The Garden Of Eden
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
This is the first line written in one of the most well-known stories ever told; from one of the most famous periodicals ever printed, the Bible.
We all know how it goes. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Then God proceeds to conceive of his creative work. He forms the light and the darkness. The ocean, rivers and dry land. The sky, the stars and vegetation; plants and trees and fruits. Mountains and hills and waterfalls. Then the birds appear in the sky. The sea animals in the sea. The bees and crawling creatures in the crevices and the four-legged beasts on the ground. The story continues. And as it unravels, we see that the creative work becomes more and more complex, and more and more beautiful. A strong intimation is beginning to take shape; and as it does, we feel the vibrations of the crescendo reaching its climax. Then God said it was good. But he was not done. There was always something exceptional in mind from the very beginning. Continuing with the intricate work, preparing from the soil of the earth, he forms the most well-known man, Adam - the crown of his creation; the one creature unlike any other up until then. And he was both delighted and pleased. This, as it may have seemed, might have been the culmination of the story, but God had something even more remarkable up his sleeve." 18 It is not good for the man to be alone. So he puts the man, Adam to sleep and fashioning from his rib, he forms… Woman. She is Eve, which means the mother of all the living. She is God’s finishing touch. His final masterpiece. The concluding mark in the creative course. And she is more exquisite than anything that had been made up until that moment. And when Adam sees her, he is in awe. She is the true embodiment of everything that is beautiful.
He then places them, most fittingly, in a garden called Eden; which means, in the Hebrew, Paradise. An area of great fertility, signifying that it is not only a place for producing, but somewhere to cultivate a relationship and fellowship with persons and the earth.
The LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the man whom he had formed.
The LORD God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it.
Genesis 2:5,8,15
And they were happy. Things couldn’t have been better. I mean, they were literally living in heaven on earth. This is the primordial and proper dwelling place for the first humans… and it is bliss.
Then something goes terribly wrong. Something was lurking in the shadows. The snake. The bad guy in the story. The evil one. He whispers into the ear of Eve and deceives her into eating from the tree of wisdom. 6 She took the fruit and gave it to her husband and they ate. They were commanded not to eat from this tree, but the two disobeyed God and were thrown out of the garden. And since then, things have never been the same.
What is it at the heart of this primal story that really speaks to us?
In her book, The Well Gardened Mind, Sue Stuart-Smith, a clinical psychologist, tells us, “A garden puts us in touch with a set of metaphors that have profoundly shaped the human psyche for thousands of years – metaphors so deep they are almost hidden within our thinking.” Adam, the first human, was created using the elements of the earth and the imagery of this verse likens God to a potter. There is actually a play on words here because in Hebrew adam means “man”, and in adama means “ground.” He was formed from out of the ground. And in turn, Eve was made from the rib of Adam. This says something. This tells us that we are very much a part of persons and of nature; as persons and nature are a part of us; and that there is a very strong positive connection to our natural environment.
But something profound did happen; something went terribly wrong and we were cast out of this spiritual and biological proper dwelling place. And since then, in a fallen and broken world, we have lost that relationship with each other and with the land.
After the fall of Adam, we see what happens to the first off-springs of our primordial parents in the story of Cain and Abel. Jordan Peterson, a renowned clinical psychologist, in his popular biblical lecture series comments on this very short, but very profound story:
"Ok, so the first thing is that Adam and Eve are not the first two human beings. Cain and Abel are the first two human beings. Adam and Eve were made by God, and they were born in paradise… What’s cool is that humanity enters history at the end of the story of Adam and Eve, and then the archetypal patterns for human behaviour are instantaneously presented. It’s absolutely mind boggling, and it’s not a very nice story. They’re hostile brothers. They’ve got their hands around each other’s throats, so to speak, or at least that’s the case in one direction. It’s a story of the first two human beings engaged in a fratricidal struggle, that ends in the death of the best one of them. That’s the story of human beings in history…
‘And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.’ There’s the first human being: Cain... Well, the first human being is a murderer, and not only a murderer, but a murderer of his own brother. And so, you know, the Old Testament, that’s a hell of a harsh book. And you might think, well, maybe that’s a little bit too much to bear. And then you might think, yea, and maybe it’s true, too. So that’s something to think about. Human beings are amazing creatures. To think about us as a plague on the planet is its own kind of bloody catastrophe—malevolent, low, quasi-genocidal metaphor. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t without our problems. The fact that this book, that sits at the cornerstone of our culture, would present the first man as a murderer of his brother, is something that should really set you back on your heels.”
