What is a garden?

Chacun à son gout

Introduction

What could be more natural than for a gardener (or anyone for that matter) to ask: What is a garden? An innocent enough question but it would, perhaps, be foolhardy to try and give an answer. Down the ages horticultural writers have penned hilarious and apposite words on this topic: they could be reproduced here and have us all rolling in the aisles – but let’s actually give this one a go, just for the mental exercise.

From the outset it is not difficult to predict that there will be no simple and precise answer to our question. But this does not mean the question cannot be asked, or that the journey of exploration will be unproductive – it can be a voyage of discovery.  A walk in a garden does not necessarily have a destination, it is the sights along the way that make it worthwhile. But be warned, this article will be hard work, so please be patient: you must roll up your sleeves and work up an intellectual sweat. Only if you are prepared to join with me in making a real effort yourself can you return to your daily routine tired, but happy!

In this article I will go back to first principles by examining the origin of the word ‘garden’, as well as other key plant and garden words, then tackle the problem of definition before, in a second article, delving into the complicated relationship between gardens and meaning – how we explain the relationship between our gardens and what goes on in our minds. As part of this journey we will also be wrestling with horticulture’s most fundamental philosophical question: why is it that humans have, from the time of the first settled societies, placed so much importance on gardens . . . a question about the relationship between gardens and human nature.

Etymology

The word ‘garden’ is used as both a noun and a verb. Here we are concerned with the noun, although later we will be examining what it is ‘to garden’.

Perhaps we can get some insight into what a garden is by looking at the derivation of the word itself, its etymology. Peering into the distant past we find that the word ‘garden’ is of ancient origin, derived from the Old English ghordos, an Indo-European word for ‘enclosure’ from which we obtain the English words ‘yard’ and ‘orchard’. We can see this common origin in other modern European languages, the German garten, French jardin, and Italian giardino.  But we can step back further in time to the  Old English geard which is derived from Proto-Germanic gardaz, from Proto-Indo-European gÿórdÿos (yard, enclosure, court).  From similar origins we have the Old Frisian garda, Old Saxon gard, gardo, Dutch gaard, Old High German gart (obsolete German Gart), Old Norse (Icelandic , Swedish and Danish gård), Gothic (gards). The old Indo-European root is also the source of the Latin hortus, the Ancient Greek (khórtos), Proto-Slavic gord (Old Church Slavonic, Russian (town)), Lithuanian gardas, Albanian gardh (fence).^[1][2]

From a different linguistic route we have the ancient Persian word for ‘enclosure’ as pairidaeza, (pairi-around, daÿza-wall) translated into the Hebrew as pardes, a word encompassing both hunting parks and walled gardens and which, with the translation of the Bible into Greek, became paradeisos from which are derived the English words ‘park’ and, of course, ‘paradise’.^[3]

From the etymology of the word ‘garden’ it is clear that, historically at least, it is the idea of enclosure that most closely captures what it is to be a garden, which is not surprising when we consider that early gardens would have needed protection from not only rain, wind, the elements and possibly other people but, more importantly, both wild and domesticated animals. Perhaps today the actual structural barrier as, say, a wall, fence or hedge, is of slightly less importance, although the idea of a garden as a ‘bounded space’ remains relevant.

We get an indication of the many different kinds of early gardens from Latin scholars in the period of the Roman empire and after. From them we have not only the word hortus, garden (and therefore the word ‘horticulture’), but also: hortulus, little garden (the Domesday Book of 1086 mentions both); hortus conclusus, an enclosed or cloistered garden; hortus siccus, a dry garden (a collection of pressed plants or herbarium); hortus academicus, an educational, demonstration, or Botanic garden; hortus amoenus, a beautiful or pleasing garden; hortus amorem a garden for love. A gardener in a medieval monastery was called a hortulanus.

While engaging with linguistics we might consider the origins of a few related words: the Latin Middle Age word herba, meaning a plant of any kind, including trees, is a word derived from herbarius (plants) as opposed to bestiaries (animals, and not to be confused with a bestiarus who was a Roman gladiator who fought animals in the arena). The word ‘botany’ comes from the ancient Greek word βοτάνη meaning ‘pasture’, ‘grass’, or ‘fodder’, although the Greek word itself is derived from βόσκειν ‘to feed or graze’ before being applied in more recent times first to the study of herbs used in medicine and then today to mean, more or less, ‘plant science’. Perhaps the Middle English word wyrt or wort, deserves a mention, familiar in names like Stonewort or liverwort. But I am getting off topic.

