If nature is a book, it is an infinite book, at least as vast as the universe itself. A garden then, is a scaled-down version of that universe, a comprehensible model of that endless text, glossed according to our restricted capabilities. According to the Midrash, God put man in the Garden of Eden “to dress it and to keep it,” but “that only means he is to study the Torah there and fulfill the commandments of God.” Expulsion from the Garden can be understood as a punishment for willfully incorrect reading.
Gardening and reading have a long association. In 1250, the chancellor of the cathedral of Amiens, Richard de Fournival, imagined a book-cataloguing system based on a horticultural model. He compared his library to an orchard wherein his fellow citizens might gather “the fruits of knowledge” and di vided it into three flowerbeds corresponding to three major categories: philosophy, the so-called lucrative sciences, and theology. Each bed in turn was divided into a number of smaller plots (areolae) containing a summary of the book’s subject matter. Fournival speaks of “cultivating” both his garden and his library.
Not surprisingly, the verb cultiver retains in French these two meanings: that of growing a garden and that of becoming learned. The tending of one’s garden and the tending of one’s books require, in the sense of the word cultiver, equal devotion, patience, persistence, and a serviceable sense of order. Cultiver is to seek the truth hidden in the apparent chaos of nature or a library, and to render visible its attendant qualities. Furthermore, in both cases, truth is subject to review. Gardener and reader must both be willing to shift purpose according to the exterior or interior weather, to yield to the consequences of new discoveries, to reorganize, redistribute, reconsider, redefine, according not to overwhelming absolutist notions but to individual and quotidian experience.
To a certain extent, the French Revolution is the consequence of a loss of confidence in absolutes. Rather than maintain that universal metaphysical categories rule human lives, or that ideas override experience, or that figures of divine power have the right to rule over individuals, the philosophers of the French Enlightenment preferred to argue what Immanuel Kant was later to call “the categorical imperative”: that every human act, at its finest, should in principle become a universal law. A splendid, if impossible, achievement, concerning which a century later Robert Louis Stevenson would note: “Our duty in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in the best of spirits.”
Voltaire would have agreed. Voltaire, above all the philosophers of the Enlightenment, wished us to act as if we, and not a Divine Commander, were accountable for the consequences of our acts. For him no human action is independent of another. “All events are linked in the best of all possible worlds,” the philosopher Pangloss tells Candide at the end of his adventures. “Had you not lost all your sheep in the good land of Eldorado, you would not be here eating pistachios and candied lemons.” To which Candide wisely answers, “Well said, but we must tend to our garden.”
The garden is then our business, the stage of our essential occupations, nature transformed into the setting in which we are to accomplish our allotted human tasks. The wise Turkish dervish whom Candide consults at the end of his adventures knows or cares nothing of what goes on in the world (for in stance, that two viziers and a mufti have been strangled in Constantinople), nor is he concerned with metaphysical questions about the reason for our existence or problems of good and evil. “What then are we to do?” asks Pangloss anxiously. “Shut up,” answers the dervish. Shut up and act. “Man is born for action, like fire tends to rise and stones to fall. Not to be occupied and not to exist is all one to man,” argues Voltaire against Pascal. And farther on: “Let us be consoled for not knowing the relationship that might exist between a spider and the rings of Saturn, and let us continue to examine that which lies within our reach.”
To examine nature, we must therefore render it accessible, lend it a shape and a symmetry that can be grasped by our senses. Faced with the conceptual order of a garden, we can pretend or assume to read it: allot significance to its beds and partitions, garner instruction from its layout, deduce a narrative from its sequence of plantings.
In this sense, every garden is a palimpsest, design over design, season after season. Let us consider, as an example, the garden through which Voltaire wandered during his three years of grace in Prussia: the royal park of Sanssouci. Sanssouci began life in 1715 as a kitchen garden planted on a hill outside Potsdam under the orders of Friedrich Wilhelm I, and it was sarcastically known as the Marlygarten in reference to Louis XIV’s costly garden at Marly. In 1744, Friedrich’s son Friedrich II added on a vineyard and six parabolic curving terraces for plum and fig trees and vines, each terrace divided by twenty-eight glazed windows and sixteen yew trees trimmed in the shape of pyramids. A year later, the terraces were extended southward by a level space of eight flowerbeds and punctuated by a fountain over which rose a gilded statue of the goddess Thetis and her attendants. Two sphinxes by Franz Georg Ebenhech were added a decade afterwards on the far side of the moat, leading to a plot of agricultural land, and still later a marble parapet topped with a dozen sculptures of children was erected to separate a Dutch garden of terraced beds from a rond-point and its fountain. Beyond this area, the king installed a Neptune Grotto and an Obelisk Portal, each with a small flower parterre, while to the west he erected a Chinese teahouse, a delightful folly designed by Johann Gottfried Buring between 1754 and 1757.
Flowerbeds, allées, parterres, fountains, sculptural groups, hedged paths combine to form a complex landscaped narrative: but in the beginning, the garden of Sanssouci had no other purpose than to express a certain simplicity as a place both pleasing and useful, a garden like the one through which God walked (Genesis tells us) “in the cool of the evening,” so peaceful, that it was here where Friedrich II stipulated (in several wills) that he wished to be buried. The model of such a garden is very ancient: in the oldest Mesopotamian texts no distinction is drawn between “orchard” and “garden,” since the aesthetic function was not necessarily differentiated from the utilitarian one.
At Sanssouci, however, habitation succeeded cultivation. A year after the establishment of the orchard and because of the beauty of the scenery, the king had a summer palace built on the site to take advantage of the delightful view. What was to have been merely a model of Eden was overwritten with new architectural episodes and their attendant subplots, complicating and multiplying the itineraries and vistas. In the following years, more buildings were added (such as the gardeners’ houses and the orangery, later transformed into guest lodgings), and to the north of the Schloss Sanssouci mock ruins were erected following the principle of baroque metaphors in order to hide the water tank that fed the park’s fountains. The stone metaphors hid too well their core meaning: only once did the king enjoy the displays of dancing water since the cumbersome mechanics that worked the jets did not become fully operational until the next century, when a steam engine was installed to fuel them. But by then the king was dead and his intricately conceived garden was no longer in fashion. Three kings later, Friedrich Wilhelm IV redesigned Sanssouci in the style of the Italian landscaped park we see today. The older scripts, however, can still be glimpsed beneath the more recent plots, groves, and pathways. As in a palimpsest, the original text never quite disappears.
When Friedrich II installed his orchard in Sanssouci, he was thirty-two years old. Eight summers earlier, as a young man of twenty-four, he had begun a correspondence with Voltaire, asking him to become his guide. “In the entire universe,” wrote Friedrich gushingly, “no exception could be made of those of whom you might not be the teacher.” Voltaire was almost twenty years the monarch’s senior and the most celebrated philosopher in Europe at the time; Friedrich was only the heir apparent to a secondary European monarchy. Friedrich admired Voltaire’s ideas, his prose, his poetry, his drama, and above all, the fact that he was French. Years later, in 1880, Friedrich was to publish a pamphlet (in French, like all the thirty-one volumes of his extensive writings) titled De la littérature allemande, des défaults qu’on peut lui reprocher, quelles en sont les causes, et par quels moyens on peut les corriger in which he brands his native tongue as “à demi barbare.” Kultur was, for Friedrich, unhesitatingly French.