Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("Gardens & Gardening")

May 19—25, 2024 | THIS WEEK: “Gardens & Gardening”

Opening Line of the Week

These beautiful opening words come from the book’s Prologue, and it’s almost impossible to imagine a reader not wanting to read on. Shortly after the book was published, a review in The Midwest Book magazine paid the author—a writer and university professor, not a professional gardener—the supreme compliment, writing:

“Goodman is to gardening what M. F. K. Fisher is to food.”

If this amazing tribute didn’t make Goodman’s day, imagine how he felt a short while later when the legendary M. F. K. Fisher herself wrote to him:

“I possess a deep prejudice against anything written by Anglo-Saxons about their lives in or near French villages. So, Richard, I thank you for breaking the spell. I like very much what you wrote.”

For nearly 2,000 memorable opening lines from every genre of world literature, go to www.GreatOpeningLines.com.

This Week’s Puzzler

This week’s Mystery Man at two stages of his adult life.

On May 21, 1688, this man was born in Twickenham, near London. A highly precocious child, he was reading Latin, Greek, French, and Italian before age ten. By age 17, his poems were being admired by England’s finest poets.

A childhood illness caused a marked curvature of his spine, limiting his adult growth to four feet, six inches. For his entire life, he suffered from a host of other ailments, including rickets, severe migraine headaches, asthma, and tuberculosis. In one of his poems, he referred tellingly to his physical maladies by writing: “This long disease, my life.” Even though he was in constant pain, he had an indomitable spirit and accepted his physical condition in reasonably good humor.

A popular essayist and respected translator, he became the chief poet of his era, and the first English writer to make a fortune through his writing. In addition to his translations of Homer, his literary efforts included such classics of English literature as “An Essay on Criticism” (1711) and “An Essay on Man” (1733). While he penned some of history’s most famous quotations, few people today know that they are his creations. They include:

This week’s Mystery Man was also a great lover of natural beauty. In 1719, flush with cash from his book royalties, he purchased a magnificent English country house in his home town of Twickenham.

The Twickenham Country Estate

Shortly after he moved in, the discovery of an underground spring on the property enabled him to build one of England’s great landscape gardens—complete with an accompanying grotto that was filled with the relaxing sounds of trickling water. He was so enamored of the very special world he’d created at Twickenham that Horace Walpole wrote of him:

“Of all his works he was most proud of his garden.”

In a 1735 conversation, he also offered one of the best things ever said on the subject of gardening:

Who is this person? (Answer below)

What Role Have Gardens Played in Your Life?

For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a fair amount of landscape painting, but—as you may have already guessed—no paints, brushes, or canvases were involved.

One of my window boxes from the summer of 2023..

As the quotation in this week’s Puzzler suggested, my recent artistic efforts consisted entirely of planting flowers in window boxes, hanging planters, ceramic pots, and garden beds around my house. I don’t want to overly romanticize the experience, but I believe it is accurate to say that as I dirtied my hands in the rich, nutritious soil, I could sense other parts of me being cleansed.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines garden as “A piece of ground, usually enclosed, where flowers, fruit, or vegetables are cultivated.” When used in the plural form, the word gardens also often refers to public spaces, like botanical gardens.

Michael Judd photograph of The New York Botanical Garden. For more on Judd’s amazing work, go here.

The word garden first appeared in English around 1300, evolving from the Old English geard, meaning “to enclose” (when the word first appeared it was under the spellings gardin and gardyn). In a 1690 work, Essential Gardens of Epicurus, the English writer William Temple not only employed the modern spelling of the word, he provided an intriguing statement about the influential role of gardens in human history:

“The use of gardens seems to have been the most ancient and most general of any sorts of possession among mankind.”

While cultural history is filled with references to the Garden of Eden, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and other ancient botanical sites, it is the role that gardens have played in the lives of individual people that has truly fascinated me. Indeed, many of the people I’ve admired the most have written with great passion about the emotional, spiritual, and psychological benefits of gardening. For example, in an 1841 lecture in Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

There are few writers I admire more than the English poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton. She published more than fifty books in her career, including Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965) and five of the best memoirs ever written on growing old. She was also an avid gardener.

John Muir is best known for his role in establishing America’s National Park system, but he was a gardener at his core, writing in The Yosemite (1993).

And, finally, in a life that almost all agree was well-lived, Audrey Hepburn credited a life close to the soil as one of the secrets to her authenticity and humility. Growing up in Belgium in the 1930s, Hepburn was introduced to gardening by her mother, an avid fruit and vegetable gardener—and it evolved into a love affair that continued for the remainder of her life. In Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (1993), biographer Diana Maychick quoted Hepburn as saying:

Given everything you’ve read so far, you’d think that the connection between gardening and emotional well-being was so obvious that, as a psychologist, I would have found a way to incorporate it into my work with depressed or anxious clients. Yes, you’d think so, but the truth is that not once in my 30-year career as a therapist did the thought even occur to me.

My perspective on the matter changed dramatically a few years ago—albeit a little late—when I came across an article on “Why We Need Gardens” from the legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks. In the article, which was published posthumously in the 2019 book Everything In Its Place, Sacks wrote: “I take my patients to gardens whenever possible.” And a bit later, he added:

If I could do my practice over again, I’m sure I’d do things differently today.

If you’re currently working as a mental health professional, I hope you’re occasionally adding aspects of this often neglected element to your therapeutic bag of tricks. And if you’re simply a person who’d like to quiet the noise in your mind or get a little more out of the life you’re living, perhaps you might want to incorporate gardens and gardening into your regular mental health regimen. Before doing anything, though, take a few moments to peruse these additional thoughts on this week’s theme:

• A modest garden . . . contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library. — Henri-Frederic Amiel

• Gardening is not a rational act. — Margaret Atwood

• God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. — Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

• Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get. — H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

• The garden is a metaphor for life, and gardening is a symbol of the spiritual path. — Larry Dossey

• A garden is a kinetic work of art, not an object but a process, open-ended, biodegradable, nurturant, like all women’s artistry. A garden is the best alternative therapy. — Germaine Greer

• The kiss of the sun for pardon,/The song of the birds for mirth,/One is nearer God’s Heart in a garden/Than anywhere else on earth. — Dorothy Frances Gurney

• Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense. — Phyllis McGinley

• A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself. — May Sarton

• I realized that I was really nothing more than a custodian to a mystery that was beyond my comprehension. I think that’s what hooks one on gardening forever. It is the closest one can come to being present at the creation. — Phyllis Theroux

For source information on these quotations, and many others on the topic of GARDENS & GARDENING, go here.

Cartoon of the Week:

Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week:

Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “Stumbles & Stumbling.”

Mardy Grothe

Websites: www.drmardy.com and www.GreatOpeningLines.com

Regarding My Lifelong Love of Quotations: A Personal Note