The gardener out of Eden

John Evelyn’s gardening texts elicit serious attention,primarily from students of gardening history but alsofrom historians of science, delighted that Evelyn (Figure Iin Box 1) is no less the virtuoso for contemplating fountains,groves and parterres1. Less attention is shown to his culinarytext, Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699), although asI have recently argued, it reflects Evelyn’s involvement inhorticultural aspirations of the Royal Society2. In thisarticle, I outline Evelyn’s relationship to gardens, at onceintellectual but also sensual and spiritual. I am interestedin delineating his sensibility; the mode of apprehension thatdistinguishes even his most learned texts from the lesssensual – certainly less spiritual – productions of his peers.This sensibility evokes that of the Adamic gardener inAndrew Marvell’s The Garden, in which the speaker is sophysically intimate with vegetation,

Stumbling on melons as I pass,

Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass

that the botanic world conditions his perception, definingpatterns of his thought,

annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade.

As in The Garden, Evelyn’s gardens are not mere spacesto be pruned and weeded. They engage the gardener’ssubjectivity; he is as much the subject as they are. Ideally,garden and gardener are reciprocal, each an image of theother. In the charming, unpublished text written for his owngardener, Directions for the Gardiner at Says-Court Butwhich may be of Use for Other Gardens, daily/monthlyschedules for supervising and maintenance, ‘not omittingthe least corner’, submit the gardener to the garden’srhythms3. The text transcribes Evelyn’s personal experience,documenting that he submits to plants that ostensibly heowns, that he observes their growth and adjusts his routineto manage the cycle of their needs. Far from deferring to anexpert gardener, Evelyn dedicates the text to an appren-tice, instructing him (and presumably other aspirants)from a position of personal knowledge on how to keep hispersonal garden (Figure 1).

Evelyn cannot imagine a garden without a committedgardener, because constant activity is God’s paradigm forhow to maintain the earth. In Kalendarium Hortense: Or,the Gard’ners Almanac, Directing what he is to doMonthly throughout the Year (1664), Evelyn states that‘As Paradise (tho’ of God’s own Planting) was no longerParadise than the Man was put into it, to dress it, and tokeep it; so, nor will our Gardens (as near as we can contrive them to the resemblance of that blessed Abode)remain long in their Perfection, unless they are also con-tinually cultivated).’ ‘Perfection’ is the postlapsarianequivalent of Paradise, which like the original is alwaysat risk. One cannot be a sunshine gardener because ‘howprecious the Time is, how precipitous the Occasion, howmany things to be done in their just Season, and howintolerable a Confusion succeeds the smallest neglect.’4

0160-9327/02/$ – see front matter © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0160-9327(00)01419-8 Endeavour Vol. 26(3) 2002 113

Replanting Eden: John Evelyn andhis gardensSandra Sherman

The first book of John Evelyn’s Elysium Britannicum states that ‘no man can be very miserable that ismaster of a Garden’, and it leaves no doubt that mastery in such precincts requires expertise and deepthought: ‘What is our Gardiner to be, but an absolute Philosopher!’ Throughout his oeuvre, John Evelyn(1620–1706) theorized not just gardens but gardeners, and he saw the two as inseparable. A garden couldnot be a garden but for its careful, informed attendance. Whether writing for his own apprentice gardener,or for virtuosi of the Royal Society of which he was a founder, Evelyn attempted to articulate the nature ofthis attendance. He noted as well the returns that gardens provided, claiming that nowhere else couldcontemplation be so satisfying. Evelyn’s work is a profound meditation on the rhythms of nature and theirimplication in our lives. His chapter in Elysium entitled ‘Of artificial Echo’s, Musick, and Hydraulick Motions’claims that introducing music into gardens draws us out of ourselves (‘our soules being drawne as it wereout of our bodys’) towards a type of divine abstraction, ‘greately conducing to extasy & the most heavenlyraptures.’ Gardens are places for rhythms – and hence for disciplines – not entirely our own. This articleexamines this constant theme in Evelyn’s gardening texts.

