Published in 1908, this collection of seventeenth-century garden writing features works and excerpts by William Temple, Abraham Cowley, Thomas Browne, Andrew Marvell, and John Evelyn. “Gardening is eclectic and cosmopolitan”, writes Albert Forbes in his editorial introduction, “more perhaps than in any other art”. As such, the collection contains the expected discussions of landscaping and plant selection but also includes assorted reveries about almost everything under the phytophilic’s sun. As Forbes summarizes: “Everywhere in Life and Letters the Spirit of the Time and of the Garden walk hand in hand and cast their spell over souls and bodies”.

Abraham Cowley’s “The Garden” is written in verse and advances a biblical argument: “God the first garden made, and the first city, Cain.” Accordingly, we can get back to Eden, in a way, by eschewing the fallen architecture of Abel’s betrayer and cultivating a garden of our own. It is in such a landscape that Cowley comes “To thank the gods, and to be thought, myself almost a god.” The collection features multiple texts by Thomas Browne (whom Forbes calls a “diffuse, desultory, and centrifugal” writer). In “Observations upon Several Plants Mentioned in Scripture”, he explores God’s garden with a botanist’s eye. He quibbles over whether the burning bush was “a rubus or bramble” and argues that the “husks” given unto swine in Luke were likely the fruit of “the siliqua tree”, a species of Syrian Carob. In “The Garden of Cyrus”, Browne advances his mystical vision of the interconnection of art, nature, and the Universe via numerous patterns and symbols including the number five, the quincunx, and the figure X. “Garden Cuttings from [John] Evelyn’s Diary” returns us to the ground beneath our feet. In a series of detailed entries from the journal he kept for sixty-six years, we travel with Evelyn across England, France, and Italy as he encounters follies, exotic varieties, and other trappings of the modern garden, including: “a most inextricable labyrinth”, “an hollow statue which gave voice and utter’d words”, and Browne’s curious egg collection, sourced from “all the foule and birds he could procure . . . cranes, strokes, eagles, and variety of water-foule.”

Reading William Temple’s “The Gardens of Epicurus” is like walking winding paths through a densely planted grove. From time to time, he slows our pace and pulls down a particularly ripe specimen for consideration. “Of plums”, we are told, “the best are St. Julian, St. Catharine, white and blue Pedrigon, Queen-mother, Sheen-plum, and Cheston.” Occasionally he wanders off the paving stones completely and into the thickets of unrooted imagination. In a famous passage, he proceeds to describe the supposedly Chinese garden aesthetic of sharawadgi (a word he himself seems to have coined): the cultivation of botanical beauty “without any order or disposition of parts”. In the eighteenth century, as Temple’s beloved geometric French garden fell out of fashion in England, it was something like sharawadgi that came to the fore in the English landscape garden’s structured informality.