94 
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THE GODS WHO WALK IN GARDENS 
{Continued from page 58) 
they were our own. No gardens are so 
vivid to the mind’s eye. There are none 
we know better. Still across the centuries 
they bring a “perfume in the mention”. 
Their very names conjure up for us visions 
of Paradisal freshness and never-fading 
liloom. It is significant that the word 
“Paradise”, according to its derivation, 
means both a garden and heaven, that 
Eden which our first parents were foolish 
enough to lose, and that Garden of God, 
where the souls of the blessed commune 
together “in solemn troops and sweet 
societies”. “The Garden of the Hes- 
perides”! \Miat a picture, vivid as 
heraldic emblazonry, the mere words 
make. Just to say them over, and leave 
the rest to the imagination, is enough. 
Not even ^^'illiam Morris, with all his 
pictorial art, can add to, or even equal, 
the mere mention: 
a streamlet clear 
From out a marble basin there did flow, 
.\nd close by that a slim-trunked tree did 
grow, 
.\nd on a oough low o’er the water cold 
There hung three apples of red-gleaming gold; 
though, outside of Spenser, no poetry of 
any poet is more rich in lovely gardens, 
and in particular the garden of that little 
perfect song beginning: 
I know a little garden-close 
Set thick with lily and red rose, 
Where I would wander, if I might. 
From dewy dawn to dewy night, 
And have one with me wandering. 
Again “the Gardens of Alcinous”! 
How the loveliest episode in all romantic 
poetry, that of the meeting of Ulysses 
with the young princess Nausicaa, is gath¬ 
ered up in the mere saying of the words. 
But how deathlessly beautiful is Homer’s 
description: 
“And within the courtyard hard by the 
door is a great garden, of four plough- 
gates, and a hedge runs round on either 
side. And there grow tall trees blossom¬ 
ing, pear-trees and pomegranates, and 
apple-trees with bright fruit, and sweet 
figs, and olives in their bloom. The fruit 
of these trees never perisheth neither fail- 
eth, winter nor summer, enduring through 
all the year. Evermore the West \^’ind 
blowing brings some fruits to birth and 
ripens others. Pear upon pear waxes old, 
and apple on apple, yea and cluster ripens 
upon cluster of the grape, and fig upon 
fig. . . There, too, skirting the furthest 
line, are all manner of garden beds, 
planted trimly, that are perpetually fresh, 
and therein are two fountains of wa¬ 
ter. . .” 
.4nd, once more, “the Elysian Fields”, 
those gardens of the happy dead,—like 
to that other garden of Avilion, whose 
description Tennyson, indeed, borrowed 
from Homer: 
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, 
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies 
Deep meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard 
lawns 
And bowery hollows crown’d with summer 
sea . . . 
To speak of such gardens of the dead is 
to recall “the Gardens of Adonis”, which, 
however, were not gardens in the sense in 
which we have been using the word, but 
little portable gardens, baskets or pots 
filled with earth, “delicate gardens, ar- 
raj-cd in baskets of silver”, in which 
wheat, barley, lettuces, anemones and 
various other flowers were sown and 
tended for eight days, and then ceremo¬ 
nially carried out with images of the dead 
Adonis and cast into the sea. 
^^'ho knows but that when we buy such 
baskets of growing hyacinths and narcis¬ 
sus from the florist, to brighten and per¬ 
fume our city rooms and signalise our 
gladness at the return of the spring, we 
are not unconsciously perpetuating the 
worship of the beautiful youth beloved of 
Venus, untimely slain, and celebrating his 
annual resurrection. Such deep roots in 
the romantic past has the most prosaic 
present. Indeed modern anthropologists 
have surmised that in these “ Gardens of 
Adonis” we may be very near to the ori¬ 
gin of all gardens, which, they suggest, 
may have originated from the custom 
among primitive peoples of bringing of¬ 
ferings of fruit and seeds to the burial 
places, the grassy tumuli, of dead chief¬ 
tains. As these seeds germinated, blos¬ 
somed and fructified year by year, their 
lu.xuriance would be associated with the 
supernatural powers of the deified and 
beatified dead, and, from this chance sow¬ 
ing, there might well grow up the custom 
of planting groves and gardens about 
the temples of the gods, and the tombs of 
heroes Thus we return again to the pres¬ 
ence of gods in gardens, and the associa¬ 
tion of them with all manner of imm.ortal 
memories. 
How many memories of great men, 
kings and poets and philosophers, are 
associated with gardens. Says Solomon: 
“I made me gardens and orchards, and I 
planted in them of all kinds of fruits”. 
The great Persian conqueror Cyrus 
is now remembered less for his con¬ 
quests than for his gardens, of which 
quaint Sir Thomas Browne has curiously 
written. Nebuchadnezzar, too, aside 
from his diet of grass, is remembered for 
those “hanging gardens of Babylon”, 
huge terraced rock gardens, which his 
slaves are said to have constructed over 
night, to appease the homesickness of his 
fierce Assyrian queen, Amytis. Diocle¬ 
tian, the savage persecutor of Christians, 
grew gentle in his gardens. And to turn 
to philosophers and poets, Epicurus is as 
well known by his garden as by his phi¬ 
losophy, that garden in Athens where he 
would walk to and fro with his scholars 
“discoursing of divine philosophy”. 
Other Greek philosophers were thus fond 
of teaching as they walked in gardens, 
Aristotle’s followers coming thus to be 
called “Peripatetics”, and there is no 
pleasanter resting place for the imagina¬ 
tion to this day than Plato’s “Academe”, 
named after the grove Academus, near 
the river Cephisus, that made such a 
fresh murmur as he walked and talked 
with his friends. And, among the poets, 
Virgil had his garden on the Tiburtine, 
where he meditated “the Georgies”, and 
Horace’s odes are scarcely better 
known than his “ Sabine farm”,“ that little 
corner”, which he has celebrated as hav¬ 
ing “more charms for me than all the 
world besides, where the honey does not 
yield in sweetness to that of Hj-mettus”. 
Well might Saint Bernard exclaim, as he 
sat and meditated on a green bank in his 
monastic garden, “Good God! what a 
company of pleasures has Thou made for 
man! ” .4nd of all those pleasures who will 
deny that man came into possession of the 
most satisfying, most innocent and most 
enduring when “God Almighty first 
planted a garden” 