To this inventory must be added the Sumerian word for garden which is kiri (noun ki – place, verb – ru, to send forth shoots, buds and blossoms) which is likely the root of the Assyrian kirû (garden, grove or tree plantation) and kirimÿhu (pleasure garden), in turn probably related to the Hebrew kar (pasture, enclosed pasture), karmel (plantation) and kerem (vineyard), all derived from the verb khr, to dig. I mention this last suite of ancient words because they are probably the oldest words we know denoting gardens.^[3]

The problem of definition

An enclosed piece of ground devoted to the cultivation of flowers, fruit or vegetables
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED)

Any serious critical examination of ideas (and that, surely, is what we are trying to do here) – legal, academic or other – must start by defining its important terms. Even the writer of the Wikipedia article on ‘garden’ had to start somewhere.

The question What is a garden? is seeking either an explanation or definition. A definition seems more formal and restrictive than an explanation which relates more to our general understanding of a word. Be that as it may, our object here is essentially both and, for simplicity, since we are trying to be brief, I will use the word ‘definition’.

Professor of philosophy David Cooper of Durham University in his book A Philosophy of Gardens (2006) sees no reason to define the word ‘garden’ because ‘ . . . nearly every English speaker knows what it means’. After all, discussion can proceed without a definition because the main purpose of a definition is to assist with marginal cases – and atypical gardens need not affect our broad concept of what a garden is. For Professor Cooper any general definition would do, provided it is  ‘. . . capturing reasonably well people’s [sic] everyday implicit knowledge of what gardens are’. However, Professor Cooper then rejects the SOED definition (given above) as not acceptable because ‘an unenclosed place, full only of trees, shrubs, and grass, might still unquestionably be a garden’.

Now we have a problem. We can perhaps accept the professor’s general point about the limited value of trying to define a garden in precise terms. We can also accept his specific point about the SOED definition, adding the observation that the SOED definition seems to have strangely omitted to mention trees. Maybe this is because historically the original Roman gardens were treeless kitchen gardens.  It is also tempting to reduce the definition to its bare bones and define a garden as a ‘bounded area of cultivated plants’ – but this allows confusion of the plants in gardens with the cultivated crops of agriculture and production horticulture.

All this discussion demonstrates the difficulty of definition. Even so, we have already seen from our etymological analysis the close association of the word ‘garden’ with the notion of ‘enclosure’. To remove this semantic association from our understanding of ‘garden’ is unacceptable. The Professor’s objection to the SOED definition could hardly illustrate more clearly the difficulty of deciding what is typical and atypical and the imprecision of what we mean by ‘implicit knowledge’– and therefore both the need for, and danger of, a definition.

To define a term is to draw attention to its exceptions and therefore its ambiguity: but to not define is to invite confusion and misunderstanding (as we see above). With this in mind I think it is worthwhile pursuing the goal of definition.

Stipulative definition

Ideally a definition is stipulative: it states those conditions which together are both necessary and sufficient to tell us precisely what a garden is. Either a given space is a garden or it is not a garden – no grey areas, no ‘ifs’, or ‘buts’.

Is this possible for the idea of a garden? To make a decision we need to look at borderline cases.

Atypical gardens

Consider the following cases and decide whether you think the word ‘garden’ is appropriate to describe them: a miniature garden scene inside a matchbox, made of artificial materials and called a Zen Garden; an actual Zen garden consisting of rocks and raked pebbles but no plants; a large areas of crops called a market garden; meadow gardens of various kinds where, for example, wild seed is sown into lightly managed land; a block of land that has been enclosed, totally cleared of vegetation, replanted with indigenous stock and then managed by a local authority; an unenclosed totally unmanaged abandoned site which was clearly once a garden; some public parks, reserves, burial grounds and the like; the apparent oxymoron ‘zoological gardens’; indoor collections and aggregations of plants of various kinds; a space of managed plant matter that is tended by a non-human organism, as in the garden galleries of an ant’s nest.