Abel is most favoured over his brother Cain and out of sheer spite and jealousy, we do witness the first murder take place. Cain betrays his family and his blood and deceives his brother Abel, and murders him out in the field. And from here, we witness the unravelling of the decline of human morality. What ensues in the Bible, is primed with story after story after story of wars, betrayal, deceitfulness, murder, adultery, immorality, rape, incest etc. This is a far cry from the original garden that Adam and Eve first inhabited. But regardless of all the sin that is rife in these narratives, we are given a strong intimation of hope throughout; hope that was hinted at in the garden when God promised that this is not the end of the story. The foreshadowing of what the ideal should be, through the representation of the garden, will become increasingly imminent in the heart of man and throughout the rest of the Bible.
The Garden of Earthly Delights, Painted by Bosch, is a perfect depiction of the transition of what was meant to be a place of paradise, that once expelled from this earthy paradise, spirals into chaos. We see on the left panel, how everything is in harmony and as man-kind progresses out, the middle panel is where the deadly sin starts to infuse its way. Filled with debauchery, excess etc… there seems to be a strong disregard for the consequences of living in such a way. The last panel is a foreshadowing of the results and consequences of sin and the meandering chaos that ensues. It is a paradise that has been degraded and destroyed. Image courtesy of: publicdomainreview.org
We live in a broken world; of this we can be sure. For proof of this, one need only to look at one's surroundings. Human relationships are fractured; whether on a global level involving wars, or on an intimate level, with family members, friends or husbands and wives. There is an epidemic of loneliness and we are witnessing more and more people struggling with anxiety and depression, exasperated by a global pandemic. I heard on the radio the other day that studies have shown that the rate of illicit drug use has increased four times over in the last decade. Drug overdose, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, exploitation, divorce, child custody… these are problems many people are contending with in our modern day.
This pervading malevolence in our fellow humans’ pursuit to destroy one another, is prevalent too, on an international scale. WWII, possibly the deadliest war our world has ever seen, is a testimony to the destructive nature that we are capable of reaping on one another. The atomic bomb could possibly be the shiniest tome of just how broken our world has become today. Never before in human history, have we been given so much power to cause untold amounts of death and destruction. And the remnants of this can be seen amidst the ominous tension and suspicion held between nations; the constant questions of who might possess such weapons and the pondering of, not if, but when one will discharge this destructive force on our world again.
This fractured relationship, or lack thereof, too, is present within the natural environment. The planet is being trashed with plastic. Our rivers and oceans and soils are being poisoned with chemicals; and our air is being clogged up with toxic fumes. We are surrounded by less and less trees, and more and more asphalt. We are seeing, increasingly, animal species put on the extinction or endangered list, and a loss of biodiversity is growing. Acidification is bleaching our beautiful coral reefs, deforestation; annihilating the lungs of our planet and oil spills; destroying our oceans. And on and on it goes. To declare that we live in a bit of a mess might be a bit of an understatement.
Sue Stuart-Smith tells us, “The source of this polarisation can be traced back to the Bible. The garden of Eden is as beautiful as it is abundant and until Adam and Eve are cast out to toil over hard ground, they live in a state perfection. If the garden is caught between paradise on the one hand and punishing labour on the other, where is the middle ground?”
It would be impossible to say that we can single handedly fix all the problems of the world. But we can do one thing, and this, I believe, as Sue Stuart-Smith has pointed out, is where the middle ground may be - to cultivate in the small corner of our world, our very own, Garden of Eden: somewhere to become reacquainted with our primordial and archetypal desires, as well as offering a place of Sanctuary in a world filled with so much tumult. Whether consciously or sub-consciously, we yearn to be reunited with our roots; to live in harmony with and not against or in exploitation of it.
In her book, ‘The Well Gardened Mind,’ Sue Stuart chronicles, through the retelling of stories from her clinical practice and experience, how placing one in a garden is seen to act as an elixir from the chaos that has potential to plague many. From the war veteran, who suffers from PTSD by having witnessed untold amounts of death and destruction; to the young woman who is suffering from post-partum depression; to the hospital patients looking to escape the clinical setting of rehabilitation; to the dying Freud, who underwent treatment after treatment to keep his mouth cancer at bay; all had one thing in common that helped their mental and physical health and well-being, as well as in some cases, their acceptance of death, and that was that the garden provided consolation, acted as medicine and most importantly, provided much needed peace.
