Gardens

Seeds of Thought

Voltaire's Vine and Other Philosophies: How Gardens Inspired Great Writers
By Damon Young (Random House 200pp £12.99)

Leonard Woolf at Monk's House, 1931

When plotting out the structure of an essay, a chapter or even a book, nothing banishes distractions from the writer's mind so effectively as some form of rhythmic exercise. Walking through London did the trick for Dickens, and England's beaches, rivers, lanes and landscapes have seeded a veritable kingdom of poems, plays and novels, but there's always the temptation for us lesser souls to look about and start thinking of something closer to home. Gardening, perhaps...

Active gardening - spade and shovel stuff of the kind that Leonard Woolf took refuge in - is only one of the horticultural paths along which the philosopher Damon Young encourages the reader to wander in this agreeable little book about the influence of gardens upon their literary or philosophical cultivators. Philosophy leads the way, with an invitation to consider Aristotle (spryly described here as having been known 'for his schmick wardrobe and bling') and his decision to establish his Lyceum within a park. Such a bucolic setting, so Young reminds us, was a convention of classical times, one that seems first to have been established by Plato and was still going strong when Cicero, ejected from public office, elected to run a private academy at his country villa. Cicero, like Aristotle (whose Lyceum housed the world's earliest botanical garden), derived particular pleasure from teaching his budding students while observing in plants the gentle process of growth through pattern and rhythm - a nurturing process that, unlike political states, has no laws and no law-makers. As Young says, 'It just is.'

Philosophers do little more than peep between the arches in Young's cloistered stroll across the gardens of a choice community of writers. There's reference to Nietzsche's Gedankenbaum, a lemon tree from which a good thought always seemed (figuratively speaking) to drop into the 33-year-old philosopher's lap during his sojourn at the Villa Rubinacci in Sorrento. There's mention of a remembered chestnut tree that Sartre, so rooted in urban life that the mere idea of a country stroll could make him shudder, transplanted into La Nausée as a disgusting symbol of repletion. Rousseau is cited for Flora Peninsularis, the intensive study of island plant life into which the philosopher plunged during the enforced exile that followed the publication of his scandalous - for its times - Emile. Voltaire appears as the coiner of Candide's famous advice to Dr Pangloss ('Let us cultivate our garden') and as the ruler, at Ferney, of a garden that represented the philosopher's ideal France on a miniature scale: a kingdom governed by tolerance and improved by thoughtful cultivation. ('Tend your vines,' Voltaire advised one of his correspondents in 1764, 'and crush the horror.')

While the philosophers represent, so to speak, the cherries on Young's cake, the base consists of a series of short essays on writers and their gardens (or landscapes). Least successful are the chapters on George Orwell (stubbornly attempting to hack a plot of cultivated ground out of the intransigent rock of Jura) and a spirited investigation of Nikos Kazantzakis's perception of life as a war against complacency. While it is clear that Young admires Kazantzakis's work ethic, it isn't easy to see how the great Greek novelist's faith in barrenness fits into a collection of meditations on the redemptive power of nature.

The book works better when Young takes on less demanding subjects. It's startling to recall that Emily Dickinson, during her intensely reclusive life at Amherst, was better known for her gardening skills than for those poems (wonderfully described by her as 'blossoms of the brain') which she dispatched to a tiny group of readers together with hand-bound nosegays. It's delightful to be reminded of the three Japanese bonsai trees ('trees for the imagination') that Proust fondly recalled when letting Albertine imagine how, 'if I arranged a few of them beside a little trickle of water in my room I should have a vast forest, stretching down to a river, in which children could lose their way'.

Here, as in his excellent chapters on Austen (strikingly unproductive during the ten unhappy years when life in Bath deprived the novelist of a garden) and on Colette (refreshing a fertile mind, during her last, arthritic years in a closed Parisian bedroom, with memories of the lush green world of her radiant youth), Young writes with a delightful combination of humour and insight. Best of all, however, is his chapter on Leonard Woolf.

'I'm always losing him in the garden,' Virginia Woolf wrote to a friend of her husband, while discovering - to her considerable surprise - that a day of weeding rather than writing had produced in her 'a queer sort of enthusiasm which made me say that this is happiness'.

Happiness may not be quite the word to describe the determination with which Leonard, when he was not churning out a regular quota of 750 words a day, set about jam-making, apple-picking, wood-chopping and planting. Even Virginia, rarely at a loss for words, wrote of 'a heroism to be admired not comprehended' as her husband persisted at his daily garden tasks throughout the gale-torn January of 1922.

Gardening, in a life that was filled with moments of quiet desperation, served as Leonard's consolation and refuge. The last words that Virginia wrote in her diary were probably less prosaic than they sound: 'Leonard is doing the rhododendrons.' Following his wife's suicide and cremation, Leonard buried Virginia's ashes in the garden under one of the two tall elms that bore their names.

Contentedly established for almost his last three decades with the artist and lithographer Trekkie Parsons, Leonard never ceased his gardening. In 1968, the year before his death, he won thirteen first prizes in horticultural shows. It was no mean achievement for a man who had declared, in one of his best-known books, his profound belief that, 'in the last resort, nothing matters'. Nothing, that is, except - as that book's concise title implicitly asserts - the redemptive process of growth. He called the book Sowing.