Sandra Sherman

Is Professor of British Literature at the University of Arkansas,specializing in the period 1660–1820. She is the author ofFinance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century:Accounting for Defoe (1996) and Imagining Poverty:Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism (2001). She iscurrently working in the area of culinary history, examining(among many issues) the relationship between women’shousehold manuscripts and printed culinary and medicaltexts, and is writing an 18th-century cookbook from recipescollected whilst she was a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at LucyCavendish College, Cambridge, UK.e-mail: ssherman@uark.edu

For every month, Kalendarium bristles with imperatives– ‘Dress’, ‘Dig’, ‘Plant’, ‘Cleanse’ – that require gardenersto constantly get down and dirty, even to apply noxiousmixtures: ‘the Dung of Pigeons and Poultry, mix’d withMould, is excellent for the Fig-Tree’ (357). The garden’sdiscipline is hard, a round of manures, hotbeds, soot-ashes and refuse-sweepings ‘never at an end’. But it ‘contributes to the most serious Contemplation’ (353),and this involvement of gritty, manual labour with penetrating thought is, I think, the ‘way in’ to Evelyn’sgardening texts.

In Acetaria, Evelyn seriously contemplates his relation-ship to Kalendarium’s Edenic ideal. For many mid-centuryherbalists as well as members of the Royal Society, horti-cultural knowledge was at last approaching Adam’s com-petence before the Fall, permitting man to pursue hisprelapsarian status, that is, Adam’s personal purity andpower over nature5. Although Evelyn was stirred by thisideal, he did not share the optimism of his peers, and pro-posed a theory of vegetable knowledge whose epistemol-ogy reflects his experience of real gardens. Like a hands-on gardener would, he cites the riotous profusion of

114 Endeavour Vol. 26(3) 2002

The Dictionary of National Biography claims that John Evelyn’stexts ‘are for the most part occasional and of little permanentvalue’. But this expression of High Seriousness, unable to ‘value’high sensibility, has proved totally wrong. The author of morethan 30 texts, Evelyn (1620–1706) is ‘now recognized as one of thekey personalities of a crucial transitional period in the evolutionof the modern intellectual world’a (Figure I). In 2001, Elysiumwas published by the University of Pennsylvania, part of a newseries entitled Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture. It isacknowledged to be ‘an immensely rich document containinga great deal of information about the garden culture of the seventeenth century’b.

Evelyn was indeed a gardening ‘expert’, provided that we donot read that term anachronistically: he collected books system-atically, visited the great gardens of Europe, took copiousnotes and met and corresponded with other horticulturists. Hemade major improvements to the family seat at Wotton, and athis house at Sayes Court established ‘some of the mostrenowned, cosmopolitan, and ‘modern’ garden landscapes inseventeenth-century England, creating in effect a laboratory forlandscape design and plant cultivation’c. Evelyn was a founderof the Royal Society with luminaries such as Robert Boyle, towhom he had proposed a type of seminary where men coulddevote themselves to ‘promotion of experimental knowledge’(there is more than a whiff of Bacon’s New Atlantis). For a time,he was Secretary, and later declined the office of President. Hewrote Sylva at the Society’s behest, and in Acetaria signedhimself ‘S. R. S.’ Yet Evelyn was too private, too multi-faceted todevote himself entirely to the Society. He led the life of a countrygentleman, held public office and carried out commissions forCharles II (during the Commonwealth, he acknowledged butdid not flaunt Royalist sympathies, leaving the army quickly butpossibly fulfilling secret missions). He was great friends withPepys, and his Diary – his most famous text outside scholarlycircles – is much the more thoughtful. Nor did he write justabout gardens. Some of his most interesting texts are on trade,art, numismatics, religion, political theory and pollution (he is ‘oneof the principal progenitors of the conservation movement’c).He was an active translator and an avid cookd.

