“What emerges most insistently from all this diversity of matter is a sense of the garden as the scene of those privileged moments when the self takes possession of the world, a sense of that interpenetration of self and world which is given its historically most definitive statement in the story of Eden.”1
Comito does not offer these as rival descriptions. The sentence moves from one to the other. The garden is the scene in which the self takes possession of the world, and this possession is then understood as an interpenetration whose fullest image is Eden. Later in the same passage, mind and thing meet in an equilibrium in which each constitutes the other. The difficulty is already there. Possession seems to place the world beneath the hand; interpenetration refuses to leave the hand unchanged.
It would be easy to rescue the first word by the second. We might say that Comito only means possession in some chastened sense: participation, custody, belonging. The garden would then become a convenient moral picture in which ownership discovers that it was stewardship all along. But Renaissance gardens do not permit so innocent a reading. They could display command as magnificently as they disclosed harmony. Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este wanted at Tivoli a palace adequate to his status; the garden attached to it became an extraordinary hydraulic achievement, making captured and channelled water perform as fountains, cascades and automata.2 The garden can announce that the world is intelligible and beautiful while also announcing who has the means to command it.
Comito himself approaches this harder sense of possession. In his account of the Renaissance “redemption of space”, sacred space becomes increasingly available to human action. Surrounding space ceases to be merely what contains a building and becomes a positive medium to be shaped and given form.3 This is not yet domination. Neither is it innocent of power. Someone owns the ground. Someone controls the gate, commands labour, diverts water, chooses what will grow and what will be removed. The deed remains in the drawer. To redescribe ownership as entrustment does not abolish any of this. If custody is to mean anything, it must begin after possession has been allowed its hard meaning.
The garden nevertheless complicates possession because what is possessed is alive. Comito says that gardens are more than models of the mind’s relation to the world: their material is the living substance of nature.4 A stone may remain where it is set. A rosemary bush answers almost immediately. It turns towards light, thickens, flowers, becomes woody, drops seed, suffers from water or its lack. A cypress placed in the wrong ground does not consent to the design by remaining picturesque.
The gardener acts, sometimes forcibly, but never supplies the principle by which the plant lives. A branch is tied; the branch grows. Earth is opened; roots enter it. Water is given; the plant takes what it can. Cultivation therefore brings two kinds of agency into contact, though not on equal terms. One can uproot the other.
The gardener gives place without giving life.
Comito calls gardening “the art of environment”. Garden form gives material expression to a judgement about how the human being stands in relation to the world.5 The judgement is made in walls, paths, shade, distance, drainage and exposure. This plant here; that tree further away. A rose against a south-facing wall is not an allegory. It is a claim about where this living thing may flourish.
At this point Comito turns to Augustine. In the thirteenth book of the Confessions, bodies seek their places according to their weight. Fire rises; stone falls. Things disordered remain restless until restored to order. Augustine then turns the image towards love: pondus meum amor meus; my love is my weight.6
Comito takes from this the possibility that created space may afford things the places in which they come to fruition. Hence his remarkable suggestion that all space is, at least potentially, Edenic.7 In a garden the thought becomes immediately attractive. Good planting does involve something like discernment of proper place. The lemon tree needs sun; the fern needs shade; roots require room; a sapling placed too close to masonry may spend fifty years making an early error visible.
But Augustine should be allowed to trouble Comito here. His argument does not end in the discovery of a satisfactory earthly location. “Our rest is our place”, he writes in the same passage, but the motion of love is finally towards the peace of God. The image of natural place opens into eschatology. The creature’s proper rest is not secured by having found an agreeable corner of the saeculum.
The distinction matters because a garden can very nearly persuade us otherwise. It is one of the forms in which a damaged world can appear gathered, bounded and fecund. Things are put in order. Water reaches roots. Fruit ripens. A person who has wandered can sit beneath a tree planted by someone who knew where shade would fall decades later. Comito’s intuition of potentially Edenic space names something real about such experiences. Augustine prevents the experience from closing upon itself. The garden may place us, but it cannot give the rest towards which love finally bears us.
This reserve changes the meaning of its wall. Comito gives great weight to the enclosure of Paradise. Eden is not bounded only because humanity has been driven from it. In the Christian traditions he gathers, enclosure belongs to its integrity: Paradise is set apart, encircled, a place whose boundary makes tranquillity and coherence possible.8
There is truth here. A young tree is fenced because animals will strip it. A gate is closed because what has been planted can be trampled. A monastery wall may make silence possible. Not every boundary is an act of fear, and the refusal of all enclosure can leave vulnerable things exposed to the strongest thing passing through.