Gardens may be deliberately designed (as with the ha-ha wall that allowed an unimpeded view of what lay outside the garden) to incorporate the surrounding landscape thereby obscuring any boundaries and blurring the distinction between what is man-made and man-managed and what is nature, maybe also what is ‘wild’ and what is cultivated, in any case removing the sense of enclosure. Is an Aussie suburban quarter-acre block with a neglected shrubbery, overgrown lawn, chipped pottery gnome or two, and a rusting car body still a garden? To suggest otherwise would probably cause offence to its owner as well as defying local common usage of the word ‘garden’, although it should be noted that in Australia, as in Canada and America, the concept of ‘garden’ passes imperceptibly into the concept ‘yard’. In what circumstances might we refer to cemeteries, parks, reserves and other managed public land be called gardens?

There is a further point to be made here – that the meaning of a word is its use. We would do better to look for the way the word is used in everyday living language rather than trying to preserve it museum-like in a dictionary definition. We must certainly address the problem of shifting semantics. Some people might regard the magnificent English landscape style gardens designed by Lancelot ‘Capability’ as superb gardens. But place a young person of today, with no training in garden history, in such a place and they might think that the word ‘garden’ is totally inappropriate for such a vast open space. Then we have an example given by Professor Cooper of the Californian garden designer Thomas Church who noted that gardens were becoming more places to ‘live in’ and less places to be ‘looked at’.

These examples of atypical gardens – gardens without plants, gardens without borders, gardens with no management regime, and gardens in name only – persuade us that gardens are so diverse in their content, form, intention, and use that any attempt to restrictively define them in terms of a restricted set of characteristics that are both necessary and sufficient to make them all members of the set of objects we call ‘garden’, seems doomed to failure.

Our understanding of the word ‘garden’ is not simple and precise, it is more like a collection of ideas that gather together and, when they reach a critical mass or a family resemblance, most of us are happy to call a garden: it is like a blurry semantic cloud.  In spite of all this it does seem, as Professor Cooper says, that we do have a common understanding of ‘garden’ and that, like good lexicographers we can try and keep our definition up-to-date while paying attention to historical and other usages. We must accept however that we will not be able to provide an absolutely precise stipulative definition we can only address characteristics that are true in most cases.

From what has already been said we can add three further important characteristics of gardens. Firstly, they contain plants (remember we are not concerned with atypical gardens here), secondly they are under human management, and thirdly that the garden is therefore almost always associated with a house or building where that human management is located. Again, we can think of exceptions like garden allotments away from residents but these are the exception.

The idea of a garden as a managed area of land is emphasised by English garden writer Hugh Johnson,^[4] although we have noted that gardens are not always primarily aesthetic in intention (more of that later):

What, if anything, do the infinity of different traditional and individual ideas of a garden have in common? They vary so much in purpose, in size, in style and content that not even flowers, or even plants at all, can be said to be essential. In the last analysis there is only one common factor between all gardens, and this is the control of nature by man. Control, that is, for aesthetic reasons. …. The essence is control. Without constant watchful care a garden – any garden – rapidly returns to the state of the country all around it
Johnson 1979

So we have decided that a precise stipulative definition for ‘garden’ is not possible.

Since we can combine the ideas of management and plants by using the word ‘cultivated’ we can now produce a preliminary definition: ‘a garden is a bounded space usually associated with a house and containing cultivated plants’. However, this is very like a lexical definition and we have already decided that we can do better than that.

Precising definition

As serious horticulturists what we are after is a definition that extends the lexical definition by including further information that fleshes out the idea, giving the reader a greater depth of understanding without introducing unnecessary confusion or complication. Definitions like these are called ‘precising’ definitions and that is where we are heading.
Surely this kind of definition has been attempted many times by institutions and people involved in horticulture?

Two of the world’s most respected institutions of gardening and horticulture are the English Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) and the (now defunct) American Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium of Cornell University. What do (did) they have to say?

The English RHS have actually avoided producing definitions, perhaps because it appears unnecessary or maybe through the challenge of consensus: in any case the world’s premier horticultural institution is silent on the true nature of its core business. A definition is similarly absent from English seminal works like the Oxford Companion to Gardens (1986) and New Dictionary of Gardening. Understandably authors are wary of the difficulties and pitfalls of such attempts.