His family’s money came originally from gunpowder, but wasshifted into land, in which Evelyn took a keen interest. Sylvawas a response to the Society’s request for a plan to reforestEngland, after Cromwell had allowed the forests’ virtualdestruction by entrepreneurs. After the Restoration, the Navywas desperate for masts, and Sylva was greeted as a textbook– a blueprint – for the future. Two centuries later, D’Israeli wrote:‘Inquire at the Admiralty how the fleets of Nelson had beenconstructed; they can tell you it was with the oaks that thegenius of Evelyn planted’e. Evelyn claimed that Sylva launched amillion trees (~3800 were needed for a small, 74-gun ship). Hewas not, however, a scientific innovator. His genius was literary.Fumifugium was reprinted twice in the 20th century because ofits power to rivet readers. The National Smoke AbatementSociety, which later changed its name to the National Society forClean Air, sponsored the text, and stated in 1961 that ‘it is ourhope that all who read John Evelyn’s powerful indictment and

most eloquent pleas, may feel themselves akin to him in spiritand will wish to help forward the work he so inspiringly began.’The Grand Salad reprints portions of Acetaria, giving modernequivalents for much of its vegetable lore. Far from being‘occasional’, and in that sense obsolete, Evelyn’s work resonateswith the modern imagination.

Referencesa Ingram, J. (1998) In John Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’ and

European Gardeningb O’Malley, T. (1998) In John Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’ and

European Gardeningc O’Malley, T. and Wolschke-Bulman, J., eds (1998) John Evelyn’s

‘Elysium Britannicum’ and European Gardening. Dumbarton OaksResearch Library and Collection, Washington, USA

d See Evelyn’s recipes in Driver, C., ed. (1997) John Evelyn, Cook,Prospect Books

e Cited in Masson, M. (1984) The Grand Salad, Peacock Vane,Bonchurch, UK (8)

BOX 1. JOHN EVELYN – A REFLECTION

Figure I. John Evelyn Robert Walker. Reproduced, with permission, from theNational Portrait Gallery.

plants, and suggests that the virtuosi can know them atbest asymptotically:

It would still require the revolution of many ages;

deep, and long experience, for any man to emerge that

perfect, and accomplish’d artist gardiner they boast

themselves to be: nor do I think, men will ever reach that

end, and far extended limits of the vegetable kingdom, so

incomprehensible is the variety it every day produces6.

The ‘artist gardiner’ is someone who, in essence, sub-jugates nature to art, allowing him to transform naturalspaces by comprehending them, reducing them – quite literally – to defined, manageable embodiments of perfect knowledge. For Evelyn, such ascendancy of gardener over garden is impossible: it contravenes thereciprocity of garden and gardener that is fundamentalto his thought, and reflective of his personal gardeningexperience. The genius of Acetaria is in its compromisewith the notion of ‘artist gardiner’, accommodating perfected knowledge to a sphere – reduced from the‘extended limits of the vegetable kingdom’ – in whichsuch perfection is possible. Evelyn would calibrate intellectual ambition to the scale of projects that can gratify it:

But this is that which abortives the perfection of

the most glorious and useful undertakings; the unsatiable

coveting to exhaust all that should, or that can be said

upon every head… There ought therefore to be as

many hands, and subsidiaries to such a design (and those

masters too) as there are distinct parts of the whole…

that those who have the means and courage may (tho’

they do not undertake the whole) finish a part at least,

and in time unite their labours into one intire, compleat,

and consummate work indeed. (8–9)

Acetaria, excerpted from Evelyn’s vast, unpublishedElysium Britannicum, constitutes a manageable, perfectedtext, ‘a part at least’ that was fit to publish. Acetariarepresents scaled-down vegetable knowledge: everythingyou need to know about sallet. It is about the perfect har-mony, purity and dressing of vegetables. It is about re-moving extraneous elements, and combining the rest withsuch knowledge and grace that a vegetable diet – whatAdam ate before the Fall – approximates its Edenic model.Mixed and served in non-reactive porcelain dishes, a salletreconstitutes Eden as a perfect array of vegetables in adiscrete, well-tended place. As such, the sallet is not ametaphor. It is Eden, much more so than botanic gardensexposed to urban grime, claiming to contain every known

