined Beer Isn’t Worth DrinkingEdited by Steven D. Hales

Whiskey & Philosophy: A Small Batch of Spirited IdeasEdited by Fritz Allhoff and Marcus P. Adams

College Sex – Philosophy for Everyone:Philosophers With BenefitsEdited by Michael Bruceand Robert M. Stewart

Cycling – Philosophy for Everyone:A Philosophical Tour de ForceEdited by Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza and Michael W. Austin

Climbing – Philosophy for Everyone:Because It’s ThereEdited by Stephen E. Schmid

Hunting – Philosophy for Everyone:In Search of the Wild LifeEdited by Nathan Kowalsky

Christmas – Philosophy for Everyone:Better Than a Lump of CoalEdited by Scott C. Lowe

Cannabis – Philosophy for Everyone:What Were We Just Talking About?Edited by Dale Jacquette

Porn – Philosophy for Everyone:How to Think With KinkEdited by Dave Monroe

Serial Killers – Philosophy for Everyone:Being and KillingEdited by S. Waller

Dating – Philosophy for Everyone:Flirting With Big IdeasEdited by Kristie Miller and Marlene Clark

Gardening – Philosophy for Everyone:Cultivating WisdomEdited by Dan O’Brien

Motherhood – Philosophy for Everyone:The Birth of WisdomEdited by Sheila Lintott

Fatherhood – Philosophy for Everyone:The Dao of Daddy

Edited by Lon s. Nease and Michael W. Austin

Forthcoming books in the series:

Fashion – Philosophy for EveryoneEdited by Jessica Wolfendale and Jeanette Kennett

Coffee – Philosophy for EveryoneEdited by Scott Parker and Michael W. Austin

Blues – Philosophy for EveryoneEdited by Abrol Fairweather and Jesse Steinberg

This edition first published 2010© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2010 Dan O’Brien

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom

Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of Dan O’Brien to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gardening – philosophy for Everyone:cultivating wisdom / edited by Dan O’Brien.

      p. cm. – (Philosophy for everyone)

   Includes bibliographical references.

   ISBN 978-1-4443-3021-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Gardening–Philosophy.2. Gardens–Philosophy. I. O’Brien, Dan, 1968– II. Title: Gardening – philosophy for everyone.

   SB454.3.P45G36 2010

   635.01–dc22

2010004722

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

DAVID E. COOPER

FOREWORD

“From my point of view, as a gardener, I consider the garden fundamentally as a spiritual and cognitive experience.”1 So writes the distinguished Spanish garden designer – and philosophy graduate of Madrid University – Fernando Caruncho. Appreciation of the garden, he explains, requires a maturity of emotion and understanding alike. The implied contrast is with the experience of the garden simply as a hobby, as a smallholding, or as a source of pleasing sights, sounds, and smells. The contributors to Gardening – Philosophy for Everyone write from a viewpoint similar to Caruncho’s and, like him, they are as much concerned with gardening, an activity, as with the products of this activity, gardens. Of the many aspects of the “spiritual and cognitive experience” of gardening and gardens discussed in their contributions, three are especially salient: the moral, symbolic, and temporal.

The idea of the garden as a theatre for the cultivation of moral sensibility goes back at least to Pliny the Younger, whose own gardens afforded him the promise of “a good life and a serious one,” of “cultivating himself” through cultivating them.2 As several essays in this book demonstrate, it is an idea that, albeit with many permutations, has persisted. It is attested to, for example, in General Lafayette’s estate near Paris, with its celebration of liberty and republican virtues, and in the humbler kitchen gardens or allotments that express an ideal of self-sufficiency. This ethical tradition, for several contributors, is one that, moreover, deserves to persist, for the garden – as a place that invites the exercise of care and humility, a regard for the good of plants and creatures, and an appreciation of nature’s workings – is indeed a source of moral education.