Kenneth Helphand, Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon tells us, “peace is not just the absence of war but a positive assertive state... the garden is not just a retreat and a respite, but an assertion of a proposed condition, a model to be emulated.”
To back Sue Stuart’s claims scientifically, citing from the Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, inquiry shows, "According to the psycho-physiological stress reduction framework [12], humans are biologically attuned through evolution for immediate positive responses to safe, natural environments associated with survival, such as trees, vegetation, and water. Thus, exposure to natural stimuli can support restoration from stress, which includes recovering from markedly high or low physiological and psychological conditions and recharging of the energy consumed in response to stress [15]. Exposure to natural environments can also mediate the destructive effect of stress by reducing negative mood while enhancing positive affects [15,16]. This restoration-from-stress effect can be gained through the activity of gardening, and this is empirically supported by the results of a field experiment in which mood was found to be restored, and stress levels, as assessed by cortisol levels, were found to reduce with the strongest extent following gardening, as compared to a control group [17]. A longitudinal survey with empirical data also indicated that adults who moved to greener residential areas benefitted from sustained improvements in their mental health, supporting the restorative effects of natural environments [18].”
“Throughout the ages in both Western and Eastern cultures,” Sue-Stuart tells us, “enclosed gardens have offered sanctuary from the turbulence of the world as well as the turbulence of the mind. On entering into a walled garden, you immediately feel you are in a warmer place. The heat of the sun radiates from the walls and you are protected from the winds and noise of the world outside.”
This concept of the garden and its multitude of meanings is echoed through and is replete in great literature. For the Medievalists, such as Tolkien and his world in the Lord Of The Rings, the garden is a place set apart, separate from the world and its concerns. But not only is it a place set apart; it too, also acts as a common place within the world – it is a great paradox in his work. It is a place of haven whereby friends, family, and even the stranger a-like may walk through; but it is also the means by which one must pass by in order to leave home and enter into the turmoil of the world. And when the Hobbits leave the peace of the shire and experience the contrast of that of the outside; the world in which Frodo and Samwise Gamgee set to fight the Dark Lord and his Ring, we see how the flourishing green of the garden has been set in stark contrast to the ugliness, sterility and black smokiness of Mordor. And at the end of their journey, whereby Frodo is dejected and almost left for dead, Samwise Gamgee (not only a buddy, but his gardener) seeks to breathe life into the heart of his friend and asks him, “Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It'll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they'll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields... and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?” The garden acts as a symbol and hope of better things to come. It is the safe space behind the gate. It is the ordinary. It is a place of reprieve. It is the ideal dwelling state, particularly in contrast to the death and destruction and malevolence surrounding these friends.
In the Bible, the beginning of the story takes place in a Garden. As has been demonstrated, chaos is what follows after the expulsion. Eventually, this story comes full circle towards the end of the Bible... in a garden. Christ, in the gospels, knowing that he would be betrayed and put to death by crucifixion - soon after, goes to a garden. The gospel accounts tell us that he was in so much agony that he sweat drops of blood. This, in medical terms, is called Hematidrosis. This happens when the capillary blood vessels that feed the sweat glands rupture, causing the blood to exude on the surface of the skin. This is the extreme response of a person who is under acute stress. To the garden of Gethsemane, he places himself, and seeks and is provided with much needed solace. The garden, in this instance, acts both symbolically and metaphorically. It is the ideal dwelling place from the beginning and it was the place that we were kicked out from. It is from the point of the garden, that Christ, which translated in the Greek, means the anointed one, will seek his refuge. But, it too, will be the starting point of the journey to restore what was lost from the beginning and fulfill the assurance of hope, promised… in the garden. Jesus, from a theological stand point, is called the new Adam. He undoes what the old Adam did. He comes to restore what was lost, and he begins this process, through the passion, starting in the archetypal dwelling place, the place of refuge; a garden. This moment is the culmination, of arguably, one of the greatest stories ever told and it speaks to our innate desire, metaphorically, but also, arguably, metaphysically and physically, to seek what was once and had been lost. To reiterate what Helphand said, the garden is.. “a model to be emulated.”
