Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

by Robert Pogue Harrison

Book Overview

Humans have long turned to gardens--both real and imaginary--for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh's garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens.

With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226317900
• ISBN13: 9780226317908
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Thought provoking and insightful

Like Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, Gardens is a book to linger over and come back to. The breadth of knowledge Harrison brings to cultivating a plot of soil enriches the experience of gardening itself. More importantly, it offers important insights into our relationship as a culture to the earth and how we might deepen that relationship.

Gardens as a lens into the human spirit

Another fine meditation and critical study by Robert Pogue Harrison of man's relationship to nature, this time through the lens of "the garden". From the Garden of Eden, to Japanese zen gardens, to manicured formal gardens, to tiny spaces in homeless encampments, Mr. Harrison explores mankind's need for and relationship to gardens -- their importance as quiet spaces in which we can relate to nature on a human scale, as retreats for quieting and refilling the spirit, as sources of literary and romantic inspiration, as windows into biological process and truth. His writing is at once scholarly, poetic, thought provoking and insightful, and is best read slowly, both to savor Pogue's beautiful language and to allow his ideas to take root and flower in your mind.

Professor Harrison again provides insight

As in "Dominion of the Dead," Professor Harrison has taken a topic (this time Gardens and our relations to them) and interwoven scholarship with stirring judgment. I am no gardener; this book can resonate with all who take up work and action to cultivate anyone or anything. The chapter on Care was particularly poignant. For example, on page 27, Harrison writes: "Care is accustomed to act, to take the initiative, to stake its claims, yet powerlessness and even helplessness are as intrinsic to the lived experience of care as the latter's irrepressible impulse to act, enable, nurse, and promote." If you have read and were moved by "Dominion of the Dead," or if you are one of the many listeners of his insightful radio show/podcast called "Entitled Opinions," or if you are one of us seeking for bold thinkers willing to powerfully interpret our current human condition, then sit down somewhere comfortable and open this important book.

A garden of delights

Harrison is insightful -- and inciteful -- in his exploration of the various kinds of gardens that are important to our sense of who we are, our self-understanding as members of Western civilization. He is erudite in the wealth of literary and philosophical materials from which he draws, but he writes clearly so what he has to say is very accessible to a reader without specialized knowledge about those materials. He has profound things to say about everyday gardens, about gardening in the literal sense of creating a place where flowers or other plants grow. He develops sometimes startling ideas about the meaning of gardens such as Eden's (thanks to Eve, we escaped its dehumanizing confines), Louis XIV's (Versailles imposes a deadening abstract human construct on the living vitality of nature), and Paradise (to be avoided). The garden of Epicurus is his recommended kind of garden: where we can learn patience, hope, and gratitude - the virtues that will save us from the frenetic denaturing extremes of our contemporary way of living. This is a wonderful book, as were Harrison's earlier books on the forest and on death.

Scholarly and Deep

Brilliant and revealing. BEAR IN MIND THAT THIS IS ABOVE ALL, A SCHOLARLY, IN-DEPTH WORK. I'll need to read it again to let the major points sink in (I'm no scholar). The treatment of the Eden myth is remarkably thoughtful.