The Bailey Hortorium had this to say:

‘In its historical significance a garden is a plant-growing area of small or limited dimensions, usually enclosed and connected with a residence. Ornamental subjects, fruits and vegetables for household use, and plantings constituting part of the setting for a home or building are the essential components of it, and gardening is the rearing, establishing and maintenance of the plants and care of the area devoted to them.’
Hortus Third (1976) p. 494

This definition adds little to what we have already discovered, but it does raise the issue of garden ‘significance’ which raises the possibility of a whole host of garden ‘significances’.

Key garden criteria

As we work on a precising definition it becomes evident that we need to find the best possible criteria, categories or ‘headings’ under which to organise our information. We need a taxonomy of garden characteristics, and because the concept of garden is complex it seems we can organise these categories in many ways.

Earlier it was mentioned that Professor Cooper showed little interest in a dictionary definition. This was partly because dictionary definitions tended to describe gardens in purely physical terms. Professor Cooper’s was much more interested in what we are trying to do with our gardens and how we respond to them, their significance … he wanted to explore what gardens mean to us. Professor Cooper has given us a very useful distinction. On the one hand all gardens consist of an arrangement of physical objects in space (it is this aspect that is emphasised by dictionary definitions and brief garden descriptions). But, on the other hand, there is another aspect to gardens and that is what goes on in our minds in relation to these physical objects distributed in space: our intentions when we laid out the garden, how we feel when we look at it, our memories and perceptions and so on, the affect of gardens. This is an important aspect of gardens that we must take into account in any definition and we shall explore this idea in article two, but for the time being

For the purposes of definition we want to keep our terms and categories as simple and accessible as possible without compromising our intentions: as gardeners we want a definition that is practical. So, for simplicity we can refer to the ‘distribution of the physical objects of the garden in space’ as its ‘structure’ and the ‘various mental processes that make up the garden’s meaning’ as its ‘function’, while acknowledging that there may not be a perfect congruence with our everyday use of these words.

Let’s ‘unpack’ what we mean by ‘structure’ in more detail so that we can extend our definition, making it more informative and maybe even more precise.

What is a garden? – Garden Categories

Physical structures

How are we to categorise the various physical components of a garden? What we are after here is a set of the simplest and most precise categories that neatly and simply classify the physical objects we might encounter in a garden.  One such breakdown distinguishes between ‘hard’ elements like paths, buildings, sculptures, and fences and ‘soft’ elements like plants. Though we can group kinds of plants in many ways one relatively simple taxonomy breaks them up into trees, shrubs and herbs, with maybe an emphasis on flowers, fruits, vegetables, herbs, and nuts.

Form, content and use

Greater or lesser attention is given to the arrangement of these hard and soft elements in space, the garden ‘form’, and this will depends to large extent on what the garden is used for, which is an aspect of garden ‘meaning’.

Let’s now summarise where what we have achieved so far because already we have made considerable headway. Firstly, it is maintained that for clarity any term requires explanation or definition and that attempting definition is worthwhile.  Secondly, it has been acknowledged that if we are to define what it is to be a garden then the definition must be a general definition, we cannot be concerned with all the minor exceptions which, though interesting and informative, would unduly complicate matters. Accepting this point we can also accept the self-evident fact that gardens are bounded spaces containing plants under human control or management.

‘A garden is a bounded space usually associated with a residence and containing cultivated plants. It consists of hard and soft landscape elements, the plants, such as trees, shrubs, flowers, fruits, herbs or vegetables’.

The meaning of ‘garden’

The physical components of gardens help us explain what it is to be a garden, but no list can be comprehensive for many reasons including: some components may be important for a particular time and place but hardly found in other contexts; concepts and terms differ between countries with different nuances of meaning; the sheer diversity of gardens make a definitive list impossible; garden objects vary, they evolve over time, and they may occur in a multitude of variations. Where would you find such a list?
The following is simply an aide memoire for those few people seeking such a list (. . . I was going to make this as complete as possible!).

Fork, hoe, rake, shears, spade, trowel
Flower bed, pavilion, pergola, trellis, turf seat, etc.

Gardens & economics

Garden historian Hyams (p. 322] makes an obvious but often ignored point that Gardens, as we know them, are surplus to necessity. They are therefore, as they have always been, the domain of people with the time to devote to their planning and organization, and the labor needed to create and maintain them. To produce gardens of any scale therefore involves the command of considerable forces of energy in the form of creative ideas, and manual labor – or, in simple terms, money.