Endeavour Vol. 26(3) 2002 115

Figure 1. Detail of plan of John Evelyn’s house and garden at Sayes Court, Deptford, showing his elaborate design and plantingof the 1650s. From The Archive of John Evelyn. Reproduced, with permission, from the British Library Board.

plant7. To prepare and consume such a sallet is to enact theprimal scene – it is to participate in Eden. Thus Acetaria,consistent with all of Evelyn’s garden texts, is not aboutan Eden – a garden – ‘out there’. It contemplates the self-in-Eden, much as Adam – much as Evelyn’s ideal gardener– occupied that space. In Kalendarium, Evelyn said thatEden (or any garden) could not be perfect except as Adam(or any gardener) kept it so, and in Acetaria he translatesthis notion to sallet-making. For Evelyn, the perfect sallet,produced from botanic knowledge perfect to its occasion,is a means of regaining man’s ur-perfection, existent beforethe Fall.

In Fumifugium: Or The Inconveniencie of the Aer andSmoak of London Dissipated (1661), Evelyn deploresLondon’s noxious fumes, and observes that air – like food– should nourish8. Indeed, as if to anticipate Acetaria,Evelyn claims that London’s foul air prevents the naturalmaturation of garden plants, which do not grow ‘unlessethey be raised on a Hot-bed, and govern’d with extraordinaryArtifice to accelerate their springing, imparting a bitter andungrateful Tast[e] to those few wretched Fruits, whichnever arriving to their destined maturity, seem, like theApples of Sodome, to fall even to dust, when they are buttouched’(139). In the London of Fumifugium, the gardener’srole is perverted. There are no natural, involving rhythms,and he is forced to rely on ‘Artifice’ in order to garden at all.Evelyn’s solution to the problem is to remove polluters tooutside the city, and then encircle it with fragrant plants.London (like a perfect sallet!) would be a purified, man-aged space, set apart from the pollution outside. ‘[S]uchShrubs, as yield the most fragrant and odoriferous Flowers’(154) would come to the aid of other plants, redeemingthe gardener as well, who could resume his ideal reciprocalrelation to his garden, and exclude unnatural Artifice.

The genius of the soil

In A Philosophical Discourse of Earth, Relating to theCulture and Improvement of it for Vegetation, and thePropagation of Plants (1676), Evelyn describes soil that isintensely alive, equivalent to the gardener and responsiveto him. Describing how to increase the germinative potentialof various soil types, he notes that ‘Earths should be marriedtogether like Male and Female, as if they had Sexes’ (96).The Discourse speculates on what makes soil producevegetation, and on how that inherent ‘Principle’ can beencouraged, even to support exotic plants. Of all Evelyn’shorticultural essays, it is thus the most ‘philosophical’. Itcontains many personal ‘experiments’. After washing away‘heterogeneous’ elements in soils and dungs, leaving only‘Sands, Crystals, or Salts’, Evelyn wonders if these might be‘universally the cause of Vegetation’, and ‘if by examiningthe several Earths… I might possibly detect, what rudimentsof such a Principle there was lurking in them, abstractlytaken’ (38). In an astonishing passage, he observes thatstone and water are perhaps the same element in variousstates of condensation, such that ‘there is but oneCatholic, homogeneous, fluid matter, (diversified only byshape, size, motion, repose, and various texture of theminute Particles it consists of; and from which affections ofmatter, the divers qualities result of particular bodies)’ (45).

Always the gardener, however, Evelyn does not disappearinto metaphysics, but suggests that this fluidity may permitthe creation of designer soils, adaptable to all sorts of plants:

…what may not mixture, and an attent inspection

into the anatomical parts of the vegetable family in time

produce, for our composing of all sorts of Moulds and

Soils almost imaginable, which is the drift of my present

Discourse?

He speculates whether ‘Solomon by this means… had allkinds of Plants in his incomparable Gardens’ (46).

