Gardens for the soul

My childhood memories are of my family’s garden in Narlidere near the northern shore of Turkey’s Izmir peninsula. It’s where my mom tended to vegetables and fruit trees and my dad cared for hives of honeybees and protected our boisterous brood of chickens. I remember tasting sweet cherries, tart tangerines and juicy raspberries straight from the bough. I realise now that I was spoilt.

I didn’t embark on gardening myself until I found myself held hostage in my apartment in Istanbul during the pandemic. Since then, I have started gifting small pilea, string of hearts or calathea that I have taught myself to propagate. I have managed to grow bougainvillea, hydrangea and jasmine (indoors) but am still failing to keep my moribund orchid happy. In new life and death, I’ve found myself cultivating my own sensitivity, attention and sympathy and yes, even joy.

I’ve also found growth in the writing of my fellow Izmir native Stanford professor Robert Pogue Harrison. Particularly Gardens, An Essay on the Human Condition. He starts with the Roman myth on the origins of humankind in which the goddess of Cura (“care” in Latin) crosses a river and decides to shape clay into a human form. She asks Jupiter, king of the gods, to breathe life into it saying that she will care for the humans as long as they live and allow their spirit to return to heaven and body to the earth after they die. The idea of care between the earth and humanity has a long history.

In Christianity, Adam’s humanity only bears fruit after he is cast out of the Garden of Eden. Here the garden signifies abundance, a place where nothing grows, dies or needs tending. “It was only after the fall that Adam acquired a measure of resiliency and character,” says Pogue Harrison. “In Eden, Adam was unburdened by worries but incapable of devotion.” This act of carelessness takes place to teach Adam his responsibility, he continues. In his exile, Adam through his labour makes things be. Adam’s is not an exertion of brute will over nature but a mastery of care.

There’s also a rich bloom of Islamic scholarship around the connection between gardening and spiritual cultivation. Ebussuud Efendi was a scholar and legislator who rose to the top of Suleyman the Magnificent’s 16th century court. Efendi was also a dab-hand in the garden and the first person to domesticate the tulip. His green fingers cultivated and introduced some 300 new species of tulips to the Ottoman Empire.

Maintaining a flowerbed was akin to the cultivation of one’s “nefs” (soul) and a proof of devotion to a higher power. As he saw it, eternal battle between the cycles of life and death were played out in the soil. It was a place to find wonder in the natural world but also to be humbled by its failure to neatly fall under human control.

Roman, Christian, Islamic and modern secular thought all seem to agree that the gardener is someone who sees the value of surrendering to the unspoken natural rhythm of life and its changing needs: Hydrangeas grow in shadow and moisture while succulents require six hours sunlight a day. Even if you give them what you think they want there are setbacks. Crops die. Flowers do not bloom. Trees get sick. To fret it, to turn away from is to maintain an unrealistic belief of the possibility of control: the unrealistic expectation of a manicured life.

There is beauty but suffering is also part of horticulture. The wind, rain and sun can take us by surprise but so can world-upending natural disasters, like the earthquake that hit my home country of Turkey in 2023. No-one then was thinking about the lessons of plants or the presentation of gardens – as they called to relatives beneath the fallen buildings or saw their homes and cities destroyed – but there was a small lesson.

In time – though no gardener, scholar or Roman god can advise us on it – new life will gradually nudge its way through the rubble and fresh hands will tend the land. Caring, although imperfect and often in vain, is the only way to help direct that growth and cultivate a brighter future.