Garden variety

A garden is not just a prettily arranged collection of plants, but an &ldquoexpression of the quest for paradise.&rdquo Myths of paradise lost and found often involve gardens from Eden whence Adam and Eve were expelled, to the chahar-bagh with its fruit trees, rivers of milk and honey, and beguiling hour is to reward the virtuous Musalman. Risaluddin&rsquos book is a scholarly survey of the &ldquoreligious, spiritual, intellectual and artistic movements [that] have influenced the making of gardens, both real and imaginary, as an expression of the paradise impulse.&rdquo This ambitious book delves into Hellenic and Judaeo-Christian mythology and &ldquothe Eastern faiths.&rdquo It interprets Renaissance art, Chinese landscape painting, and English country gardens. It examines the links between the sensual and the sacred, temporal and divine love, the symbolism of the rose and the lotus.

All this is potentially fascinating but, by compressing an enormous amount of material into a mere hundred pages, the text is condensed to the point of being cryptic. It provides a lot of information but not enough insight. With far too many facts squeezed in at the expense of clarifying meaning and significance, the reader is bewildered by statements such as

&ldquoCosimo and Ficino were convinced &mdash wrongly &mdash that in the manuscript known as the Corpus hermiticum, which they ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, they had discovered the primordial revelation, the ancient Egyptian solar symbolism, preceding that of Moses, which had been the inspiration of the Persian Magi, Pythagoras, and Plato himself&rdquo (p. 45).

&ldquoRadegunda (521-587), the widowed queen of Clotaire I (497-561), founded a nunnery outside Poitiers with a garden of apples and pears, where violets grew and the gardens of queen Ultragotha, widow of Childebert I (d. 558) were noted for their fragrant roses &lsquoParadisiacus spargit odore rosas.&rsquo&rdquo