Historically, those people possessing the luxury of excess over necessity in time, creativity, labor, and money have been the most privileged and influential within their communities – the pharaohs, princes and princesses, kings and queens, moghuls, czars, lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses, emperors and other assorted rulers and aristocrats. It is not surprising then that the history of gardening turns out in many ways to be simply part of the social history of the rich and powerful (see social ladder in The Great Chain of Being). 

But societies change. Today there are collective administrative bodies – like powerful corporations – or government authorities – like municipal councils, botanic gardens, or forestry commissions – that command large areas of public or private space. Sometimes small private companies are employed to carry out large design works.

In sum, gardens reflect social authority structures and, over time, there has been a shift from powerful individuals at the head of society to either government authorities or  public and private administrations.

‘The modern rich are not leaders in the arts they are followers . . . (Hyams, p. 324)’ and . . . the class of small clients for the garden artist is more numerous than ever before’.(p. 325].

Increasingly, more people desire a garden but are not prepared to sacrifice the time that it demands. We now have the small-scale paid gardeners and designers of various kinds creating gardens, not as ‘separate’ spaces but as a pleasing ambience for recreation and relaxation.

As we admire the creative genius of the glorious gardens and wealthy lifestyles of the past, it seems that there was a moment – sometime around the 1960s – when the horror of sprawling suburban mediocrity was drowning everything. We have certainly paid a price for greater social equality. But we do have choice, something unknown to our ancestors, and nowadays we can enjoy our own creative garden space, maintained by ourselves or not, while having access to simulacra of the great landscaped spaces of the wealthy of yester-year . . . our parks and botanical gardens. 

Gardens & human nature

‘What explains the immense significance that human beings locate in making and experiencing gardens?’
Professor David Cooper, A Philosophy of Gardens, 2006, p. 3

Professor Cooper, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Durham University in the United Kingdom, poses the above question as the ‘fundamental’ question about gardens.

As a philosopher of ‘meaning’^[1] Professor Cooper is at pains to point out that our appreciation of gardens cannot be simply reduced to our appreciation of art or of nature, nor is he concerned with a garden’s ‘scope, design and function‘ and he is not searching for any ‘historical, anthropological or biological significance’. He points out that his enjoyment of the view of an orchard from the refuge of a gazebo has nothing to do with what had survival value for prehistoric hunter-gatherers. What he is looking for in answering the question posed at the top of this page is something more – something akin to Francis Bacon’s observation in 1606 that gardening is ‘the purest of human pleasures’ or celebrity English gardener Alan Titchmarsh’s observation that, apart from having children, gardening is ‘the most rewarding thing in life’. He is asking what significance gardens have for people (I think).

Since appreciation of gardens appears to be a universal characteristic across cultures, then it seems reasonable to suggest that it is initiated by something that is within our human nature. If we are going to build an evidential foundation for this claim then we need some agreement about what we mean by human nature.

Cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker suggests that human nature is the ‘commonality of basic human responses across cultures … it encompasses our common pleasures and pains, our common methods of reasoning, and our common vulnerability to folly‘, it is the totality of ‘Universal patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour‘. Most importantly human nature is not something mystical. We lie within an intellectual tradition that has looked to many of the apparently unanswerable questions about human nature (for example, why do we seem flawed, imperfect, sinners? What does it all mean?) as questions that can only find a solution in religion and metaphysics.(See Meaning & purpose, human nature).

Our task now is, in principle, straightforward. We need to single out those universal characteristics of our human nature, our predispositions, that are triggered by or resonate with gardens and gardening.

I suspect that the number of factors we find will be many. This is an ongoing project but I will begin with just two: our response to space and time.

Why do gardens attract?

As the author of this article I have been engaged with gardens and horticulture all my life and for most of that time as an academic: a reflective gardener from a Botanic garden who has a vegetable patch at home, not much of a hands-on gardener or designer.

In Australia, where I live, I have often been told that more people engage in gardening than in following sport. If that is true then you should be impressed. This fact, together with the general observation that gardening has played a major role in human history ever since the first settled human communities, leaves me totally convinced of the importance of Professor Cooper’s fundamental question. I have often wondered why the subject of my study has held so many people in its thrall, myself included: to me its attraction is undeniable. You can understand why I sought out Professor Cooper’s book as soon as I saw it mentioned on the web. Here was a professional philosopher who was prepared to give my life-time study some long-denied serious thought.