A Philosophical Discourse contemplates the possibility,dear to Evelyn’s peers, that England might become a uni-versal garden. What is required is to ‘make new confectionsof Earths and Moulds for the entertaining of the most gen-erous and profitable Plants’, perhaps even to ‘modifie alsothe Air about them, and make the remedy regional as well astopical’. The optimal goal is to domesticate exotics, ‘otherFruits (Strangers yet amongst us) as for Oranges, Lemons,Pomegranats, Figs, and other precious Trees’ (48–49).Read against Acetaria, the Discourse is a point from whichto measure the contraction of Evelyn’s horticultural am-bition. In the Discourse, the earth is so alive that grandprojects seem possible. The key is to work the earth toenhance its potential – ‘the nature of the Plant always fol-lowing the genius of the soil’ – and to purge impuritiesthat impede growth. Gardener and nature must cooperate tothe seeds’ advantage, which ‘would rise freely, in all places,if impediments were removed’ (57). Following Hugh Plat,Evelyn argues that manuring is less important than expos-ing earth to natural elements, churning it up for air and sun,which ‘cause all Vegetables to prosper in the most exalteddegree’, and allow exotics to ‘bear their fruit as kindlywith us, as they do in their natural Climates’ (67)9. Evelynprefers horticultural minimalism, wherein soils allowed torecover their natural vitality are the best-growing medium:

…a mellow and rich mould, impregnated with

all the blessings which the Influences of the Heaven,

and efflorescence of the Earth can contribute to it;

fitted, as it is, for Generation, and yet so restrain’d from

it, as greedily to receive the first Seeds, which are

committed to it, with a passion, and fervency as it were

of animal love. (67)

Yet although Evelyn envisions a minimalist utopia, thereason for the Discourse is that not all soils grow all vegetation, especially exotics, so that intervention is crucial.At one point he imagines that soils might be imported:‘This might be effected to good proportion by the ballastingof Ships’ (28–29). More realistically, he provides detailedinstructions on what, today, would be called ‘organic fer-tilization’, always keeping in mind that soils, fertilizerand plant must be exactly suited: ‘Each single speciesdraws and assimilates that only to it self which it findsmost amicous and congruous to its nature; and if so it be,then have we no more to do, than to learn how to prepareour Ferments, and apply them accordingly, namely acidto acids, sweet to sweets…’ (113).

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Gardeners are required to study specimens minutely:

Thus as by the Plant we may conjecture of the

Mould; so by the Mould we may guess at the Plant:

The more herbaceous and tender, springing from the

gentle Bed; the course and rougher Plants, from the

rude and churlish. (27)

The Discourse moves between speculation and pragmatism,combining ‘conjecture’ and ‘guess’ with observation(Evelyn employs a microscope). Ultimately, its purpose isto formulate a regime for how to make things grow. Hencethere are specific recipes: ‘If you desire something exquisite,macerate [pigeon dung] well mixed with the Lees of Wine,stale Urine, and a little Brimstone beaten very fine’ (125).But what makes the text sublime is that just around everycorner, the most acute observation, the most detailedinstruction opens a natural philosophical mystery:

For Grounds are as nice as our Bodies…and

therefore it requires skill, and no little study to be able

rightly to martial this Materia Medica (as I may call

it) of Composts, the virtue of which does sometimes

lie very hidden …what we all this while seek after,

is indeed altogether invisible to humane eyes, and to

be discern’d only by the eyes intellectual, because ‘tis

veiled and clad under so many different bodies…

such as Marle, Chalk, the Dung of Beasts…(129)

The passage points towards Acetaria’s submission to horticultural complexity.