Yet integrity, safekeeping and tranquillity are dangerous words. They are also words by which households and institutions hide what would disturb their peace. A wall may protect what is within; it may protect the person who controls the wall from being seen.
The difference cannot lie in the custodian’s intention alone. A protective boundary must be answerable to the flourishing of what it encloses. It cannot make the keeper immune from scrutiny, nor prevent legitimate claims from crossing it. A wall becomes suspect when the peace it preserves is chiefly the peace of the one who possesses the keys. Secrecy can imitate sanctuary very closely.
This gives a harder meaning to keeping. Keeping is not benevolence exercised by the powerful. It is power placed under judgement by the good of something whose existence does not originate in the keeper. The garden fence may be opened because the plant needs tending; the institutional boundary may need to be breached because what it calls protection has become concealment. A custodian cannot be the sole judge of whether his custody is good.
Nor is gardening itself gentle enough to rescue the metaphor. Gardeners kill. Weeds are pulled before they seed. Diseased branches are cut away. Seedlings are thinned so that others have room. A plant flourishing in the wrong place may be removed precisely because it flourishes too well.
This is one reason organic metaphors become dangerous when carried directly into human affairs. Institutions also speak of health, growth, pruning, scarce resources and the good of the whole. Once a person can be imagined as the weed whose removal allows the garden to flourish, cultivation has ceased to be an innocent moral vocabulary. There are decisions in human life about finite attention and resources, but no administrator acquires a gardener’s right to identify unwanted persons as excessive growth. The metaphor has reached its boundary.
That limit tells us something important about custody. The good keeper does not merely know how to intervene. He must know where the authority contained in the image of keeping ceases. The fact that one may cut a rose for the sake of the rose does not establish a general law of persons.
Robert Pogue Harrison brings another limit, this time from beneath. The Dominion of the Dead asks what it means that human beings bury their dead and continue to inhabit places with them. Graves, houses, monuments, images and inherited names keep predecessors within the world of the living. For Harrison, burial is not merely disposal of remains; the buried dead become part of the ground from which later generations receive a past and imagine a future.9
The garden makes that dominion almost embarrassingly material. Its soil is already full of death. Leaves fall, roots rot, insects decompose, compost darkens into what will feed another season. The gardener works this matter with a body moving towards the same end. The resemblance must not be sentimentalised: human burial is not composting, and Harrison’s dead are not important because their bodies happen to fertilise soil. They remain through memory, name, obligation, inheritance and the cultural work of burial. Yet the earth under the gardener’s hand refuses the fantasy of a proprietor standing outside mortality. The owner is temporary.
This also changes what inheritance means. Someone may have planted the old tree; someone may have raised the wall. Even a garden newly made enters forms received from others: grafts, cultivars, pruning practices, names, tools, stories of what belongs where. Possession begins halfway through things. What is called my garden has a past that was never mine and a future over which the possessive gives no guarantee.
Augustine and Harrison therefore press upon Comito from different directions. Augustine refuses to identify successful placement with final rest. Harrison refuses to identify present possession with final tenure. Between them, the garden becomes neither a recovered Eden nor merely a piece of property. It is a temporary field of responsibility within a world received from before and relinquished before its end.
This returns us to Comito’s difficult word without cleansing it. Possession can dominate. The Renaissance garden can make beauty out of command and call the result harmony. Enclosure can protect life and also conceal violence. Cultivation can give a living thing the conditions of flourishing and can kill what stands in the gardener’s chosen way. None of these ambiguities disappears when possession is renamed custody.
But possession may nevertheless place the possessor under judgement. To say mine is to become answerable for what happens here: whether the soil is exhausted, whether water is hoarded, whether the wall protects or hides, whether living things are attended to as having goods not exhausted by the owner’s desire. The possessive creates powers, but it can also expose obligations.
A garden can therefore teach something less comforting than belonging. It teaches that place matters while withholding final rest; that boundaries may be necessary while remaining morally dangerous; that care exercises power and must therefore accept judgement; that what is kept was never given life by its keeper; and that the keeper himself will leave.
The garden is not Eden returned. It is one of the places where the desire for Eden becomes material enough to be tested. We keep the garden for a while. The garden does not keep us.