In Praise of the Earth: A Journey into the Garden

Philosopher Han (The Crisis of Narration) serves up an offbeat meditation on the aesthetic and symbolic value of gardens. The author, driven by a sudden “pressing need... to be close to the earth,” adopted a daily gardening practice in Berlin. He reports on the “three full years” he devoted to this preoccupation, finding in his “secret garden” a sublime, poetic refuge from a digital age dominated by homogeneity, suppression of bodily experience, and greedy exploitation of nature. These meditations are interwoven with musings on the physical properties of flowers, the symbolism of their colors (the blue flower is a “central symbol of Romanticism” that “stands for love and longing”), their mythological resonances (ivy was said to have trailed out of the separate graves of Tristan and Isolde to “reunite the two in love”). Steeped in German philosophy and high culture, Han’s reflections move by free association, which may frustrate some, but will yield for patient readers subtle and lovely insights (“I hope next year it will flower,” the author says of a stubborn Japanese allspice plant; “Hoping is the temporal mode of the gardener”). This poetic volume will nourish gardeners and nature lovers. (Nov.)