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel perfectly encapsulates what has been demonstrated here. Typically, the focus, when viewing this masterpiece, is placed on the moment God gives his life to Adam through the finger. We see this continuously in the replication of this masterpiece. But what many rarely pay attention to, is the left finger that God places on the Child, who is in fact, Jesus. Michelangelo, through his art, is telling us that the creation of Adam would be intrinsically linked to the future coming of Christ, who comes to reconcile man after the sin of Adam in the Garden. Image courtesy of: Italianrenaissence.org
It is important, in my view, as clients, to seek; and as designers and architects, to create places that connect spaces to nature; granting people with a much-needed tangible symbolic place to become reacquainted with these archetypal truths.
No-one has encapsulated this notion more profoundly than in the master architect's masterpiece, Luis Barragán’s, Casa Barragan. His garden is positioned and acts as an altar, in my view, to the home. It is the place in the home given prominence; connecting to the architectural elements. Images may not tell the true story, but as can be seen in the below floor plan, Barragán is generous in his attribution and placement of the garden. It seems that there is no inside or outside, as he is known to have stated, “I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.” This stress on the importance of the garden in his architectural approach is reiterated in his Pritzker Prize speech, "Gardens. In the creation of a garden, the architect invites the partnership of the Kingdom of Nature. In a beautiful garden, the majesty of Nature is ever present, but Nature reduced to human proportions and thus transformed into the most efficient haven against the aggressiveness of contemporary life. Ferdinand Bac taught us that “the soul of gardens shelters the greatest sum of serenity at man’s disposal,” and it is to him that I am indebted for my longing to create a perfect garden. He said, speaking of his gardens at Ies Colombiers, “in this small domain, I have done nothing else but joined the millenary solidarity to which we are all subject: the ambition of expressing materially a sentiment, common to many men in search of a link with nature, by creating a place of repose of peaceable pleasure “ It will appear obvious, then, that a garden must combine the poetic and the mysterious with a feeling of serenity and joy. There is no fuller expression of vulgarity than a vulgar garden.”
Peter Zumthor’s Home and Atelier, too, encapsulates the importance of the garden. So often, when interviewed, does he reflect on the luxury and love that he has for gardens, and in particular, his own garden… the one that connects the buildings that he lives and works in. His love for gardens is so prolific, that when asked to design the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, he creates an enclosed structure with the garden at the heart of it. Characterising his thinking behind this temporary masterpiece, he has this to say, “A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. It is close to us. There we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.”
“Enclosed gardens fascinate me. A forerunner of this fascination is my love of the fenced vegetable gardens on farms in the Alps, where farmers’ wives often planted flowers as well. I love the image of these small rectangles cut out of vast alpine meadows, the fence keeping the animals out. There is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big.
“The hortus conclusus that I dream of is enclosed all around and open to the sky. Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magical place. I think of gardens that I have seen, that I believe I have seen, that I long to see, surrounded by simple walls, columns, arcades or the façades of buildings – sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time” –Peter Zumthor, May 2011
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011 Designed by Peter Zumthor, Serpentine Gallery, London (1 July - 16 October 2011) © Peter Zumthor, Photograph © 2011 John Offenbach
We need to go back to the beginning and rediscover the primordial desire to be with nature. Carl Jung says, ‘Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had a symbolic meaning for him.’
Now, we all know how dangerous and cruel our world can be. But perhaps we might look at creating our own Garden of Eden. A small plot on the Earth that we might cultivate and allow for it to cultivate us.
We have been expelled from the garden, and with-it, have been attributed with many hardships. But we need not fall into despair of these calamities and reacquaint ourselves with a glimpse of the ideal; the ideal through the lens of the garden.
“Certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth,” J. R. R. Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher in early 1945. “We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile.’ … As far as we can go back the nobler part of the human mind is filled with the thoughts of sibb, peace and good will, and with the thought of its loss. We shall never recover it, for that is not the way of repentance, which works spirally and not in a closed circle; we may recover something like it, but on a higher plane” (Letter 96).
Let us recover something like it; let us retrieve a small plot to act as an echo.
I will leave you with this heart rendering extract from T.S Elliot’s, the Four Quartets;
We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time. / Through the unknown, remembered gate / When the last of earth left to discover / Is that which was the beginning; / At the source of the longest river / The voice of the hidden waterfall / And the children in the apple-tree / Not known, because not looked for / But heard, half-heard, in the stillness / Between the two waves of the sea. / Quick now, here, now, always— / A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well / When the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one.
Below are some images and a floor plan that will hopefully give an intimation of the importance of the garden in Luis Barragán’s Masterpiece, Casa Barragán and some images of Peter Zumthor’s, Atelier and Home in connection to the garden.