Trees and eternity

Evelyn’s most famous horticultural text, Sylva, Or aDiscourse of Forest-Trees, And the Propagation of Timberin His Majesties Dominions (1664), is not about gardens,but was commissioned by the Royal Society to suggesthow to restore England’s forests. Of interest here is BookIV, Dendrologia: An Historical Account of the Sacrednessand Use of Standing Groves, added to the fourth editionin 1706. The book is an intensely personal statement,couched in classical mythology, poetry, druidical lore andBible stories, all tending to show that forests are spiritualplaces to be cultivated for their own sake, apart from anypractical use. In this context, Evelyn makes astonishingasides about gardens and the nature of vegetable growth.In particular, he attacks church-burial as ‘a novelPresumption, undecent, sordid, and very prejudicial tohealth’, arguing that since Jesus chose a garden as ‘the Placeof his Sepulchre’, what better place for our own burial‘than in our Gardens and Groves, or airy Fields, sub dio;where our Beds may be decked and carpeted with verdantand fragrant Flowers, Trees, and Perennial Plants, the mostnatural and instructive Hieroglyphics of our expectedResurrection and Immortality: besides what they mightconduce to the Meditation of the living, and the taking offour Cogitations from dwelling too intently upon more vainand sensual Objects.’10 Gardens are sacred because theyare living places, and remind us that death cannot, in fact, beproud. They draw us out of ourselves into Creation, towards

the same mysterious objects of ‘Contemplation’ cited inKalendarium. Evelyn notes that ‘the late elegant andaccomplished Sir W. Temple, tho’he laid not his whole Bodyin his Garden, deposited the better Part of it (his Heart)there,’ and he affirms that wherever his own body is laid‘let …it be not in the Church or Chancel’ (297–298).

As a coda, Evelyn draws a complex analogy betweenplants and human beings, each with similar organs that‘concoct, transmute, augment, produce and nourish’ andmost particularly generate new organisms (311). He marvelsat how ‘Seeds, those little Souls of Plants’, remain in theirreceptacles until they ‘fall into the Embraces of the Earth’,which every year ‘fails not to bring them forth’. Yet justwhen Dendrologia seems like a hymn to autonomousnature, in comes the gardener:

With what delight have I beheld this tender and

innumerable Off-spring, re-pullulating at the Feet of an

aged Tree! From whence the Suckers are drawn,

transplanted and educated by Human Industry, and

forgetting the Ferity of their Nature, become civiliz’d

to all his Employments. (312)

Plants assume a reciprocity so intense, so involved withthe gardener that they become humanoid, able perhaps(like the poet) to merge with the rest of nature, ‘a greenthought in a green shade’.

References and notes1 See the magnificent collection of essays in O’Malley, T. and

Wolschke-Bulman, J., eds (1998) John Evelyn’s ‘ElysiumBritannicum’ and European Gardening, Dumbarton OaksResearch Library and Collection, Washington, USA. TheElysium was Evelyn’s summa on gardening, but only parts –notably Acetaria – were published in his lifetime. It has justbeen published: Ingram, J., ed. (2001) Elysium Britannicum,or the Royal Gardens, University of Pennsylvania Press,Philadelphia, PA, USA. See also Graham Parry (1992) JohnEvelyn as Hortulan Saint. In Culture and Cultivation inEarly Modern England – Writing the Land (Leslie, M. andRaylor, T., eds), pp. 130–150, Leicester University Press,Leicester, UK

2 See Sandra Sherman (2002) An Eden on a plate. PetitsPropos Culinaires 69, 70–91

3 See Geoffrey Keynes, ed. (1932) Directions for theGardiner at Says-Court But which may be of Use for OtherGardens, Nonesuch Press, London, UK, p. 96

4 Kalendarium Hortense In Guy de la Bedoyere (1995) TheWritings of John Evelyn, pp. 347–408, 353, 354, BoydellPress, Woodbridge, UK

5 The classic study of this ambition is Charles Webster (1975)The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform1626–1660, Duckworth, London, UK. See also John Prest(1981) The Garden of Eden and the Re-Creation ofParadise, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, USA

6 Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, Tom Jaine, ed. (Totnes:Prospect Books [1699], 1996), p. 7

7 For a good discussion of these gardens, in places such asAmsterdam and London, see John Prest (1981) The Gardenof Eden

8 See Fumifugium In de la Bedoyere, ed., Writings,pp. 127–158, 135

9 Although Evelyn does not cite chapter and verse, see Sir Hugh Plat, The Garden of Eden (1654), suggesting that a fallow earth, ‘manured with the starres’, would produce such glorious plants as no herbalist ‘could either know, or give true and proper names unto’(pp. 169–170)

10 Sylva (5th edn, 1729), p. 296

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