There are gardens – like Lafayette’s, Stowe, or those in the Sacro Monte tradition – which deliberately aim at moral effects through what they symbolize. But the symbolic roles of gardens extend well beyond that of moral edification, and those historians have a point who encourage us to examine the gardens of past cultures in order to identify how they envisaged their world, themselves, and the connections between nature and culture. Among the many diverse messages or meanings of gardening and gardens – whether self-consciously intended or not – to which contributors draw our attention are the political ones of power and prestige and the sense of home that people living very far from home seek to protect through their gardens. At their most ambitious, gardens or parks like Shanglin in ancient China, Versailles in Enlightenment Europe, or Charles Jencks’s in southwest Scotland even attempt to symbolize the order of the cosmos.

This, and other symbolic ambitions, would not be intelligible to the French painter Henri Cueco’s gardener who, in reply to the rhetorical question “You must look at other things apart from your lettuces!?” replied, “Maybe, but I don’t really notice them.”3 But even he must have taken full notice of the changes and rhythms of season, weather, animal behavior, and much more with which the fate of his lettuces, like everything else in the garden, are intimately bound up. It is, however, to the aesthetics of garden experience that several contributors to Gardening – Philosophy for Everyone relate the temporal, even ephemeral aspect of gardens, their ingredients and contexts. For it is in this relationship, one surmises, that the distinctiveness of garden aesthetics lies – in the manner, say, that a garden “presents,” or makes mindful of, time, or perhaps in an “enchantment” that unexpected changes in the process of experiencing a garden may trigger. If this is right, then the familiar image of the garden as “mediating” between human creativity and the natural order needs to make proper room for nature’s fourth dimension, and not just its spatial aspects. An interesting garden may “borrow” the weather’s impending change as much as the distant mountain scenery.

The range of themes addressed in this book, and the variety in the ways they are addressed (philosophical, historical, anthropological, and so on), demonstrate that the topic of gardening is as fecund as many gardens themselves are. Readers will especially benefit from a concreteness of discussion that they might not have expected from a book with “philosophy” in the title. Some of the essays are focused on specific gardens or particular figures in garden history, and the discussion in nearly all of them either draws on or is applied to actual gardens, from Versailles to Dumbarton Oaks, from Cyrus the Great’s to Vita Sackville-West’s.

The book as a whole confirms that, during the last couple of decades, serious (which isn’t to say solemn) writing on gardens has come of age, and furthers the aim – as the editors of an earlier volume of garden writing put it – of “bringing gardens and horticulture into the realm of intelligent public discourse … over our relationship with our environment.”4 Better, perhaps, the book illustrates and contributes to a renaissance of serious garden writing. The failure, for the most part, of twentieth-century philosophers, cultural historians, and social scientists seriously to attend to the garden was a caesura, a lapse. In earlier centuries, in the traditions of both East and West, the garden occupied an honorable and important place in “the realm of intelligent public discourse” – a discourse engaged in, of course, by philosophers, who had yet to fall victim to the professionalization and specialization that philosophy was to undergo during the last century. One will, admittedly, still hear occasional voices greeting a book on philosophy and gardens with cries of “Get real! What next? Philosophy and safety-pins?” But these are voices of ignorance – ignorance of a long tradition of philosophical dialogue on gardens – and voices in a very narrow register, unable to encompass a broader, richer, more civilized range of philosophical discourse. I would be very surprised if readers of this enterprising and imaginatively devised book were able, at the end of it, to listen to such voices with any sympathy.

NOTES

1 Fernando Caruncho, “The Spirit of the Geometrician,” in T. Richardson and N. Kingsbury (eds.) Vista: The Culture and Politics of Gardens (London: Frances Lincoln, 2005), p. 111.

2The Letters of Pliny the Younger, ed. B. Radice (London: Penguin, 1963), pp. 43, 112.