So what is the significance of the garden according to Professor Cooper? It takes a while to get into the book but the professor does not shirk his task and he does give us an answer, there is a Poirot-style dénoument. The professor’s web site I believe summarises his thinking most succinctly:

‘The meaning of the garden is to be understood in terms of the garden as an epiphany of the relationship between creative human activity and the mysterious ‘source’ of the world’.^[2]

In the book:

‘Gardening or cultivation [is] a practice which, engaged in with an appropriate sensibility . . . embodies more saliently than any other practice the truth of the relation between human beings, their world, and the ‘ground’ from which the ‘gift’ of this world comes.^[3]

Even granting the list of professor provisos listed in the opening paragraph of this article this is not what I had expected.

I just do not find such a definition satisfying. But rather than engaging in an unproductive argument with the professor, which I would undoubtedly lose, let me just say simply that I think such an important question deserves other answers and different perspectives, and I would like to share my thoughts with you on this matter because I think there will be others who would also find Professor Cooper’s question enthralling even if his conclusions are unsatisfying.

Meaning & empiricism

I return to the original question posed by Professor Cooper and agree about its overwhelming importance. I suspect we have different approaches to ‘meaning’.  For me, when we ask an extremely broad question like ‘What is the meaning of life?’ it seems we can answer in two very general ways. Either we can say that meaning derives from outside ourselves, that meaning is given to the cosmos and our lives by some external factor like god(s) … or we can say that meaning is something that comes essentially from within us.

For me the answer must come from within us, it is we, in interaction with gardens, who give those gardens meaning. In the same way I think that the cosmos itself does not have meaning, that it is we who give it and our own lives meaning (See Meaning & purpose). Further, it is absolutely legitimate to ask what it is within us as human beings that gives rise to this meaning. What are the chords within our human nature that are struck by gardens? No doubt professor Cooper would regard such a quest as illegitimately biological but I think that the question he poses for us can and must have an empirical answer.

I agree with a review of this book written by Emeritus Professor of Philosophy Donald Crawford of the University of California at Santa Barbara who regards this book as being for philosopher-gardeners who have … assimilated Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty … and that we should be aware that it is addressed to ‘exemplary’ gardens and ‘thinking’ people … what Kant referred to as the supersensible substrate of nature.^[4] I agree with Professor Crawford’s assessment. When we talk of ‘exemplary’ gardens for ‘thinking’ people we are entering a rarified intellectual atmosphere that will not appeal to many when other explanations will do the job. Most gardeners are much more earthbound, both literally and metaphorically. We can answer this most important of questions empirically, without being mysterious, metaphysical, phenomenological, or transcendental.

Space & time

Our perceptions of the world are guided by the way our minds have evolved to structure it: we are born with innate mechanisms and predispositions. As philosopher Kant and others have observed, our minds structure the world along two dimensions, space and time. Natural phenomena within the world that excite our awareness of space and time give us pleasure, or at least a heightened sense of awareness of our ‘being within the world’. It makes us, perhaps unconsciously, aware of an interaction with what is in the physical world outside our minds.

Perhaps a good way of understanding this is to think of the way that sports engage our minds. The changing location of a ball in space and time as influenced by our actions has crucial outcomes. Almost all sports are tests of our space-time skills working on the physical world external to our bodies, perhaps in the manner of the ancient hunt of our ancestors. This direct and meaningful physical engagement with the ‘external’ world gives us a distinct sense of pleasure.

Time

As an art form it is a fusion of art and nature that engages the fourth dimension so that nothing is final, all is ephemeral, as all things change with the seasons and the organic characteristics of birth, growth, maturation, senescence, death, decay and renewal meet us in real time as well as changes in light, temperature etc. Gardens reveal the passage of time visually in a manner akin to the way music presents the passage of time audibly.^[5] As a living, transient art they present constant challenge, lacking the finality of painting and sculpture.  It can recall gardens of the past while incorporating the predilections of the present.  We are ‘in’ a garden and move through it, it is not ‘framed’ like a picture even though there may be vantage points and vistas.  We experience the ambience or atmosphere as a whole.

First published on the internet – 1 March 2019

. . . 20 July 2023 – minor edit

Whatever a garden is, it contributes to the cycling of elements critical to life

Image Courtesy of Rob Cross