Brains with green fingers

‘Life is bristling with thorns,’ Voltaire observed in 1769, ‘and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.’ This is the remedy espoused by Candide at the end of Voltaire’s satirical novel, published ten years earlier, and the literal and metaphorical cultivating of gardens is the subject of Damon Young’s sprightly and stimulating little book. Young examines the relationship between gardening and philosophy in the life and work of 11 writers, from the 18th to the 20th century, topping and tailing these individual essays with a consideration of the Ancient Greeks.

What he calls the ‘plein-air tradition of philosophy’ starts with Aristotle giving lectures in the Lyceum, a park which included not only sports facilities and temples but the world’s first botanical garden. Gardens have always offered a retreat in which to think, often while taking gentle exercise at the same time, but Young argues that one reason they are intellectually stimulating is that they are ‘a fusion of two fundamental philosophical principles: humanity and nature’.