Virgil's Garden of Flowers and his Philosophy of Nature

Extract

In his charming essay on ‘Jardins d'Humanité’ Pierre Grimal says that gardens are inseparable from the humanism of Europe; ‘the groves were God's first temples’, wrote the poet Bryant; and there is abundant testimony to these statements in classical antiquity. Sir Archibald Geikie, who, like Sir D'Arcy Thompson, belonged to those grand old Scottish scientists who added to their science a deep humanism, Geikie from whose books I learned geology forty years ago, wrote:

From the infancy of mankind, trees have been regarded with mingled feelings of admiration and awe. The combined majesty and grace wherewith they tower above the soil that supports them; their infinite variety of individual forms and colours, whether carrying their foliage all the year or at one season clothing themselves with tender leaf and blossom, at another flaming in the varied glories of autumn, and, thereafter, bare and leafless, stretching their giant arms and delicate branches to all the winds of heaven; their immemorial age; their calm endurance and seeming defiance of the vicissitudes of time, in pathetic contrast to the short and troubled span of human life; their varied music under the changeful moods of the weather, from the faint whisper awakened by the gentlest breath of summer to the loud roar or moaning wail aroused by the fury of a wintry tempest; the grateful shelter which under their canopy of leafy boughs they provide for man and beast; the endless services which they render to man's daily life in their yield of timber or leaves or fruit—these features give to trees a high place among the charms and bounties wherewith Nature teems.