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This time of year, I spend a lot of my free time thinking about my garden.
It’s still a little too early to put everything in the ground, but I've been planning the garden since January, and I started a lot of my seeds indoors in February. Thinking about my garden isn’t just a hobby. It’s an act of hope, a sign that the end of winter is coming and that spring is on its way. It sustains me through the bleak days of the winter.
Once I do get the garden fully underway, it’s a source of great pride and joy. Even if it would be easier (and sometimes cheaper) to just go to the store and get some tomatoes, I really enjoy tending the garden and watching my food develop from seed to table.
Gardening has been a fundamental human activity for at least 10,000 years, when we invented agriculture. But it probably goes back deep into our hunter-gatherer past; I’m sure our nomadic ancestors understood the value of scattering seeds here and there and then returning to harvest their produce months later.
And gardens have probably been in our imagination for just as long.
Some of the earliest gardens in human literature belonged to the gods. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest story we have, Gilgamesh visits the “garden of the gods:”
There was the garden of the gods; all round him stood bushes bearing gems. Seeing it he went down at once, for there was fruit of carnelian with the vine hanging from it, beautiful to look at; lapis lazuli leaves hung thick with fruit, sweet to see. For thorns and thistles there were haematite and rare stones, agate, and pearls from out of the sea.
And the Trojan War, the central conflict in Greek mythology, started in a goddess’ garden. It was a golden apple from Hera’s orchard, the Garden of Hesperides, that Eris, the goddess of discord, rolled into a wedding party. She had written on the apple: “to the fairest.” Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite all wanted that apple. They got Paris to judge the contest, Aphrodite offered Paris the beautiful Helen in exchange for his vote, and things spiraled out of control from there.
The most famous mythical ancient garden was where the Abrahamic religions believe the world began. Here’s how the Garden of Eden is described in the Bible:
And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads….
And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
I think we all know what happened next.
There’s not much detail in Genesis about what the Garden of Eden looked like. But I think it’s notable that it’s not described as a wilderness, nor is it described as human-dominated. It’s a garden, a place both human and natural, somewhere in between wild and domesticated.
Out of this thin description sprouted countless depictions of the Garden of Eden. Artists over the centuries tried to picture what this earthly paradise must have been like, and their images tell us as much about the artists and their societies as they do about the Garden itself.
Let’s start by locating the Garden of Eden. The Bible doesn’t give many clues other than that it’s “eastward.” So that’s where Medieval Christian mapmakers put it.
One of the earliest medieval maps to feature the Garden of Eden was by Beatus of Liébana, a Spanish Monk, first drawn in the 1000s. On these maps, the east is usually at the top (it’s literally “oriented”), and Eden sits at the eastern end of Asia:
We get the universal symbol for Eden in a little box — two naked people, a tree, and four rivers flowing from it.
This map, which may have belonged to Henry III, is typical for the later period around 1265, when it was made:
It’s circular, with Jerusalem at its center. Eden is in a little circle in the east, with four rivers. I like how Adam and Eve eye each other warily inside the garden, with the Tree of Life between them:
One of the biggest and most famous medieval maps, the Hereford Mappa Mundi, is incredibly detailed.
It, too, has the garden far in the east, although Eden here is separated from the rest of the world, either as an island or some sort of separate spiritual realm.
As knowledge of the world grew, locating Eden became more problematic. Explorers and conquerors had traversed the whole world, and they hadn’t come across any magical gardens. But mapmakers still did their best, using obscure clues from the Bible to try to place the garden.
Most maps put Eden in modern-day Iraq, somewhere in the vicinity of Babel and the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Nicolaes Visscher’s 1657 map is a good example of the genre:
It’s helpfully marked “Paradys:”
This map from 1700 by Dirk Janszoon van Santen also puts Eden in the same general area.
Just take a right at Babel, follow the wiggly river, and if you’ve hit the Persian Gulf, you’ve gone too far:
Interestingly, these later cartographical versions of Eden aren’t represented by Adam and Eve; they’re represented by natural abundance, which, as we’ll see, was the focus of artists at the time.
OK, now that we know where people thought the Garden of Eden was, we can concentrate on what they thought it looked like.
