ekleksographia wave two

Rudolf Borchardt, almost forgotten for decades after his death in 1945, has recently seen a modest renaissance, since his sixteen-volume collected works were published in Germany (Stuttgart: Klett/Cotta, 1957-1999), together with his voluminous and remarkable correspondence (9 volumes since 1994, and still underway, Munich: Edition Tenschert, Hanser Verlag, 1994-2002).

The author is almost impossible to categorize. During his lifetime, part of his fame rested on his oratorical skills, and he traveled throughout Germany as a sought-after speaker on themes of cultural history and contemporary literary trends and figures. But he was also a prolific poet, a literary critic, playwright, novelist, short story writer, and a most gifted translator, who brought major texts from classical French, English, Italian, Greek and Latin, close to German readers.

The Passionate Gardener is probably the most unusual book of his entire body of work. Like the author himself, it is hard to categorize. It is a practical compendium for the garden enthusiast with long lists of plant names, detailed descriptions of garden plants, seed companies throughout Europe, ideal soil conditions, and suggestions for proper cultivation of various shrubs and flowers.

But it is also a history of gardening in Europe, as well as an overview of the great European voyages of discovery that brought not only new scientific knowledge of the terra incognita but also unknown seeds and succulents from the New World to the Old. And, last but not least, the book is a philosophical treatise about the garden where human and nature meet on a personal level, and where a man may find his full humanity in his encounter with flowers, beauty, creativity, and creation. Borchardt summarizes all this in his chapter Postscript:

The reader with whom the author of this book has still the luck, after so many pages, to converse ...has of course been aware for quite some time of spending his hours with no gardener's garden book, and indeed with no botanist's book, nor even, finally — no matter how strong these pages' defense of the stature of such a figure — with a book of a simple amateur. He has been in the company of a humanist. And if now he has the impression that the garden can be seen, or must be seen — like everything truly important for the human being — as a voice of the human spirit's oneness and indivisibility — since this alone is the whole of humanitas — then the effort of this book has not been wasted.

While reading this book, I was struck by how very European it is, in its experience and in its historical perspectives. It offers wide sweeping overviews of the great princely gardens of Schwetzingen, Muskau (Germany), Versailles (France), Het Loo (Netherlands), Boboli (Italy), or Hampton Court and Stowe (England) that either reflect geometrical "French" designs or the later "English" landscape gardens with their carefully crafted "natural" vistas. The book traces the triumphant march of foreign and exotic plants through the monastery gardens north of the Alps into the private gardens of bourgeois botanists and into the herb gardens of healers and apothecaries in Germany, Holland, and France. It accounts for the discovery of the New World and the taking root in Europe of plants from African deserts, the American wilderness, and the steppes of Asia. The book shows how the floral riches of the world enhanced Europe.

I read both the German edition of 1968 and the 2006 English translation and was impressed with Henry Martin's accurate and sensitive work. If Borchardt had written the book in English, it would read as it now does. The German original remained unpublished for many years after Rudolf Borchardt's death. Although his family had converted to the Protestant faith in the nineteenth century, the Nazis considered Borchardt a Jew and publication of his work became impossible. The author's Italian residence with its ample gardens eventually became his hiding place during Hitler's rule. At the very end of World War II he was arrested and deported to Germany, but released en route by a merciful low-ranking soldier. Hiding in a remote Alpine village, Borchardt died during the last months of the war. His book will give new and deep insights to the reader who cherishes European intellectual history, gardening, and traditional, elegant prose.