3 Henri Cueco, Conversations With My Gardener, trans. G. Miller (London: Granta, 2005), p. 3.

4 T. Richardson and N. Kingsbury (eds.) Vista: The Culture and Politics of Gardens (London: Frances Lincoln, 2005), p. 2.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost I must thank all the contributors for their enthusiasm for this project, for their helpful suggestions, and for their patience with my editorial interventions. We haven’t met but from their essays I have a picture of them in my mind, tending their vegetables, walking in Central Park, watching the fireflies, and digging up the remains of ancient civilizations. It should be noted that they come from a wide range of professions: contributors work in philosophy, art history, classics, archeology, anthropology, design, archival studies, and history; and in various botanical gardens and the National Trust. This has been an ambitious interdisciplinary project and I must thank all who had faith in it, particularly the series editor, Fritz Allhoff, whose enthusiasm for this book and for the series as a whole is infectious. Thanks also to Jeff Dean and Tiffany Mok from Wiley-Blackwell.

It’s true, gardening is the new rock ‘n’ roll, and I must thank those who have initiated me into the heady world of shed construction, composting, seed catalogues, pruning, mulching, and potting on. Here I think back to gardens past. To my grandmother, her giant Yukka and gooseberry patch; to Mont’s regimental roses at Burnside, and to mum’s heathers and the various cuttings she gave me that started my gardening off in earnest in the backyard of Armadillo – I hope the fritillaries and day lilies are still thriving there. Since then, raised beds have replaced scavenged chimney pots and greenhouses have taken the place of windowsills. For helping me and Lucy keep (almost) on top of our patch I must thank Paul and Betty for the passing of advice and tools over the garden fence, and especially Tom and Barbara for their unstinting dedication to watering our greenhouse when we are away, garden center trips, and the supply of homemade cakes. (Actually, another Tom and Barbara have probably also been influential, those of 1970s sitcom fame: I think I wanted to be like them when I grew up, and I’m getting there!) Thanks also to Henry and Jones for keeping the rat population at bay, and to Dyl for putting up with the intrusion on his football pitch.

The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:

“This is the garden: colours come and go,” Copyright 1925, 1953 © 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage, from Complete Poems: 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Dan O’Brien

DAN O’BRIEN

PLANTING THE SEED

An Introduction to Gardening – Philosophy for Everyone

This is the garden: colours come and go Frail azure fluttering from night’s outer wing Strong silent greens serenely lingering, Absolute lights like baths of golden snow. This is the garden: pursed lips do blow Upon cool flutes within wide glooms, and sing (of harps celestial to the quivering string) invisible faces hauntingly and slow. This is the garden. Time shall surely reap And on Death’s blade lie many a flower curled, In other lands where songs be sung; Yet stand They were enraptured, as among The slow deep trees perpetual of sleep Some silver-fingered fountain steals the world.

(“This is the garden,” E. E. Cummings)

Gardening is not just a pleasant thing to do on a Saturday afternoon, or a way to reduce one’s supermarket bill – gardening is a human activity that engages with core philosophical questions concerning, among other things, human wellbeing, wisdom, the nature of time, political power and ideals, home, aesthetic experience, metaphysics, and religion. That is what the contributors to this volume aim to show, and we hope that the gardener will find rumination on these questions rewarding and illuminating, either at the end of a hard day’s digging or as something to think about while deadheading the sweet peas.

The book is also an invitation for philosophers to look down from their ivory tower to the gardens around its base. There they will find this characteristically human practice of cultivating plants for their beauty, arranging them in varying degrees of formality, and accompanying the show with similarly ordered or not so ordered herbs, fruit, and vegetables. Perhaps the first thing to notice about this activity is that a terrific amount of hard work seemed to go into growing, say, those basil plants. There was the disinfecting of the greenhouse, the transportation of compost, and the purchase, planting, and watering of seed. The potting on followed … all looked good, but then the seedlings started to wilt. Thinning them out and pinching the stems back did not lead, as the book said it would, to luscious, bushy Mediterranean plants. Nevertheless the gardener – well, this was me earlier this summer – seemed pleased with the handful of leaves he clutched on the way back to the kitchen. The spaghetti in pesto was delicious. But, the philosopher wonders, why on earth all the effort? A jar of pesto would have cost very little and taken ten minutes to buy. Why do people go through all this effort? In short, why do they garden? The reader will find various answers to this question in these pages.