Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature

CHAPTER THREE: THE IMAGE OF THE GARDEN

Chapter Three The Image of the Garden A garden locked is my sister, bride, a garden locked, a fountain sealed. . . . Awake, O North Wind, and come, O South Wind! Blow upon my garden that its spices may distil. —Song of Solomon THE BIBLICAL EDEN ("delight") is probably the valley of the Tigris in the vicinity of Babylon, a green strip extensively irrigated by an elaborate and ancient system of canals for nearly six thousand years. The Tigris and Euphrates are major river oases in the arid subequatorial regions of the Near East, part of the "fertile crescent," the home of civilization . Man was "created" here in the Hebrew-Christian paradise . "Paradise" is Persian for "garden." The uplands of this area, now central Iran, were probably where cereals and most hoofed animals were domesticated. These slopes were gripped simultaneously by deforestation, overgrazing, and soil erosion. Urban man and domestic animals together blighted the landscapes of the hilly flanks and intermontane valleys of Mesopotamia even then. In the flood plains of these rivers were parks, extensive, walled places into which animals were released to be hunted, where the nobility and its retinue went for sport and to escape the city heat in summer, living in large tents or summer ( 66 ) MAN IN THE LANDSCAPE palaces. In these grazed, open woodlands the court resided in cool spaciousness and directed the business of troop maneuvers , public festivities, legal trials, and religious observances. The practice of keeping exotic animals in the parks probably represents the origin of the zoo. Temples in ancient Persian cities were sacred artificial mountains covered by terraced hanging gardens. Perhaps the terraces were suggested by the irrigated valley; certainly they were practical solutions to the management of water. Here flowers composed islands of perfume in the horrendous summer stench of an equatorial city (as in Egypt, flowers had religious significance). Here the vacation was invented— retreat from the city during the worst season—and the custom of summertime evacuation of the royal palace spread east to the Orient. The Nile Valley, with its annual floods, was unsuitable for such extra-urban retreat. The Egyptian nobility made do with a small garden architecturally extended from the private villa. It was a small, protected, semi-sacred place for the cultivation of special plants. In these bowers the Egyptians wrote poetry, made love, and staged the important ceremonies of life and death. In scope the Egyptian garden was not greatly unlike that of the Moors, from which the Spanish medieval cloister grew, a distant inspiration to the great Italian Renaissance gardeners. The Greeks discovered the hunting parks during the Persian wars. Alexander was reportedly so enthralled that he set aside one quarter of Alexandria as park. The Persian parks had shrines and hermitages and long rows of planted trees. Although pre-Alexandrine sacred temples in Greece had not been placed in constructed landscapes, they were parts of an organic whole, oriented to evoke in ritual procession a profound sense of the protective anatomy of the Great Mother Earth. Perhaps the more detached, man-dominated, geometric parks of Media helped undermine the indigenous unity of the older Greek shrines whose sacred groves and mountains were parts of the living body of the Goddess and prepared the way for the later Greek thought of Aristotle and Plato that emphasized dichotomies separating man from nature . The Image of the Garden ( 67 ) Public parks were native to Greece, and small private gardens were common. The lyceum was a public park reserved for meditation, a quiet stroll, or discussion. The larger gymnasium, with its turf and trees, was a gaming field often in the environs of a sanctuary and sacred grove. The heart of the sacred grove was a spring, sometimes flowing from a cave or grotto. Even during the centuries of deforestation of Greece the trees of these shrines were spared. Burial in a sacred garden is an ancient privilege. Alexander was buried in a park; Israelite and Jewish kings looked upon burial in a grove as a final sign of status; Jesus was buried in Joseph's garden. According to Genesis, man was created in what amounts to a Mesopotamian hunting park. There lions, other predatory animals, and hoofed animals were kept, living peacefully , artificially fed. These parks also contained fruit. One can picture the yearning of inhabitants of drier regions such as the Hebrew pastoralists for such lush fabled places. These great parks resembled...