Interestingly, we don’t have many depictions of Eden from before the late Medieval/early Renaissance period, and those that do exist don’t bother to depict the garden itself. They’re all about Adam and Eve, like this illustration of their expulsion from paradise dating from the year 1000. There’s barely a garden there at all!
By the 1400s, though, we start to get more frequent and vibrant attempts to draw the Garden. Here’s one from the early 1400s:
One from 1416:
And another from 1469, with a delightful moon floating in the sky above (is that Jesus hanging out in the garden with them?):
All three of these depict the Garden of Eden as a pretty sparse landscape. Outside of the Tree of Life, there’s not a whole lot of plant and animal diversity. During this period, the garden tends to be a contained space surrounded by manmade walls and sometimes containing other structures. The human story is at the center, and it seems that paradise, to medieval people, was not all that wild.
The Garden of Eden started to change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The left panel of Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthy Delights represents the beginning of this evolution. He depicts Eden as, well, pretty weird:
Bosch fills the garden with animals, many of which are exotic (giraffes, elephants being ridden by monkeys) or mythical (unicorns, a dog-eared kangaroo-type-thing). He paints several recognizable and differentiated species of trees. There are strange structures in the background that may be manmade, and a fantastical fountain. A duck reads a book (!) in the lower right-hand corner.
Bosch seems to be trying to demonstrate the variety of God’s creations and leave a lot of fun tidbits for the dedicated viewer. But though his Eden is weird, it’s not all that wild — the garden is very much an open space with just a few trees. The humans dominate the space, not least by being bigger than everything else.
As time went on, the Garden got wilder, bit by bit. I really like this English velvet panel from around 1600. The trees tower over the humans in Eden:
And on this cover of a Book of Common Prayer from the early 1600s, paradise looks a little more full of nature:
Even though Hendrik Goltzius’ 1616 painting foregrounds Adam and Eve, the nature in his Garden of Eden seems like it has more going on than the medieval versions, although it’s notable that the animals here are all domesticated ones (goats and a cat that looks like it’s done something wrong):
Soon, it became common to see Adam and Eve pushed to the background, as artists tried their hand at depicting a wide variety of animal and plant life, as in this engraving from around 1600. Camels, bears, cows, and a lot of dogs hang out in the garden, with Adam and Eve almost an afterthought:
In the seventeenth century, artists were fascinated by the accounts of travelers who brought back word of the natural wonders of the New World and Africa. They used the Garden of Eden as a showcase for this diversity. Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens collaborated on this painting, which contains all sorts of exotic animals cavorting together in paradise. Dogs bark, tigers wrestle, and fish sort of float on top of the water:
In the painting above, Rubens painted the people and Brueghel painted the nature. Brueghel was apparently fascinated by the natural features of the Garden of Eden — or at least saw it as an opportunity to paint a wide variety of animals and plants. Here’s another of his attempts:
This interest ran in the family, as Jan Brueghel the Younger took a stab at depicting the wild beauty of Eden too. You’ll notice that Adam and Eve have entirely disappeared from these images — the focus is entirely on nature:
By the time the American artist Thomas Cole painted the Garden of Eden in 1828, it wasn’t much of a garden at all. He portrayed it as a pastoral American landscape, untrammeled by humans, very similar to his other paintings of nature:
The Garden of Eden has served many purposes in Western culture. For believers, it’s a paradise, the place where the world was created, where God brought to life all of the wondrous plants and creatures that share the world with us today. It’s also the source of humanity’s original sin, a place of shame and disappointment.
Since the Bible tells us so little about the garden, people over centuries have projected their own ideas onto it, imagining where it was, what it looked like, and the life that filled it. Our images of the Garden of Eden have reflected our ideas about nature itself. At times we’ve wanted to control nature, at other moments we’ve wanted to experience its wildness. Sometimes we’ve wanted to see it full of other creatures, and sometimes we’ve wanted the stage all to ourselves.
You could say, I guess, that we’ve carefully tended our image of the garden. And just as there are all sorts of gardens, from fussy formal spaces to messy, weedy ones, there are all sorts of Gardens of Eden.
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